SaaStr: The Marketo Failure Is Self-Inflicted, and the Market Now Prices Growth at 12x Versus 3x
Jason Lemkin's July 29 piece argues legacy B2B SaaS is being killed by neglect rather than AI, using Adobe Marketo as the case: 1.5 days of downtime, a missed send to 450,000+ subscribers, a broken unsubscribe link left live for over two weeks, all on a $60,000 ACV contract that came with a proposed 20% price increase. He names four root causes, and the one that matters architecturally is that vendors stopped modernizing their APIs, which is exactly the surface agents need to operate. The pricing evidence he cites is the sharp part: companies growing 20%+ trade around 12x while sub-10% growers trade around 3x, with Pluralsight, Medallia, Proofpoint, Qualtrics, Cornerstone, Yext, Domo, LivePerson and Upland below 2.5x and several under 1x revenue.
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