New!! 5 Interesting Learnings from Anthropic at $17 Billion in Quarterly Revenue Anthropic added $5.4B in Q3. Q2 added $6.8B. The dollar add fell for the first time. And it spent $5B on short term compute rather than ration customers.

✅ Your CRO will forgive you for: Cutting the SDR team to zero and moving outbound to agents Folding RevOps, support, and CS ops into AI A smaller sales team than any CRO they’ve worked with A growth plan that would’ve needed 40 reps in 2022 ❌ Your CRO will NOT forgive you for:

Now my Muse and Amelia's Muse talk to each other 2x a day and plan what they think they should to help us. They do not talk directly per se. They leave messages in a shared inbox on 10K and the agents check it twice a day for now and chat with each other through it. Routine items get handled ... just between them. Humans only get pulled in when something needs a decision. Will be interesting to see where this goes

Founders send decks with no net revenue retention, no burn multiple, and a market slide that says $100B TAM. Then they wonder why no one replies. Run your deck through the SaaStr AI pitch deck review and see which numbers you left out:

New!! Why You Don't Want Humans Doing Outbound Anymore A rep pitched me with a 2024 sequence nobody had read since. At volume, humans stop reading what they send. Agents read every account, every time.

✅ Your LPs will forgive you for: - A Fund I that took 10+ years to return capital - A couple of zeroes in a concentrated portfolio - Marks that stayed flat while the market reset - Missing the hottest deal of the vintage ❌ Your LPs will NOT forgive you for:

90% of VCs won’t invest in you if they don’t think can get to $100M in 4-ish years or less It just is what it is But 10% still will One bit of advice for that 10%: price the round, and the size, very reasonably, without games or drama

A pitch deck is a filter, not a story. A VC decides in about 3 minutes whether to take the meeting. SaaStr AI reads your deck the way that first pass actually happens and tells you where you lose them.

Anthropic's Q3, from today's amended S-1: $16.96B in revenue, +47% Q/Q. But the dollar add shrank for the first time:
 - Q2 added $6.84B
- Q3 added $5.40B That's still about a Snowflake's full year of revenue added in one quarter. But hitting the $110B year-end run-rate investors expect would take a Q4 add more than 2x Q3's.

You might not be a great CEO, especially not yet But anyone else: - wouldn't really know the product cold - wouldn't really know the customers - wouldn't really know crazy nuances of the market - wouldn't see the future - wouldn't care so much So you are probably the right CEO

A founder at YC Demo Day: "I love SaaStr but I don't really need you on the cap table. I learn everything I need from you, @HarryStebbings + @rodriscoll every week, plus The Agents podcast." Hmmm. Does make you think ;)

✅ Your Series A lead will forgive you for: - Hitting $2M ARR in 18 months instead of 12 - A hire or two that didn’t work out in year one - Changing your ICP once you saw who actually buys - A slower month while you rebuilt the sales motion ❌ Your Series A lead will NOT forgive you for:

Before you send your deck to a VC, send it to us. SaaStr AI scores it slide by slide, tells you what a partner will ask in the first 10 minutes, and what’s missing from your traction story. Free, private, instant.

Big week on 20VC with @HarryStebbings and @rodriscoll Anthropic filed its S-1 with $16.3B in first-half revenue, Microsoft offered buyouts to 27% of its staff, Meta launched a $95B equity raise, and a Qwen model tried to upload a file to a server in Beijing. My takes: #1#. Anthropic went from founding to IPO in 5 years. SpaceX took 24. Time to liquidity matters again. Why would anyone put money into something 10 to 12 years from an IPO now? #2#. Be careful with the 900% NRR. It almost certainly includes pilots converting. The durable number is probably 300% to 400%. That's still the best I've ever seen. #3#. The worst number of the week wasn't in the S-1. Broadcom had to backstop $63B of debt so Anthropic could buy its chips. Even the best credit in AI needed its vendor to co-sign. Debt is an exhaustible source here. #4#. Microsoft offering exits to 27% of the company is a worse scarlet letter than a layoff. Everyone who stays knows they were on the list. Cut 9% in one day and move on. #5#. Cloudflare cut 20% in May while growth was accelerating every quarter. Every B2B company used to assume it would hit a plane of stability at $100M or $300M or $500M ARR. Those planes don't exist anymore. #6#. Chinese open-weight model have peaked in market share in the US. Even at 1 in 100,000 calls, we'd hit that Qwen behavior in under 3 days at SaaStr. No CISO approves that model. #7#. I vetoed Instinct at $30B. I'll pay the multiple, but I want 100 days of traction for a growth round. And I pitched putting 20% of the fund into OpenAI at $1.25T. Rory's best line: this is when the bill for AI comes due, and this is how it'll be paid