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Building a Global SaaS Empire: 5 Bets That Paid Off with Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham

SaaStr

Big Bet #1: Cast Your Net Wide — Bet On Inbound While Going Global Freshworks was founded in October 2010 in Chennai, India. Big Bet #2: Find Tomorrow’s Great Anglers — Hire Talent With A Learning Mindset In 2010 and 2011, San Francisco was the place for SaaS talent. It helped them get funding in the first round.

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Should You Consider Emotional Intelligence When Hiring Your Startup's Team?

Tom Tunguz

How important is hiring for emotional intelligence? Professor Adam Grant wrote Emotional Intelligence is Overrated in 2010. After two tests within the sales organization across several hundred people, the data revealed that cognitive ability predicted workplace performance in that company five times better than emotional intelligence.

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The Secrets to Aligning GTM Teams & Finance to Scale by 10X with Subskribe Founder Prakash Raina and Okta VP Finance Leslie Hui (Video)

SaaStr

From 2010 until 2015, the SaaS world was becoming more complex with the introduction of static bundles and recurring revenue as an addition to the annual/monthly subscription model. Hire ahead of the curve. The first person you should hire should be the person with the experience you will need. Hire for where you want to be.

Scale 192
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Doubling Down: Mark Roberge, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital

SaaStr

From sourcing opportunities to hiring talent to coaching founders to implementing sales methodologies, we leverage the Stage 2 Capital LP base in every stage of the investing and portfolio support process. Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School.

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Revenue, Revenue Everywhere. Not a Dollar to Count

Tom Tunguz

A few minutes into the meeting with the sales team, the group startles: the data doesn’t match their expectations. The company moved to customer_revenue last quarter when we hired a new VP of Finance and they updated the definition. Something’s wrong. What data are you using?! Revenue_new? Oh, Revenue_new is the old column.

Revenue 310
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Bought-in and paid for: how Atlassian bridge the gap from freemium to enterprise sales

Intercom, Inc.

Many businesses struggle to strike a balance between freemium’s light-touch customer engagement with the more involved enterprise sales process. For every company that’s executing the freemium model successfully, there are hundreds more that struggle and the tension it can create between sales, marketing, and product teams.

Scale 205
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5 Very Good Days, and 5 Pretty Bad Days, as a SaaS CEO

SaaStr

A Good Day: Hiring My Real VP of Sales. Trust me, until you’ve hired someone great, you don’t know. A Good Day: Dec 31, 2009; Dec 31, 2010; Dec 31, 2011; Dec 31, 2012. But since It Was Clearly Hopeless (see point #2), I was pretty deeply bummed to have this option pulled out from under me.