How Growth Rate and Unit Economics Interact in AI Era

Alex Clayton is one of the clearest minds in growth-stage investing, the person elite founders turn to when the market is noisy and the stakes are high. A General Partner at Meritech Capital, Alex has built a reputation for breaking down complex businesses with uncommon clarity, from his legendary S-1 teardowns to his frameworks on power laws, secondaries, and AI-native growth. Before Meritech, he honed his craft at Spark Capital and Redpoint, backing breakout companies like Braze, JFrog, Outreach, Pendo, Duo Security, and RelateIQ. A former ATP tennis pro and Stanford team captain, Alex brings that same discipline, pattern recognition, and competitive fire to evaluating the next generational companies.

Discussed in this episode

• Why GAAP revenue and cash burn are the two metrics that quietly govern everything.
• How AI is changing growth rates, margins, and what “good” looks like in SaaS.
• The rise of secondaries, and why they now rival or exceed IPO volume.
• How to read an S-1 like a pro (and what Alex looks for first).
• Founder ownership, fund lifecycles, and how long companies really stay private.
• Why power laws in venture are getting even steeper in the AI era.
• How AI is reshaping pricing models from seats to usage and outcomes.
• Which iconic private companies are most likely to go public in the next 3 years.

Episode highlights

02:40 — Is the IPO window really back? 

05:10 — Secondaries quietly outpacing IPOs

08:10 — The only two metrics that matter

10:56 — AI growth that breaks SaaS mental models

26:20 — From “software” to “SaaS” to “AI”… and back again

29:25 — Seat-based pricing vs outcome-based AI pricing

34:55 — The capital tidal wave & longer private lives

44:00 — Bubble vs biggest opportunity of our careers

57:17 — What the rest of the 2020s look like

1:03:41 — Why GAAP revenue + cash burn still win

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Follow Alex Clayton

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aclayton
• X (Twitter): https://x.com/afc

Follow Max Altschuler (Host)

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

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