SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

Don’t force VCs to find out in due diligence that only 2 percent of the pool, not the customary 15 percent or so, is available for new hires. And if they are seed investing in the round (surprisingly common) — disclose it! Half of a VC investment is in the CEO. If you don’t know who that really is, it’s difficult to invest.

Finance 284

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships, and exchange strategies. Braindates are 1:1 and small group networking sessions designed for you to share knowledge and network with like-minded SaaS leaders during SaaStr Europa.

VP of Engineering 240

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 240

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2020

He joined StubHub as CTO, but didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because he “wasn’t committed enough.” They wanted to invest in apps, not APIs. You can’t build a whole new product, but you can tweak what you have. He learned paper millions can go to zero ??.

CTO Hire 339

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Airlines 339

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2023

Ok we’ve now got the final speaker list locked down for 2023 SaaStr Europa in LONDON on 6-7 June: CEOs, CROs and CXOS : Edith Harbaugh, Executive Chair & Co-founder @ LaunchDarkly Nowi Kallen, Managing Director @ Salesforce Ventures Spencer Kimball, CEO @ Cockroach Labs Joe Thomas, Co-founder and CEO @ Loom Sterling Snow, Former CRO @ Divvy (..)

VP of Engineering 210

VP of Engineering CTO Coach New CTO CTO 210

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Alex Kayyal and Julie Kainz, Partners at Lightspeed, shared at SaaStr Annual a framework they developed around how to think about this new era of Artificial Intelligence in SaaS, what opportunities are out there for startups, and how to think about incumbents. CRM wasn’t a new category, but they were done on-premise.

AI 216

AI Artificial Intelligence Healthcare New CTO 216

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. The co-founders of Hubspot were at SaaStr Annual last year and said that for two years, they each had to write a blog post every single day. When Lemkin started investing ten years ago, his first five early-stage investments were wildly successful.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 241

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2023

Reference other great investments they’ve made, and why they are similar. Another month of progress, another set of new customers, etc. Share up front why your first CTO left. And no one is in a rush today to invest. But hiding both doesn’t help. #3. Truly hyper-personalize it. Share lots of details. Show the opposite.

New CTO 250

New CTO CTO Banking Cloud 250

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Less and you under-invest. At $8m in ARR, if you have $2m of cash in the bank, you get real nervous investing much more than $500k-$750k, $1m max. It’s subtle, but in SaaS I’ve learned you under-invest if you have < 50% of your ARR in the bank. 5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. More here.

Part-Time VPE 266

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 266

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2021

” — Jason Riedel, founder/CTO of Aspireship. “When on New Year’s Eve, customers kept sending us signed contracts.” “When customers get back $100k’s in minutes and want to pay us more” — Kanat Bekt, founder/CTO, SupplyPike. 20% conversion. ” — Drew Naugher.

CTO Hire 280

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Healthcare 280

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales. Amazing, great emails that are perfect, that solve your problems as a buyer for real right now, or are a jaw-dropping investment, get opened,” says Lemkin. Q: What Do You Think About Specialization In This New Era Of Efficiency? They wanted a one-call close.

CTO Hire 175

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 175

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2020

As the year starts to wind to a close, one exercise I go through with many CEOs I’ve invested in or am close to is this: Did you ship at least 3 truly game-changing features this year? Not launching 3 Truly Game-Changing Features doesn’t mean you didn’t ship any new code or features. Not just at $0.1m

New CTO 219

New CTO CTO Engineering Investment 219

SaaStr

JANUARY 22, 2021

Ciara Peter (Gainsight VP of Product & Design) and Mickey Alon (CTO & Founder of Gainsight PX) share their practical tips for product leaders looking to achieve business growth. Every year, millions of new products are created and launched. The return on marketing investment is much faster.

Scale 268

Scale New CTO CTO Acquisition 268

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2020

Your investors and others will learn a lot more hearing about sales from your VP of Sales, your CTO co-founder … and not you. Just assume none of your investors invest again. But there are 1,000+ new firms since 2016 alone. Professional investors can even write off any given investment if they have to.

Sales Recruiting 331

Sales Recruiting New CTO Scale CTO 331

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

“Our journey with JFrog started back in November 2015 when I first met CEO and co-founder Shlomi Ben Haim and the JFrog team,” said Jai Das, who is the president and managing director at Sapphire Ventures , which participated in the $50 million Series C investment. “One But even more appealing was the product vision the founders outlined.

New CTO 211

New CTO CTO Benchmarks Consulting 211

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2024

Benjamin added, “I think a lot of people think about this new AI technology as something that’s gonna just come in and like work from day one. ” What are the Most Important Investments that Ensure a Future 50 Company Can Adopt? But actually, it turns out its still software. Compliance matters. Security matters.

AI 237

AI Enterprise Artificial Intelligence compliance 237

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They were aware of it, but startups that I work with closely or invested in, if they got all the way to 25 million with 75% NRR, I would tell them to quit today. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote. VCs can only invest in outliers.

Outsourcing Services 181

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 181

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer. We all know this, but we forget about it, especially when the Hot New Deal and the sales team’s wants and needs consumes all of management’s resources. ” — Ankit Sindhi, Founder, Spurt.

CTO Hire 277

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 277

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 221

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 221

Valerian Tech

JUNE 13, 2023

This blog will explore the challenges faced by healthcare companies in achieving regulatory compliance. It can be challenging to keep up with the evolving compliance landscape without a dedicated compliance team or the ability to invest in advanced compliance tools and technologies.

Healthcare 52

Healthcare compliance CTO Hire New CTO 52

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Time to Market for New Products : Also known as velocity, this metric measures the CTO’s effectiveness and speed in rolling new products /features. Come up with product and new feature ideas.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 23, 2022

Advances in automation and new engineering techniques are enabling faster development cycles, raising expectations for ROI from the R&D function. A view of new revenue for every R&D dollar invested further reinforced the correlation of R&D investment to growth. . Source: 2022 OPEXEngine BenchmarkEngine™.

Outsourcing Services 59

Outsourcing Services Technical Review CTO Coach Software Review 59

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2022

Dramatically accelerating its new customer count at scale. But the past several quarters Braze has doubled its new customer growth, from 22%-29% to 48% today. Invest in customers for life. CEO and co-founder Bill Magnuson was CTO until 2017, then took over as CEO from a co-founder, and owns 4.5%. And it has been.

New CTO 61

New CTO CTO Software Review B2B 61

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

The concept was the foundation for his popular talk and ultimately his classic, long-form blog post. This was a team value that became to talk, when led to a blog post and ultimately this conversation. Ciaran, our CTO , came up with this magical line. To extend that conversation, I hosted Rich on our podcast.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

What sets apart some of the most successful, high-growth companies we see today—Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian—has been their ability to tap into and master a new GTM strategy: B2C2B. So we kept investing, we knew we were onto something, and little by little we saw our traction improve. Then something really interesting happened.

B2B 133

B2B B2C Scale New CTO 133

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

When the company was first founded, two of its co-founders, Wade and CTO Bryan were freelancing on web projects and soon noticed a pattern around their clients who were asking for more and more integrations built from one app to another This is where the idea for Zapier was born. Hear how you can turn your SaaS Startup into an army.

Payment Services 100

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 7, 2014

Instead I’ve written a blog post about the nine favorite books I’ve read over the last five years have helped me understand startups and the processes that make them successful. Unlike most business stories which are penned from the point of view of the CEO, this one is written by the CTO/founder, David Hitz.

Underperforming Technical Team 154

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO CTO Government 154

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

For those who don’t know him, Will has over 10 years of experience in the likes of Yahoo, Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and he’s currently the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app that helps millions of people to lower their stress levels and sleep better. They often superimpose it on the new company they’ve joined.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Announcing new features, increasing customer satisfaction and retention are among the top functions of an online community. . #1 Our community is the best way for us to inform our customers about upcoming updates and new features. For example, before releasing/starting to develop a new feature, we run it by our community first.

Marketing 98

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Julien Lemoine | Co-founder and CTO @Algolia. So I’m Julien, Co-founder and CTO of Algolia. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 127

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 127

Unbounce

JUNE 24, 2020

I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI. Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce. Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages.

Artificial Intelligence 145

Artificial Intelligence AI Search Machine Learning Marketing 145

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As you said, people take it hard if suddenly you say, “Hey, this is your new EVP. In the good sense, like go and build the kind of organization and process that made them successful in the past, but you need to hire that kind of person when you’re willing to make a big investment and a big change in that area. What is good?

Sales Hiring 256

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 256

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

I used to be a CTO and operator, co-founder of a SaaS start up. And something of insight so we are New York based, global venture and equity investor. We invest mainly in the growth stage, so think series B, series C, but also somethings earlier as well as some later stage buyouts.

Outsourcing Services 109

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Technical Review 109

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

You can read blog posts, tweets about why you shouldn’t try to create a company outside the Bay area. The catch was he had just moved his family four kids to New York city. We had no New York city presence. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. This was a problem.

CTO Hire 161

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 161

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman , a former host of the podcast, asked Rachel what made that point when Rachel joined Slack in 2016 the right time to invest in growth marketing? For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. They had occasional advertising here and there. Here’s Rachel.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

Your top subscription news. What’s the return on investment of your mom? But after years of research and thinking about this problem at typeform.com and Notion , David decided to write a blog post explaining why this question is so hard to answer. Plus, the Product Marketing Alliance drops the Product Marketing Salary Survey.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Don’t overextend your resources when testing new SaaS growth ideas. Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business. Read all of Petri’s thoughts and observations on his blog . Anything less is not acceptable.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

ProfitWell

JANUARY 24, 2020

So they dropped a blog post all about the common problems that marketers face when focused too much on brand affinity. But once they dug deeper into the data, they found out that their campaign generated the same amount of web traffic as a reasonably successful blog post, converted minimal leads, and generated barely any business.

Sales Recruiting 40

Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 40