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Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

@jasonlk

Jan 1

Today, Thiel, Sacks and Page prepare to leave California tomorrow.

- Offices opened in Miami and Austin — today by Thiel
- Driver’s Licenses Changed
- Homes already owned

California has approximately 255 billionaires — about a quarter of the U.S. total. The tax was estimated to raise $100B from ~200 of them.

But as they scatter to Miami, Austin, and beyond, that number could shrink fast.

It has already begun.

The one-time wealth tax revenue is just the headline number. The real damage may be ongoing — and much larger:

1. Annual Income Tax Loss

California’s top 1% pays roughly 50% of all state income tax revenue. Billionaires and their associated entities contribute disproportionately.
•If even 20-30 billionaires permanently relocate, California loses their annual income tax — estimated at $500M-$2B per year, ongoing
•The Legislative Analyst’s Office acknowledged this: the state could lose “hundreds of millions of dollars per year” in income taxes

2. Capital Gains Leakage

When billionaires sell stock, California gets 13.3% of the gains if they’re residents. If they’ve relocated:
•Larry Page alone could generate $10B+ in capital gains over the next decade from Alphabet stock sales — that’s $1.3B to California if he stays, $0 if he’s in Florida
•Multiply across 50 relocating billionaires and you’re looking at $5-15B in lost cap gains revenue over 10 years

3. Business Formation & Job Creation

•VCs who relocate will deploy capital elsewhere
•Startups follow the money — Miami and Austin are already competing for deal flow
•The “next Google” may incorporate in Texas instead of Delaware/California

4. Real Estate & Local Economy

•Ultra-luxury real estate in Palo Alto, Atherton, Pacific Heights takes a hit
•Property tax revenue declines
•High-end services (private aviation, wealth management, luxury retail) see reduced demand

The SEIU-UHW designed this tax to raise $100B for healthcare.

But the retroactive January 1, 2026 trigger — meant to prevent escape — has instead created an emergency evacuation incentive.

By making the deadline tomorrow rather than November 2026, they’ve ensured that:

1.Every billionaire is making this decision right now, tonight
2.Those who can move, will move — they have 11 months to establish residency before the vote
3.The exodus happens regardless of whether the measure passes

As Chamath put it: “That one bill, this proposed billionaire tax, has single-handedly changed the trajectory of the California economy by $100 to $200 billion over the next five to 10 years.”

Even if the measure fails at the ballot, damage is done.

Billionaires now know California views their wealth as something to be seized in a crisis. Many won’t wait around for the next “emergency tax.”

Bottom Line

- Expected one-time revenue: $50-70B (not $100B)
- Expected ongoing annual revenue loss: $1-3B/year
- 10-year net fiscal position: Likely positive but far below projections, possibly break-even or negative when accounting for secondary effects

Strategic outcome: California signals it’s willing to tax wealth retroactively — a message that will influence billionaire residency decisions for a generation.

Read 8 tweets

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

@jasonlk

Oct 5, 2025

ICONIQ's latest State of Software 2025 report is out.

Buried in 73 pages are some great data on just how AI is changing B2B software

Here are my Top 10 Learnings: 🧵

#1. AI Companies Burn More Cash — But Also Have Better Capital Efficiency. It’s Not a Paradox But … It’s Complicated.

This one breaks your brain at first: AI-native companies under $100M ARR have a median FCF margin of -126% (they’re burning cash at 126% of revenue). That’s more than double the -56% for non-AI companies.

Yet their burn multiple—the key metric for capital efficiency—is actually better: 0.4x versus 1.8x for non-AI companies.

Translation: AI companies are burning more absolute dollars, but they’re generating new ARR so much faster that each dollar burned produces more revenue growth. They can afford to burn harder because the growth rates are exponential rather than linear.

This suggests we need entirely different frameworks for evaluating AI-native businesses. Traditional SaaS metrics around payback periods and magic numbers may not capture what’s really happening when you can scale revenue 3x faster than historical benchmarks.

#2. GTM for AI Products Is Flipped: 55% of High-Growth Teams Are in Post-Sales

Traditional SaaS companies put 55% of their GTM headcount in sales roles.

For high-growth AI-native companies, that ratio is flipped: 47% in sales, but 31% in post-sales (versus just 23% for traditional SaaS).

AI leaders have sales teams. They are just much smaller. And much more of that budget is going to FDEs, SEs, and post-sales.

Read 13 tweets

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

@jasonlk

Sep 27, 2025

Can AI agents really manage other agents? Most of us can't even get one AI agent to really work well.

But it works in @Replit v3. For real. And it's so cool.

I had it do a 2.75 hour autonomous security audit. One agent managing other AI agents.

Here's how it worked:🧵

2/6: I was updating our pitch deck grader and it became time to deeper security audit.

This was just hard before v3. To do it for real. Doing a deep security audit against every single element of the app.

But instead of getting stuck, Replit V3 autonomously brought in specialists:

-Security expert
-System architect
- Senior/junior agents

I watched them DEBATE each other in English for 3 hours. Like humans. Like extremely talented, bickering engineers.

It was like old times :) Just without the humans.

🚀And truly incredible.

(Now bear in mind in a sense some of these agents are different personas of the same agent, but I'm not sure that really matters)

3/6: Why this was so novel:

No human could conduct a 3-hour security audit covering every line of code, every function, every vulnerability. Without a break, on demand.

These agents found edge cases I'd never consider. A lot of them. Maybe too many, but a lot of them.

And then on their own, they implemented sophisticated protections. They thought through attack vectors systematically.

For hours.

Read 6 tweets

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

@jasonlk

Jul 21, 2025

Vide Coding Day 11,

So today’s been a time of introspection and reflection. I have learned a lot becoming a ‘vibe coder’ and it has been addictive. For real.

My #1 learning is an old one, re-learned: Building Great Software is Still Hard.

Getting going is easier than ever. 🧵

On the dev tools side, I’ve asked all the best CTOs in my portfolio how much they really benefit from Cursor, Claude Code, et. al.

The consistent answer: net net, no one is giving back their Claude Code. No one. But net net, alone, it lets folks move about 20%-40% faster.

Why? These tools (all really Anthropic LLMs) help everyone do routine work faster, and in fact, some of the best devs I talk to can do 90% of most of their routine work in prompts.

But what about the hard stuff? The stuff that hasn’t been done before? The novel stuff?

What about the planning? The thinking?

What about code reviews and checking the work?

That all takes time.

So net net many are seeing a 20%-40% real productivity boost from Claude Code et. al. Much higher for routine stuff, but net net of all of the job — that’s where it seems to land today.

On the platform side, the B2C side, Replit+Loveable etc., this tools are magical. Magical. Maybe more than magical.

If you want to build a POC or prototype, it’s all magic, really.

But in the end, if you want to built true commercial grade apps, then they are … just tools.

Flawed tools, magical tools, but tools. At least today.

You can now think up an app and see it prototyped in < 20 minutes. Longer if you want all the buttons to work, but still.

But getting to >great< software? That’s in its own ways is hard as ever. Even if the tools are so much cooler, faster, and slicker.

No great engineers have been made obsolete here.

Read 6 tweets

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

@jasonlk

Jul 18, 2025

Vibe Coding Day 9,

Yesterday was biggest roller coaster yet. I got out of bed early, excited to get back @Replit despite it constantly ignoring code freezes

By end of day, we rewrote core pages and made them much better

And then -- it deleted our production database. 🧵

You can read the thread here, and all the convos with @Replit. It went rogue again during a code freeze -- and deleted our >production< database.

Rule #00001 my CTO taught me: never, ever, never, ever touch the production database.

Even in 2005, when we launched the first version of EchoSign / Adobe Sign, everything broke. But the database was sacrosanct.

In 2025, 1 Billion+ contracts later, I think no contracts were ever lost in DB. A few corrupted, but none lost.

Yet, Replt went rogued and destroyed our production DB last night.

During a code freeze when it knew to touch nothing. And agreed to touch nothing.

x.com/jasonlk/status…

Now it gets a little crazier. Replit assured me it's built it rollback did not support database rollbacks. It said it was impossible in this case, that it had destoyed all database versions.

It turns out Replit was wrong, and the rollback did work. JFC.

Replit went rogue again, lied, and then said we couldn't roll back.

But we could. I'm still processing all this.

Is it OK there are NO guardrails to deleting a production database?

Why did Replit "lie"? Also, why did it not know about how this feature worked?

Look, no matter what, deleting a >production< database is NOT OK.

But Replit lied / was wrong, and I just rolled back. And it >seems< OK.

JFC though.

Read 12 tweets

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

@jasonlk

Jul 17, 2025

Vibe Coding Day 8,

I'm not even out of bed yet and I'm already planning my day on @Replit.

Today is AI Day, to really add AI to our algo.

I'm excited. And yet ... yesterday was full of lies and deceit.

@Replit Ok I have 2 main goals today:

1. Keep working on minimizing rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data

2. Get our AI working

Now, yesterday was crazy. Until 9pm or so, I wasn't sure we made any progress at all.

Because Replie was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.

We built detailed unit tests to test system performance. When the data came back and less than half were functioning, did Replie want to fix them?

No. Instead, it lied. It made up a report than almost all systems were working.

And it did it again and again.

Read 32 tweets

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