"PLG is still super relevant and makes sense at the outset for most companies, but it has a ceiling. People generally won't give you $1M via self-serve. Companies that wait too long to add sales hit walls."
Evidence from the Archive
Vercel (COO); formerly Stripe (CRO), Google
Sierra: Going after Global 2000 with eight-figure deals from day one -- PLG would not be useful here
Atlassian: The most famous PLG company eventually added sales, proving that PLG alone cannot sustain $100B+ scale
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser built the early sales organization at Stripe from the ground up and now runs all go-to-market functions at Vercel, giving her direct experience adding sales to two of the most iconic PLG-native developer tools. Their core argument: PLG is still super relevant and makes sense at the outset for most companies, but it has a ceiling. People generally won't give you $1M via self-serve.
The evidence is specific: Sierra: Going after Global 2000 with eight-figure deals from day one -- PLG would not be useful here. Furthermore, stripe's Project Rosland: Built a company universe database to enable hyper-personalized outbound with only 4 SDRs instead of the typical 30, demonstrating how PLG companies must reinvent sales for their culture. Atlassian: The most famous PLG company eventually added sales, proving that PLG alone cannot sustain $100B+ scale.
In Jeanne DeWitt Grosser's own words: "PLG makes sense for a lot of companies at the outset, unless you are very explicitly building a product for enterprise. So Sierra as an example, right? They are very clearly going after Global 2000 or something close to that. PLG is not going to be overly useful to them because they are trying to win eight-figure deals from day one." (Explaining when PLG does and doesn't make sense.)