SaaStr 818: Anthropic, Cursor, Fal & Bessemer: The Realities of Scaling AI
episode
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
30 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 15 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the official Saster Podcast, where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Saster Podcast.
The way we sell software changed. Before, if you are selling a SaaS product, the marginal cost was very little to sell to another company and or to sell another product. But with AI, the the new gross margins are lower because it comes with a cost to sell, sell to another person. So that means everyone has less margins. Maybe that changes over time, models might get cheaper and if you can have like people have stick stickier workflows, maybe the margins go up over time.
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How are AI companies redefining traditional SaaS metrics?
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Thank you to Saster for having us. It is great to be here. I'm Talia Goldberg. I'm a partner at Bessemer and I'm very excited to do this panel with our friends at Anthropic, Cursor, and Fall. So before we jump in, if you guys just give like your quick bios, that'd be awesome.
Nice to meet everyone.
What new economics are emerging around margins, growth, and pricing for AI startups?
My name is Kelly Loftus and I lead the startup sales team at Anthropic. I've had the privilege over the last year and a half working and scaling our startups team and so very excited to be here today.
Hi everyone. My name is Jacob. I first got my start in AI making tab nine, uh, back in twenty eighteen. Then I worked at OpenAI as a researcher and then did Supermaven about a a year ago and then uh around eight months ago we joined Cursor and so I've been working there on machine learning since then.
Hi everyone. My name is Georgem. I'm the CTO and co-founder of FAL. File is a generative media platform. We host open and closed source image and video models in our platform and expose them as easy to use APIs to the end users using our inference engine. Awesome.
I love having the three of you because all of these businesses are enabling this wave of AI and developers They're always leading at every at every era of innovation. And so I I wanna start this off Actually by sharing a conversation that I was having with Gorgham while we were driving up here. And Gorcom was like, Gosh, UVC is like the metrics are totally broken. Like all the metrics, all the questions we get asked, they're wrong because the businesses look different today. And we have these SaaS metrics that looked at things like CAR and you know, gross margin like this and and had you know very clear good better best metrics and you know lo and behold we have three wildly successful companies that have broken the norm.
So Gorgham tell me to start like what is broken? And then maybe we can chat a little bit about what metrics actually matter for all of you.
I think the biggest difference now is companies are growing much faster, right? I think it used to be triple double double or or you know if you tripled in a year, that was considered gold standard. And now it's So many companies are breaking out, going from zero to fifty million, like really, really fast. I I think that's the biggest difference.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:37
2
How are AI companies redefining traditional SaaS metrics?
1:37–2:24
3
What new economics are emerging around margins, growth, and pricing for AI startups?
2:24–4:59
4
How do usage‑based pricing models affect the cost‑to‑serve in AI businesses?
4:59–8:31
5
What does Anthropic’s go‑to‑market team structure look like as they scale?
8:31–9:58
6
How are AI firms approaching sales‑team scaling and the quota debate?
9:58–12:21
7
What hiring and team‑building tactics are driving rapid growth at these companies?
12:21–14:58
8
How are Anthropic, Cursor, and Fal using AI internally to boost productivity?
14:58–30:56
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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