Will today's AI hypergrowth rates persist or revert to traditional SaaS growth benchmarks?

Jake Saper · Mar 10, 2025

There is substantially more market pull for software now than in the pre-LLM era, which makes far faster revenue growth genuinely achievable

The models themselves do amazing things and every buyer's boss is telling them to go buy AI, so products tapping that pull can scale extraordinarily fast — Bolt went 0 to 20 in two months, Together went from $2M to over $100M in about fifteen months

Scope: these companies still have to figure out defensibility on the back end

37:54 20VC: Lessons from Investing $2BN and Returning $8BN in Cash | Why Most Venture Partnerships are Broken | We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions | Are The Best Deals Always Expensive and Competitive with Jake Saper @ Emergence Capital

Hemant Taneja · Sep 22, 2025

Revenue growth still matters, but the bar has moved: the growth curves that were most interesting five years ago (triple, triple, double, double) are no longer impressive

Value is concentrating in the hands of a few companies, and the underlying AI technologies are so high-leverage that companies with the right product grow far faster than before

Scope: compared to companies like Samsara and Gusto

47:11 20VC: General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja on The Future of Venture Capital: Chanel vs Walmart | Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM | Investing $5BN+ Into Stripe Over 14 Rounds | Investing Hundreds of Millions into Anthropic at $60BN Valuation

Maor Shlomo · Nov 24, 2025

Zero to $10M ARR is an insane result for a SaaS business, but quite a lot of companies now do it, and he does not require it as a bar when deciding to invest

Scope: growth is the 'exciting' input, not the investment criterion

42:49 20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?

Harry Stebbings · Nov 24, 2025

Quite a lot of companies today go from zero to $10M in a year, so it is no longer an exceptional signal

42:54 20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?

Harry Stebbings · Jan 12, 2026

Growth rates today are unprecedented — companies going from $1M to $20-40M are now reasonably common, whereas that was previously unheard of

51:21 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital

Lucas Swisher · Feb 23, 2026

In today's AI market, a product the market likes doesn't merely triple at the earliest stages — the market yanks it into hypergrowth, so SaaS-era growth benchmarks understate what winners look like

The market dynamics have changed: demand pulls product-market-fit companies far faster than in the SaaS world

31:51 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher

Miles Clements · Mar 9, 2026

The historical SaaS growth benchmarks investors relied on are largely obsolete; usage intensity and how customers actually engage with the product matter more than ever

Growth can obscure and blind you to underlying ills in the business, so headline growth rates no longer give the comfort they used to

Scope: applies to both enterprise and consumer companies

25:25 20VC: Inside Accel's $4BN Growth Investing Machine | Cursor is Dead is Total BS: Here is Why | What Missing Rippling and ElevenLabs Taught Us | Are $2BN-$10BN IPOs Dead | Why Now is a Great Time to be Thoma Bravo with Miles Clements

Nikesh Arora · Jun 22, 2026

The window from idea to execution has shortened dramatically in AI, with companies forming and reaching $100M ARR faster than ever before

He observes new companies getting formed in twelve to twenty-four months and hitting that revenue scale

46:32 20VC: Nikesh Arora on the Frontier Model Problem: Breadth vs Depth | The Future of Token Costs | Memory Becoming the Moat | Where Value Accrues: Infra, Models, or Apps? | Why Enterprise AI is Not Ready & Systems of Record vs Systems of Intelligence

Matt Murphy · Jul 27, 2026

The bar for outlier growth has reset — what used to be top 5% performance now looks more like top 50%

Companies are going zero to $100M in a year, more examples than he can count, and investors can't control that recalibration

Scope: acknowledges it's hard to shed twenty-plus years of context about what counted as great

47:36 20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo

Jerry Murdock · Aug 22, 2026

General growth heuristics like triple-triple-double-double no longer apply; venture is in a completely different era and each case must be judged specifically

What Anthropic and OpenAI have done has never been done in the history of the world — comparable to fire or electricity — so historical venture benchmarks don't transfer

34:16 20VC: The AI Bubble Will Burst: Half the Neoclouds Will Die | China: Should We Ban Chip Exports & Be Fearful of Chinese Open-Source | Mag7: Who Dies and Who Thrives: Why Meta is Meh and Microsoft is Mega

Harry Stebbings · Jan 12, 2026

The triple-triple-double-double growth standard is not dead

Scope: stated after noting a strong 5x vertical SaaS company had a brutal Series A process

57:02 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital

Oren Zeev · Feb 2, 2026

The claim that growth-rate expectations have fundamentally risen in the AI era is wrong; compounding math is unchanged, so a company doubling annually is still a great outcome

Two to the power of five was 32 before AI and it's 32 after AI — the arithmetic of compounding hasn't changed

Scope: the real test is whether the growth is sustainable and the economics are healthy

13:21 20VC: 50% of Funds Will Go Out of Business | Why Growth Expectations Today are BS and Will Not Last | Why Oren Zeev Takes $0 Management Fees But 30% Carry | Why GPs Should Not Tell LPs Their Strategy

Gili Raanan · Mar 28, 2026

The bar for genuine greatness in growth has stayed roughly the same despite the AI-era headline numbers

Compounding new ARR at 4x, 4x, 3x, 3x over five years is 144x, so a company booking $1M of new ARR in year one books $144M in year five — terrific by any standard, even if it isn't the most iconic company ever

Scope: there is no upper limit on greatness — going five to fifty to two hundred is welcome

26:29 20VC: The Venture Model is Broken | You Need to be Greedy and Selfish to Win Early Stage Investing | Why Margins Do Not Matter for Early-Stage Startups | The Growth Rate that is Required in a World of AI with Gili Raanan, Founder @ Cyberstarts

Jason Lemkin · Jan 4, 2024 · hedged

Some of the growth deceleration in SaaS seen in 2023 may be permanent rather than cyclical

Public SaaS companies grew at their slowest pace ever last year, which is unlike anything he's seen since 2005

Scope: applies to public SaaS growth rates; first time he has been worried since 2005

0:00 20VC: Predictions for 2024: What Happens to Early Stage VC Funding, Do a Load of Venture Funds Die, What do LPs Do in 2024, Does Figma Kill the M&A Market, Will IPOs Comeback & What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups with Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr

Jason Lemkin · Jan 4, 2024 · hedged

SaaS may have hit genuine market saturation, and some of the growth deceleration seen in public SaaS may be permanent rather than cyclical

Software spend has absorbed more and more of corporate budgets for eighteen years, but software cannot keep growing faster than GDP forever, and Gartner already projects a trillion in enterprise SaaS spend

Scope: framed as a worry, not a certainty; third consecutive year of poor public multiples is part of the concern

34:59 20VC: Predictions for 2024: What Happens to Early Stage VC Funding, Do a Load of Venture Funds Die, What do LPs Do in 2024, Does Figma Kill the M&A Market, Will IPOs Comeback & What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups with Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr

Harry Stebbings · Jan 10, 2024

The biggest worry after fifteen-plus years of SaaS investing is that growth has slowed and software spend may have reached saturation

AI is wanted by everyone but is not yet a line item on CFO budgets

53:42 20VC: Did Figma Kill M&A Markets in 2024, The Three Biggest Mistakes Made in Growth Investing, The Three Requirements Companies Need to Go Public in 2024 with Ed Sim and Jamin Ball

Harry Stebbings · Oct 27, 2025

Rory O'Driscoll and Jason Lemkin argue the biggest problem today is overestimation of demand — an atypical cycle where 100% of a market (e.g. law firms) is shopping for an AI provider when normally only 5% would be

Every law firm has been told to look for an AI provider, and that will not be true next year or the year after

Scope: specifically about legal

33:20 20VC: Sequoia's David Cahn on The Winners and Losers in AI | The $0-$100M Revenue Club: Is Triple, Triple, Double, Double Dead? | The Future of Defence: Who Wins and Who Loses | How to Analyse Margins and Growth Rates in a World of AI

Harry Stebbings · Apr 20, 2026 · hedged

The current AI demand pull may be a momentary ~18-month phenomenon that the industry is wrongly extrapolating forward

Every company currently needs an AI story and wants to kick the tires, which inflates apparent demand

Scope: framed as a worry

27:58 20VC: Everyone is Wrong; We Will Have More Developers in Five Years | Why Frontier Labs Will Be Way More Valuable Than They Are Today | Are SaaS Companies Cooked: Which Thrive & Which Die with Aaron Levie, Founder at Box

Aaron Levie · Apr 20, 2026

The AI demand pull is not an 18-month blip; diffusion will take far longer than Silicon Valley thinks and the market will end up larger than expected

The cloud diffusion cycle looked spiky and unsustainable early yet lasted twenty years and got much bigger; and most enterprises can't deploy agents unattended because regulators like the SEC will hold them accountable, so compliance, security and review processes slow adoption

28:24 Diffusion is a decades long cycle so demand is durable

Jason Lemkin · Jan 4, 2024

The industry has moved past survival mode into a get-back-to-growth phase, but founders do not yet have answers for how to do it

His portfolio companies at $200M+ ARR all became cash flow positive simply by pausing hiring, and now have only marginal growth with no playbook for reacceleration

15:30 Companies are cash flow positive but lack a playbook to reaccelerate growth

Anish Acharya · Feb 9, 2026

Triple triple double double is not dead; growth expectations should be calibrated to the market segment, with the real bar being top quartile against your peer set

Different markets have different physics — consumer-led or bottoms-up markets can show explosive growth, while ERP or payroll involve cautious customers and high-stakes, slower sales cycles

45:32 Benchmarks hold but are segment relative top quartile vs peers

Ed Sim · Jan 10, 2024

We are entering a new cycle in which fifteen-year-old software categories get reinvented on the back of the AI platform shift, so software spend is not saturated

Creative destruction reinvents the world every ten to twenty years, and as an early-stage investor he has to believe that; AI will be infused into software wherever people will pay for it and it is economically important

54:09 Ai platform shift reinvents existing software categories avoiding saturation

Julien Bek · Aug 24, 2026

Traditional growth benchmarks like triple-triple-double-double will return, because today's hypergrowth AI companies are in greenfield markets that will mature into replacement markets

People conflate new markets with replacement markets: an AI-native CRM still has to rip out an existing system of record, whereas greenfield AI companies replacing human work face no incumbent and grow vertically; once most customers have a solution, those companies hit replacement dynamics and become comparable apples to apples

22:17 Greenfield growth normalizes as markets become replacement markets