The best way to learn how SaaS companies are built is to follow the founders and CEOs building them. But most lists of SaaS founders to follow are out of date: we found CEOs on them who left their jobs years ago and founders whose companies have since been sold. This list comes from the SaaS founders Khrystyna Oleksiienko of LeadWave follows, plus the ones other lists cite most. On November 13, 2026, we checked every person's current role, where they post and how many follow them.
The short version: 18 SaaS founders and CEOs made the list. Aaron Levie of Box has the biggest audience, 3.5 million on X; Melanie Perkins of Canva has the biggest on LinkedIn, 394,000. Karri Saarinen (Linear), James Hawkins (PostHog) and Tyler Denk (beehiiv) build in public most openly. And 11 of the 30 people we checked from Khrystyna's list have changed jobs, stepped down or sold their company.
SaaS founders and CEOs to follow in 2026
CEOs of the biggest SaaS companies
Melanie Perkins: co-founder and CEO of Canva, on building a $4B-ARR company
Aaron Levie: co-founder and CEO of Box, the most-followed SaaS CEO on X
Dharmesh Shah: co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, building AI agents in public
Guillermo Rauch: founder and CEO of Vercel, on Next.js, v0 and AI-built software
Amjad Masad: co-founder and CEO of Replit, on AI agents that build software
Christina Cacioppo: co-founder and CEO of Vanta, on trust and security in the AI era
Eléonore Crespo: co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, on AI for finance teams
Laura Behrens Wu: co-founder and CEO of Shippo, shipping software for e-commerce
SaaS founders building in public
Karri Saarinen: co-founder and CEO of Linear, on product craft and calm company-building
James Hawkins: co-founder and co-CEO of PostHog, building in public with unusual candor
Tyler Denk: co-founder and CEO of beehiiv, with a weekly founder newsletter
Jason Lemkin: founder of SaaStr, the most prolific writer on scaling SaaS
Rand Fishkin: co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, with data on zero-click marketing
Andrew Gazdecki: founder and CEO of Acquire.com, on buying and selling startups
Amanda Kahlow: founder and CEO of 1mind, on AI agents that sell
Alina Vandenberghe: co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper, on running a company on AI agents
Alyona Mysko: founder and CEO of Fuel, on AI agents for finance teams
Chris Frantz: co-founder and CEO of Loops, email for SaaS
Key numbers
Lists go stale fast. 11 of the 30 people we checked from Khrystyna's list have changed jobs, stepped down or sold their company: Clari merged into Salesloft, June shut down, and Vendr, Keyplay, Firstbase and ProfitWell were sold. Two more founders we checked, Julie Zhuo and Alexa Grabell, sold their companies in 2026.
One giant. Aaron Levie's 3.5 million X followers are more than the next four founders here combined.
Sources: X counts via the public fxtwitter API; LinkedIn counts as shown on each public profile; both on Nov 13, 2026.
CEOs of the biggest SaaS companies
Melanie Perkins
Melanie Perkins started Canva in Perth and now runs one of the biggest software companies in the world: it ended 2025 with $4 billion in annual recurring revenue and 265 million monthly users. She posts on LinkedIn, where 394,000 people follow her, about Canva's launches, its mission and its "two-step plan" to build one of the world's most valuable companies and then give much of it away. She also writes about hard calls, like the team changes she announced on November 3, 2026. More in our Melanie Perkins dossier.
Follow: LinkedIn · X · 394K followers on LinkedIn
Aaron Levie
Aaron Levie is the rare public-company CEO who posts like a person. On X, where he has 3.5 million followers, he writes short, quotable takes on how AI agents change enterprise software and SaaS business models, and the tech press picks them up regularly. Box is on track for about $1.29B in revenue this fiscal year.
Follow: X · 3.5M followers on X
Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah co-founded HubSpot, which now serves 311,704 customers, and is still its CTO. He posts on LinkedIn and X about building with AI agents, from HubSpot's Agent Hub to his own side projects, plus startup and productivity advice, often with a joke.
Follow: LinkedIn · X · OnStartups · 601.1K followers on X
Guillermo Rauch
Guillermo Rauch runs Vercel, the company behind Next.js, valued at $9.3B in its 2025 Series F. On X he posts product launches, web performance and short, contrarian takes on how AI changes the way software gets built. See our Guillermo Rauch dossier.
Follow: X · LinkedIn · 919.4K followers on X
Amjad Masad
Amjad Masad's Replit raised $400M at a $9B valuation in 2026 on the back of Replit Agent, which lets people who can't code build software. He posts agent launches and opinionated takes on AI and tech on X, where half a million people follow him.
Follow: X · 505.9K followers on X
Christina Cacioppo
Christina Cacioppo, a former venture investor, co-founded Vanta, which automates security compliance for more than 16,000 customers. She posts on LinkedIn about building an agent-first product and why trust is the defining problem of the AI era, with the odd dry joke. Her X thread on growing from $10M to $100M in ARR in two years is worth reading.
Follow: LinkedIn · X · 50K followers on LinkedIn
Eléonore Crespo
Eléonore Crespo co-founded Pigment, the business planning platform, and runs it as co-CEO with Romain Niccoli. In October 2026 Pigment raised a $250M Series E at a $2.3B valuation, after passing $100M in ARR. On LinkedIn she posts product launches, customer stories and survey data on how CFOs spend on AI, sometimes in French.
Follow: LinkedIn · 43K followers on LinkedIn
Laura Behrens Wu
Laura Behrens Wu co-founded Shippo, which more than 4.6 million e-commerce customers use to ship. She posts less often than others here, short product updates like Shippo's MCP launch, which lets you buy shipping labels from ChatGPT and Claude, but they show where commerce software is heading.
Follow: LinkedIn · X · 31K followers on LinkedIn
SaaS founders building in public
Karri Saarinen
Karri Saarinen designed at Airbnb and Coinbase before co-founding Linear, and he posts the way Linear builds: about product craft, design quality and running a calm, profitable company, and lately about how AI agents change product development. His long essays on the Linear blog, like Self-driving SaaS, are worth the time. Linear passed $100M in ARR in 2026 and more than 40,000 companies pay for it. More in our Karri Saarinen dossier.
Follow: X · LinkedIn · Linear blog · 96.6K followers on X
James Hawkins
James Hawkins runs PostHog in public: funding rounds, culture, hiring and mistakes, written more candidly than almost any SaaS CEO. His post on the Series E, an "upgrade from unicorn adjacent to unicorn" at a $1.4B valuation, is typical. In May 2026 he wrote that he's moving his focus to PostHog's AI products. See our James Hawkins dossier.
Follow: X · LinkedIn · PostHog blog · 28.9K followers on X
Tyler Denk
Tyler Denk worked in product at YouTube and Morning Brew before co-founding beehiiv, the newsletter platform. Every Tuesday he sends Big Desk Energy, candid essays on running a startup, like Founder death spiral. He told Reuters that beehiiv expects about $50M in revenue in 2026. See our Tyler Denk dossier.
Follow: X · LinkedIn · Big Desk Energy · 49.9K followers on X
Jason Lemkin
Jason Lemkin co-founded EchoSign, sold it to Adobe, and founded SaaStr, the SaaS conference and blog. He publishes several posts a day: ARR benchmarks, public-company teardowns, sales and fundraising, and his Dear SaaStr answers to founders' questions. Nobody writes more about scaling B2B SaaS.
Follow: SaaStr · X · LinkedIn · 256.1K followers on X
Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin founded Moz and now runs SparkToro, an audience research company. He posts most on LinkedIn, with research on falling web traffic and AI search and contrarian takes on SEO and brand; his November 2026 study found traffic to the open web has fallen 12% in five years. He co-wrote the book Zero Click Marketing.
Follow: LinkedIn · X · SparkToro blog · 466.5K followers on X
Andrew Gazdecki
Andrew Gazdecki runs Acquire.com, a marketplace where more than 2,000 startups have been sold. He posts about SaaS valuations and acquisition multiples and the lessons of building and selling companies, often as long X threads. Read him before you sell, or buy, a small SaaS.
Follow: X · LinkedIn · 317.8K followers on X
Amanda Kahlow
Amanda Kahlow founded 6sense, the account-based marketing platform, and is now founder and CEO of 1mind, which raised $30M for AI sales agents with a face and a voice. She posts on LinkedIn several times a week about replacing parts of the B2B sales process with AI, as in I want to blow up the way we sell, and about being a second-time founder.
Follow: LinkedIn · 25K followers on LinkedIn
Alina Vandenberghe
Alina Vandenberghe co-founded Chili Piper, the meeting scheduling and routing software used by companies such as Meta, Verizon, Gong and Cursor, and runs it as co-CEO with Nicolas Vandenberghe. At HubSpot's UNBOUND in September 2026 she explained how Chili Piper's employees built more than 1,000 AI agents and how its marketing team went from 22 people to 2. She posts on LinkedIn almost every day, to 54,000 followers, about AI at work, leadership and, openly, herself.
Follow: LinkedIn · 54K followers on LinkedIn
Alyona Mysko
Alyona Mysko is a former CFO who founded Fuelfinance in Ukraine; its product, now called Fuel, is a multi-agent platform for finance teams. She posts on LinkedIn almost every day: practical breakdowns of how CFO teams hand treasury, close and forecasting work to AI agents, and long articles like How to automate any finance inbox with AI.
Follow: LinkedIn · 43K followers on LinkedIn
Chris Frantz
Chris Frantz co-founded Loops, the email platform built for SaaS companies, after going through Y Combinator. He posts about startup marketing, fundraising and product, and his reflections on Y Combinator are a good read for first-time founders.
Follow: X · LinkedIn · Blog · 28.9K followers on X
Who to follow, by what you need
Building product: Karri Saarinen, Guillermo Rauch, Amjad Masad.
Scaling a big SaaS company: Melanie Perkins, Aaron Levie, Dharmesh Shah.
Fundraising: Jason Lemkin, Eléonore Crespo, Christina Cacioppo.
AI agents at work: Alina Vandenberghe, Amanda Kahlow, Alyona Mysko.
Marketing: Rand Fishkin, Tyler Denk.
Building in public: James Hawkins, Tyler Denk.
Selling your company: Andrew Gazdecki.
SaaS founders who changed jobs
You'll still find these names on lists of SaaS CEOs to follow, with titles they no longer hold:
Andy Byrne: co-founded Clari, which merged with Salesloft in December 2025; Steve Cox became CEO of the combined company.
Dave Rogenmoser: stepped down as Jasper's CEO in 2023.
Julie Zhuo: Meta acquired Sundial, her data analytics startup, in October 2026.
Alexa Grabell: Apollo.io acquired Pocus in March 2026, and she joined Apollo.
Enzo Avigo: June, his product analytics startup, shut down in 2025 when its team joined Amplitude.
Ryan Neu: Vendr, which he co-founded, was bought by Vertice in June 2026.
Adam Schoenfeld: Inflection.io bought his company Keyplay in 2026, and he's now its CMO.
Chris Herd: sold Firstbase to AppDirect, where he's now a general manager.
Patrick Campbell: sold ProfitWell to Paddle in 2022 and is working on a new, unnamed company.
Sahil Lavingia: handed Gumroad's CEO role to Ershad Kunnakkadan in 2026 and is now its chairman.
Also worth a look, though we couldn't confirm a recent public post: Buğra Gündüz (HockeyStack), Stefan Bader (Cello) and Steli Efti (Close).
FAQ
Which SaaS founders should I follow on LinkedIn?
Melanie Perkins (Canva), Christina Cacioppo (Vanta), Eléonore Crespo (Pigment), Amanda Kahlow (1mind), Alina Vandenberghe (Chili Piper) and Alyona Mysko (Fuel) post mainly on LinkedIn, as do Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) and Rand Fishkin (SparkToro).
Which SaaS CEOs should I follow on X?
Aaron Levie (Box), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Amjad Masad (Replit) and Karri Saarinen (Linear).
Who is the most-followed SaaS founder?
On X, Aaron Levie of Box, with about 3.5 million followers on November 13, 2026. On LinkedIn, Melanie Perkins of Canva, with 394,000.
Who should bootstrapped SaaS founders follow?
Indie hackers like Pieter Levels and Marc Lou, who build alone and share their revenue; see also our bootstrapped SaaS companies.
Where can I find SaaS founders' contact details?
LeadWave's list of SaaS companies has the CEO's verified email for 15,000 SaaS companies, and our dossiers cover individual CEOs such as Linear's, Canva's and Vercel's.
How this list was built
Khrystyna keeps the people she follows in an Airtable list. We took the SaaS founders and CEOs in it, and added the founders and CEOs that other lists of SaaS founders to follow cite most. On November 13, 2026, we checked each person's current role against their company's site and the press, found their profiles, and looked for their most recent public post.
The list keeps people who founded a SaaS company, still lead it or build it, and post publicly. Operators, investors and indie hackers will get their own lists. X follower counts come from the public fxtwitter API, LinkedIn counts from each public profile, both on November 13. Company figures are the companies' own or from reputable press.
About this list
Curated by Khrystyna Oleksiienko at LeadWave, which maintains a hand-researched database of SaaS and AI companies. She also picked our top SaaS newsletters, best SaaS communities and best SaaS design resources.
Want to reach SaaS founders directly?
Following a founder is a start; an email reaches them. LeadWave's list of SaaS companies gives you the CEO's verified email for 15,000 SaaS companies, with size, funding and founding year.
