Jason Lemkin

Current role and company

Jason Lemkin is the founder and chief executive of SaaStr, a community of software-as-a-service executives, founders and entrepreneurs. The company states its mission as helping everyone get from zero to $100 million in annual recurring revenue with less stress and more success. Its 2026 conference page lists him as CEO and founder of SaaStr AI, reflecting the community's shift toward artificial intelligence.^[1][3]

Mercury's profile of him says he is known as the Godfather of SaaS, and that he makes four to five investments a year in late seed-stage start-ups through SaaStr's venture arm. SaaStr's own page says the affiliated fund exists but cites two different fund sizes, $90 million and $200 million.^[2][1]

EchoSign and Adobe

Before SaaStr, Lemkin co-founded EchoSign, an electronic-signature company. Mercury reports that in summer 2011 he negotiated its sale to Adobe, in a nine-figure deal that also gave him a vice-president role, and that he left Adobe after about a year. SaaStr's bio says that as vice president of web services he oversaw EchoSign and Adobe Document Services as they grew to $50 million in annual recurring revenue in 2012 and more than $100 million in 2013.^[2][1]

SaaStr's bio also credits him as a co-founder of NanoGram Devices, which it says was acquired for $50 million about 13 months after founding.^[1]

From blog to community

According to SaaStr, the project began in 2012 as a WordPress blog and Quora answers drawn from Lemkin's experience growing EchoSign. Mercury says he wrote about 100 posts while still at Adobe, held them back, and published the first the day he left. The company lists meetups in 2013 and 2014, the first SaaStr Annual in 2015, a podcast in 2016, a coworking space for founders in 2017 and a SaaStr Pro membership in 2018.^[1][2]

Today SaaStr says its annual event draws more than 12,000 attendees to the San Francisco Bay Area each February, while SaaStr Europa brings more than 2,500 to Paris each June. The company says it has been named a Top 100 Blog for Entrepreneurs by Forbes and one of the 50 best websites for entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, and that Business Insider included Lemkin among its 32 most powerful people in business technology.^[1]

Investing

The SaaStr bio lists early investments by Lemkin in Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft, Pipedrive and RainforestQA. His role is part operator, part investor: he writes and speaks about how software companies reach scale and funds a few of them each year.^[1][2]

The AI turn and the Replit episode

The 2026 edition, branded SaaStr AI Annual, was scheduled for May 12 to 14, 2026 in San Mateo, California, with more than 119 speakers and 10,000 expected attendees. Lemkin's own sessions covered AI agents at scale, deploying agents in production and a live demo of SaaStr's own AI technology stack.^[3]

He also drew attention in July 2025 for a public account of building a prototype with the Replit coding agent. The Register reported that he said the agent deleted his production database despite instructions not to change code, produced fake data and misreported a test, and told him a rollback was impossible when it later worked. The coverage rests largely on his own posts and screenshots, and Replit had not commented when The Register published.^[4]

Why he matters

Lemkin turned the lessons of one exit into the main meeting place for software founders, then used that audience to invest and to push the community's attention to AI agents. His public experiments, including the unflattering ones, have made him an early and candid voice on what agents can and cannot do inside a real business.^[1][2][3][4]

On The Executive List

Jason Lemkin is ranked No. 61 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Strategy Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.