Sam Blond

We're launching Monaco today. Monaco automates customer acquisition and revenue growth for startups. The platform disrupting sales with AI has finally arrived.

“The greatest startup event of all time” is back. Announcing the $100,000 cash prize, no buy-in Monaco Invitational (Part Deux). Bigger and better than the first: more founders, more money, more celebrity guests. This will be the largest founder poker tournament and party of all time. The best startups in the world run on Monaco. The best founder poker players in the world compete in The Invitational. June 4. San Francisco.

@ycombinator @lightanchor_ai huge! congrats @sanghaya1 and @chasingjohnnn !!

Light Anchor (@lightanchor_ai) builds fully autonomous e-commerce brands at the speed of compute. Today, Light Anchor operates one flagship brand and multiple experiment stores, all run by AI agents on a shared platform that compounds with every new brand launched. The vision is thousands of consumer businesses, operating with little to no human intervention. Congrats on the launch, @sanghaya1 and @chasingjohnn! ycombinator.com/launches/QFW-l…

@jasonlk @kodylow @RevenueCat 🤯

Boom!! Huge congrats to @RevenueCat for continue to accelerate at a jaw-dropping rate! More double digit monthly growth! The mobile app explosion is something epic to see Everyone is just ... building and shipping so, so much more

@howard @roam Crushing it!

April @roam !nvestor Update +ARR +123% YoY, $3.25m +ARR +6.8% vs last month +1,006 logos +1,000,000 meetings, ~5,000,000 chats -115% NDR *The Office That Thinks* ... Where People & AI Agents Collaborate.

@joshearle 🤔

i think i’m about to get sold an ai crm

@adamguild @jaltma Awesome! Congrats!

Introducing Grader: the world's first AI CMO for restaurants. It’s helped us drive over $1 BILLION in sales for our customers. Grader outperforms human marketing teams. See how:

@jaltma @mansourtarek_ Great episode!

I sat down with the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi (@mansourtarek_), a prediction market reportedly worth over $20 billion. After years of struggle, Kalshi won a regulatory battle, culminating with their successful suit to overturn a CFTC decision, giving them the ability to allow consumers to bet on politics, sports, weather, and more. Tarek shared the history of how he got here and what kind of company he had to build to weather all the uncertainty. I also got a chance to push him on Kalshi’s place in the world and its potential for positive or negative impacts. I was persuaded by his arguments that it can be a big force for good. We closed out by talking about his ideas around company building, hiring, and the future of Kalshi. Hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:23) Kalshi’s genesis (5:05) Regulation-focused from inception (11:06) Suing the government (18:02) Gambling vs. financial markets (20:58) Defining insider trading (25:38) Incentive structure of the system (32:40) Investing vs. trading (35:31) Using Kalshi for hedging (41:38) On keeping a lean team (44:02) Kalshi’s culture

@parkerconrad This makes a ton sense to have in Rippling

Rippling is the *legitimate* way to spend less time on your SOC 2. Every other SOC 2 product is purely a detection system — a reporting layer bolted on top of tools it doesn't control. Rippling *is* those tools. That’s how we’re able to get SOC 2 done unbelievably fast.

@HacktronAI This is huge! Congrats @zeyu1337 and the @HacktronAI team!

Introducing Hacktron Review: an AI security reviewer for your pull requests. It understands your whole codebase, builds a threat model, takes your feedback, and catches exploitable vulnerabilities before they reach production. Try for free: app.hacktron.ai

@michellearning So cool!! Congrats @michellearning !!

Welcome to the scientific revolution. 100s of robots. Zero coffee breaks. America’s largest autonomous lab, open today.

@scottmartinis @sarah_cone @MonacoGTM 🙏🏻

@sarah_cone @MonacoGTM @samdblond None of their competitors get GTM as much as @samdblond does You're in good hands

So @MonacoGTM closed me in one hour: literally one hour from demo to signing the (expensive) contract. Can't wait to ride the Ferrari of CRMs and see where we can go. The best part about the pitch: they say that @samdblond will teach you his ninja sales practices.

@sarah_cone @MonacoGTM Thrilled to partner with you, Sarah!!

Founders regularly ask me: how do we make the most of this event we’re sponsoring? The thread below is your guide.

@jasonlk These are awesome!

The Agents #002: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn, and Why No One Will Pay for "Good Enough" AI 🎙️We're back. Episode 2 of The Agents is live! Amelia and I got into what we're actually seeing across SaaStr AI's own 20+ AI agent stack and the broader B2B AI ecosystem. Agents that get lazy on you. Incumbents shipping 60% products. Vendors whose APIs silently break the moment an agent touches them. And the quiet metric every AI leader should have on a dashboard but probably doesn't: stealth churn. The full rundown: 01:00 — Lazy Agents An AI agent silently dropped Amelia's session from the SaaStr Annual Top 10 and didn't flag it to anyone. What we learned about why agents get lazy and why daily QA is now non-negotiable. 06:30 — When Agents Blame the API Your agent will tell you the API was down. Sometimes that's true. Most of the time it's agentic deflection. Accountability is the new ops. 09:00 The 60% Solution Problem HubSpot shipped a new AEO tool. It didn't work. We vibe-coded a better version in 10 minutes. The lesson for every incumbent: "good enough" AI features are getting lapped by two-person teams on Replit. 14:00 — Figma Make vs. Replit, Lovable, and v0 No one is going to pay for the second-place AI coding tool. This market is consolidating faster than any B2B category we've watched in 15 years. 17:30 — Classic Figma Is Now Grandpa Software Production breakdowns on old Figma while Illustrator's agent is quietly winning. The design tools story just flipped. 21:00 — Stealth Churn at Canva, ChatGPT, and Beyond Users aren't canceling. They're just using it less. The hidden metric every B2B AI leader needs on a weekly dashboard and why NRR is lying to you. 27:00 — Why Claude Cowork Killed ChatGPT for Amelia The lock-in story of 2026. Once Cowork had her files, her context, and her agents, ChatGPT became a tab she stopped opening. 30:00 — Forward Deployed Engineers vs. Self-Serve Why "FDE light" is the answer for SMB AI deployments, and why pure self-serve onboarding is dead for anything with real complexity. 36:00 — Vector Breaks the Agent Freeze Their CEO deployed their product into SaaStr in 15 minutes. That won the deal. The new B2B sales motion in the agent era. 40:00 — The Agent API Test Which APIs actually work when an agent is the one calling them? Salesforce wins. Marketo fails. The new dividing line between winners and losers in B2B infrastructure. 46:00 — Resend, 11 Labs, and OpenRouter The new gold standard for agent-friendly API design. What these three got right that the incumbents missed entirely. 50:00 — The Marketo Collapse When your marketing automation platform can't honor unsubscribes, you have a product problem and a legal problem at the same time. How bad has it gotten. 55:00 — Building an AI VP of Finance Collections is the next agent frontier at SaaStr. Why AR is the ideal agent job and what we're planing to ship. 1:00:00 — SaaStr Annual 2026 Is Three Weeks Away May 12-14 in the SF Bay Area. Attendance tracking 140%+ of last year. What we're doing differently for the first AI-native Annual. Listen to Episode 2 of The Agents below ... or wherever you get your podcasts!

We're launching Monaco today. Monaco automates customer acquisition and revenue growth for startups. The platform disrupting sales with AI has finally arrived.

@simonkubica This is awesome - congrats @simonkubica and the Alloy team!

Introducing Alloy, the Cloud Playground for Product Teams. Prototyping tools are dead. Build with your codebase in the cloud, and deploy in one click. > Start from your real app and codebase. > Cloud sessions with instant preview links. > Push code to GitHub. Available in early access.

1/ How to succeed with founder led sales: Last week, @garrytan was nice enough to invite me to his home to speak with the current YC batch. The most common topic was founders figuring out how to close the first set of customers in time for demo day.

@jankaminski94 Looks like it’s $57 now. And this was in 2018 so would have been much less expensive. We found a distributor and ordered in bulk. totalwine.com/champagne-spar…

@samdblond how did you find a Veuve Clicquot for 50$ ? :O

1/ The best outbound campaign we ever ran at Brex (75% demo rate, 75% demo to close): Brex launched in 2018 as the first corporate card for startups. After launch, when we were still ~30 employees and near 0 rev, we ran the most successful outbound campaign I've ever seen.