JASON LEMKIN
Founded SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS community, and built a VC career entirely around B2B software
Jason Lemkin built SaaStr into the world’s largest community for SaaS founders — over 100,000 members, a massive annual conference, and a media empire of content about recurring revenue. He also runs a fund that’s backed companies like Algolia, Pipedrive, and Talkdesk. He’s basically the guy who turned "annual recurring revenue" into a religion and then became its pope.
Net Worth
$300 million
Nationality
American
Time Horizon
Long-Term
Risk Appetite
5 / 10
Net Worth Context
- · 300x the average American's lifetime earnings, stacked and waiting.
CAREER & BACKGROUND
Lemkin co-founded EchoSign, an electronic signature company, and sold it to Adobe in 2011 for over $100 million. After the exit, he started blogging about SaaS metrics and business building.
The blog exploded.
In 2012, he founded SaaStr, which grew from a blog into the world’s largest SaaS community. The annual SaaStr conference draws over 15,000 attendees.
He became the go-to voice for B2B SaaS founders on topics like pricing, churn, CAC payback, and growth.
He also founded SaaStr Fund, investing in early-stage SaaS companies. Notable investments include Algolia (search-as-a-service), Pipedrive (CRM), Talkdesk (contact center), and dozens of other B2B software companies.
COMPANIES & ROLES
SaaStr — the world’s largest SaaS community, conference, and media platform. Over 100,000 members.
SaaStr Fund — early-stage VC fund focused exclusively on B2B SaaS.
EchoSign — electronic signature company sold to Adobe for $100M+ in 2011.
INVESTING STYLE & PHILOSOPHY
Lemkin invests exclusively in B2B SaaS. He evaluates companies on SaaS-specific metrics: ARR growth, net revenue retention, CAC payback period, and magic number.
He’s developed a framework that’s become industry standard.
His edge is the SaaStr community itself. Thousands of SaaS founders share data and insights through the platform, giving Lemkin proprietary deal flow and real-time market intelligence.
THE PLAYBOOK
Risk Approach
Moderate. B2B SaaS is one of the more predictable venture categories — recurring revenue provides visibility, and the metrics framework lets you assess risk quantitatively.
Lemkin’s investments are guided by data, not gut feeling.
Money Habits
Lemkin lives in the Bay Area and is extremely visible on social media. He answers thousands of questions from SaaS founders on Quora and Twitter.
He runs SaaStr like a media company — content-first, community-driven.
BIGGEST WIN
EchoSign to Adobe was the personal win. In investing, Algolia has grown into a major company valued at over $2.25 billion.
Talkdesk reached a $10 billion valuation. Pipedrive was acquired for $1.5 billion.
BIGGEST MISTAKE
Lemkin has been candid that some of his early SaaStr Fund investments didn’t work. B2B SaaS has a high failure rate despite the predictable metrics — many companies reach $1-5M ARR and then plateau.
He’s spoken about the difficulty of distinguishing companies that will scale from those that will stall.
FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY
Lemkin believes that B2B SaaS is the best business model in software because recurring revenue creates predictable, compounding growth. His framework for evaluating SaaS companies — the "SaaStr benchmarks" — has become the industry standard.
FAMILY & PERSONAL LIFE
Lemkin is based in the Bay Area. He’s active in the SaaS community and transparent about his life, but keeps family details relatively private.
EDUCATION
Stanford University for undergrad, then Harvard Law School. He practiced law at Wilson Sonsini before founding EchoSign.
The law background gave him expertise in contracts that directly informed the electronic signature business.
BOOKS & RESOURCES
From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin himself is their co
Authored guide to hypergrowth
As an Amazon Associate, Netfigo earns from qualifying purchases. Book links above may be affiliate links.
QUOTES (5)
If your net revenue retention is above 120%, you can screw up almost everything else and still build a big company.
I sold EchoSign to Adobe and thought I’d retire. Then I started answering questions on Quora and accidentally built the world’s largest SaaS community.
SaaS is the greatest business model ever invented. Recurring revenue. Negative churn. 80% gross margins. What’s not to love?
The best SaaS founders are obsessed with one customer problem. The worst are obsessed with their competitor’s features.
NETFIGO SCORE
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