Agents compete for payroll, not SaaS budgets: Jason Lemkin won't back agentic SaaS
evisoft · x · 2026-10-13
- evisoft amplifies Jason Lemkin's argument: agent startups aren't competing with SaaS seats, they're competing with headcount.
- Price like software and you get software budgets; replace a team's work and you unlock payroll budgets, roughly 10x bigger.
- Lemkin says he'll no longer invest in agentic B2B companies unless they unlock materially more budget than traditional software: being 10x better than legacy vendors wins customers, but only steals Salesforce/Workday's existing budget, not incremental spend.
- Most agent startups are still pricing like it's 2015; the real opportunity is radical ROI (winning customers for clients) or radical cost savings.
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