I Built a $4.4B SaaS and AI Agents Destroyed It: The End "Per Seat" Pricing episode artwork

EPISODE · Dec 10, 2025 · 47 MIN

I Built a $4.4B SaaS and AI Agents Destroyed It: The End "Per Seat" Pricing

from Startupable · host Enzo Cavalie

My guest today is Manny Medina, the founder who defined the last decade of sales tech with Outreach and is now building Paid.ai , the infrastructure for the next decade of AI.Manny’s path took him from a shrimp farm in Ecuador to the heights of Silicon Valley, where he built Outreach into a $4.4B SaaS. But in 2023, a conversation with the CEO of DocuSign handed Manny a "Red Pill" moment: if AI agents do the work of humans, companies will hire fewer people, and the seat-based SaaS model will collapse .He realized the current infrastructure—giants like Salesforce, Netsuite, and Datadog—was "conspiring against him." They could track closed deals or API calls, but they couldn't distinguish between an agent's cost (tokens) and its value (reasoning) . Manny founded Paid to solve this: a way to interpret agent behavior so builders can stop selling cheap software and start selling valuable work. Paid has raised +$30M from investors like Sequoia, Lightspeed and EQT.What we coveredWhy the Agent Economy is impossible without a new metering layerWhy seat-based pricing is dead and what replaces itWhy generalist agents lose to specific domain expertsHow the tech recession forced Outreach to reinvent itselfGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrssMarcelo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelocamberos/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/Do you want AI powered productivity?Get 3 Months Free of Notion: Business Plan + Unlimited AI 👉 https://rebrand.ly/NTNENGYTR3

My guest today is Manny Medina, the founder who defined the last decade of sales tech with Outreach and is now building Paid.ai , the infrastructure for the next decade of AI.Manny’s path took him from a shrimp farm in Ecuador to the heights of Silicon Valley, where he built Outreach into a $4.4B SaaS. But in 2023, a conversation with the CEO of DocuSign handed Manny a "Red Pill" moment: if AI agents do the work of humans, companies will hire fewer people, and the seat-based SaaS model will collapse .He realized the current infrastructure—giants like Salesforce, Netsuite, and Datadog—was "conspiring against him." They could track closed deals or API calls, but they couldn't distinguish between an agent's cost (tokens) and its value (reasoning) . Manny founded Paid to solve this: a way to interpret agent behavior so builders can stop selling cheap software and start selling valuable work. Paid has raised +$30M from investors like Sequoia, Lightspeed and EQT.What we coveredWhy the Agent Economy is impossible without a new metering layerWhy seat-based pricing is dead and what replaces itWhy generalist agents lose to specific domain expertsHow the tech recession forced Outreach to reinvent itselfGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrssMarcelo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelocamberos/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/Do you want AI powered productivity?Get 3 Months Free of Notion: Business Plan + Unlimited AI 👉 https://rebrand.ly/NTNENGYTR3

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I Built a $4.4B SaaS and AI Agents Destroyed It: The End "Per Seat" Pricing

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My guest today is Manny Medina, the founder who defined the last decade of sales tech with Outreach and is now building Paid.ai , the infrastructure for the next decade of AI.Manny’s path took him from a shrimp farm in Ecuador to the heights of...

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