ON24

Big news to share 🚀 Our next-gen ON24 + LinkedIn integration is officially live – and it’s our first big launch as part of the Cvent family. We’re piping ON24 first-party engagement data straight into LinkedIn’s audience targeting so you can zero in on high-intent buyers, cut the noise, and turn events into real pipeline. And because Cvent + ON24 are all about connected experiences, you can spin ON24 Key Moments into LinkedIn video ads in just a few clicks and keep your best content working overtime Onwards and Upwards!!! Johnson Lee Mike Tenholder Jim Blackie Scott Lockey Jared Chappin

I was recently reminiscing with some ON24 employees about the changed landscape after 25 years scaling ON24 from $0 to IPO and through its recent acquisition — plus 200K+ lines of Claude Code I've personally created in the last two months across various projects — here's what I told them, and what I'd tell any board member in the room right now: The scarce resource in B2B SaaS has flipped — from execution capacity to judgment. For most of my career, the hard question was "can we build this in time?" Today it's "should we build this at all?" When coding agents hit senior-engineer output at production volume — and they're there — the bottleneck moves upstream, to the decisions themselves. Three implications I find myself discussing with CEOs and GPs in my network: 1. Valuation will widen on revenue-per-judgment, not revenue-per-head. I'm seeing Bay Area companies that cross $100M ARR with under 100 people and positive FCF. The math that used to require 300 now takes 50, and those 50 are making higher-order calls. Boards that still tell the "cost-per-headcount" story they told in 2022 are going to miss the companies that have reshaped their cost structure. The IPO cohort 12-18 months from now will look fundamentally different from the last one. LPs should already be asking for revenue-per-employee benchmarks alongside ARR. 2. Middle management is the hardest layer to re-scope. The PM and engineering-manager role was built to coordinate execution. When execution doesn't need coordinating, the job becomes: curate bets, own judgment, absorb risk. That's not the same job. At ON24's peak this would have meant rewriting what half my product org's day looked like. Most CEOs I talk to know they need to do this. Almost none have started. Whoever does this first in their category resets the cost base before anyone else's board sees the slide. 3. Governance velocity has to match delivery velocity — or the incident IS the product announcement. Two weeks ago a financial firm disbanded one of its 12-person QA team to save $1.2M a year and stood up automated testing in its place. An AI-generated discount code slipped through the validation gates and set product prices to zero. $6M in revenue gone in days — five years of the savings, burned in a week. I know what that room feels like. The lesson is not "don't use agents." It is that AI-native delivery compresses the distance between a bad judgment and a production incident to near-zero. If your governance cadence is quarterly and your delivery cadence is hourly, you are building a time bomb. Your board is going to learn this before you brief them on it. The leaders who win the next decade will be the ones who can tell — in real time — which judgments to automate and which to zealously keep human. The AI tools are downstream of that call. The org chart, the P&L, and eventually the stock price are all downstream of that call. #AI #ProductLeadership #EnterpriseSaaS #VentureCapital #Leadership

Great innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. We’re honored that LinkedIn has named ON24 Innovator of the Year. Built in close collaboration with LinkedIn’s product and business teams, our integration sets a new standard for how event marketers create, promote, and capture demand—all in one seamless experience. Here’s to continuing to raise the bar together.

Excited to be growing our APAC team and welcoming a dynamic, enthusiastic individual to join us. #Hiring #APACTeam #WeAreHiring #GrowthJourney #Careers

The biggest mistake in AI right now is assuming better models automatically create better businesses. They don’t. Better models often make businesses more interchangeable: Once every product can plug into increasingly powerful intelligence, the product itself becomes easier to substitute. That changes what matters. It’s no longer enough to say: “We added AI.” “We ship fast.” “Our UX is cleaner.” “Our assistant is smarter.” Those advantages decay quickly when the underlying models keep improving for everyone at once. So the question is no longer who uses AI. The question is: who has something AI alone cannot commoditize? Trust. Distribution. Embedded workflows. Customer behavior data. Habit. That’s where durable value will come from. A lot of AI products are still operating like wrappers. And wrappers look strong right up until the core capability gets good enough to stand on its own. That’s the shift more teams need to prepare for.

ON24 is looking for Customer Success Manager. Reach out to me to learn more!