Kellblog

DECEMBER 27, 2021

My point was that this is normal and healthy: you can long Miami and Austin without shorting Palo Alto which, by the way, would have been a bad idea in 2020. Is web3 going to change everything because, as Chris Dixon argues, the best entrepreneurs and developers have learned not to build atop centralized platforms? Web3 hype peaks.

Blockchain 143

Blockchain Technical Review Venture Capital Sales Hiring 143

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

So is developing a geographic strategy. Just as sports teams have an advantage when competing in their home stadium, European startups often have a (sometimes unacknowledged) home country advantage when competing in their home market. The US poses numerous, often unique, challenges for a European technology startup. The market is vast.

Startup 117

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 117

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

Mark’s a seasoned startup executive, he’s go-to-market oriented, and he has some large-company chops that he developed earlier in his career. DK: a lot of CEOs and boards wait too long in denial on a bad VP of Sales hire. Hiring the wrong VP Sales due to incomplete vetting and then giving them too much runway to perform.

Sales Hiring 139

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 139

Point Nine Land

MARCH 15, 2022

If you take a look at a 50 person sales team, you’ll likely find it to be very data-driven. They usually track low-level metrics about their app performance or errors, and agile teams have burn-down charts. Previous attempts failed or didn’t get a lot of adoption, usually because of some combination of these issues: Poor data quality.

Investment 52

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 52

Baremetrics

MAY 7, 2019

Choosing the right combination of funding for your business is just as fundamental as choosing the right co-founders (or not), the right market, the right product, and the right team. million – about half of all the cash they had on hand – to buy out their main venture capital investors after eight years since founding.

Finance 111

Finance Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 111

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2019

And the very first thing that I did, like any neurotic person is I Googled corporate venture capital. We have one company in our portfolio that this is the third time the founding team has been together. Workday wasn’t in that model, so we have a slightly different approach to portfolio development.

Development Team Review 131

Development Team Review Scale Technical Review Software Review 131

ProfitWell

JANUARY 6, 2020

If you don’t have product-market fit, you could be advertising to the wrong buyer personas and attracting the wrong buyers, leading to higher churn and poor retention. A high churn rate might be indicative of poor product-market fit. He said by 2017, the team had reached 14 people. Marketing messaging. Churn rates. Customer LTV.

Product Marketing 52

Product Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Advertising 52

ProfitWell

AUGUST 13, 2020

Ben Horowitz is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a private venture capital company. CEOs are often reluctant to share bad news because they suffer from positivity delusion. That’s why he calls it a delusion: employees can handle bad news. And how to be vulnerable in a leadership role.

Payments 52

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 52

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 4, 2020

Years later, he’s got a thriving business that is not venture capital backed. Years later, he’s got a thriving business but one that is not venture capital backed. Sam Jacobs: Have you developed a process to answer that question of should you hire, should you fire? How do you evaluate talent?

Scale 105

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 105

Point Nine Land

JUNE 22, 2023

I can already hear Christoph and the rest of our software-loving P9 team telling me that they would have preferred to invest in SaaS if it had existed, and he’s probably right. Some pure hardware businesses have capex requirements that would break a typical venture fund’s model. Still, it’s clear that things are different today.

Outsourcing Services 59

Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development AI 59

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

After working on NASA’s Space Shuttle Main Engine, he went on to develop Portfolium, a social networking platform that allows students and graduates to showcase skills beyond the traditional resume to potential employers. Portfolium was eventually acquired, but the team behind it never stopped thinking about a better way to do it.

Scale 211

Scale compliance Software Review Technical Review 211

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

To date Bob has raised over $15m with Crossbeam from friends of the show including Andy @ Uncork, Matt @ Firstmark, Bill @ First Round and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures, to name a few. Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018.

Sales Hiring 133

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 133

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2019

Do I have the right team? And just because someone was a right member of the team last year doesn’t mean they’re a right member of the team next year. And just because someone was a right member of the team last year doesn’t mean they’re a right member of the team next year. ” Right?

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scale Startup 125

FastSpring

MARCH 10, 2023

Our former Director of Content and Community spoke to Alf about managing a happy team, how he’s grown his company without external funding, the history of developing in the Mac ecosystem, and running a consulting and software business. And the problem was, I have no clue in software development. So I just had this idea.

Consulting 78

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Software 78

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team. But let’s step back a minute, you’ve got three reps on your team already, doing whatever revenue, four, and you want to triple your revenue. Whatever you do, hire two.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 274

Kellblog

APRIL 4, 2021

We are team members in an organization, after all. They apologize for missed quarters or bad hires. Founders own the team. We disagree and commit. We horse trade. We split the difference. But, unless we want to do a deliberate end run to the person in charge, we abide by the decisions of the group. Founder aren’t.

CTO Coach 99

CTO Coach CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO 99

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? I’ve heard so many good things from Kobie, now at Upfront, and then also the team at Openview. Andy MacMillan: I started my career in tech actually as a developer. How does one instil volume based pricing without disincentivizing usage? Andy MacMillan: Excellent.

Sales Hiring 218

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 218

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2019

We were both in business school, and my aha was I was spending some time at a local venture capital firm helping with them just thinking about how do we grow these companies, saying, “What’s the plan? Increasingly organizations talk about B2D marketing, to developers. Some developer’s tinkering with something.

Scale 109

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 109

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2019

How can one prevent their customer support team from being a wall of protection for the product and eng team? Stripe recently announced their 5th office would be… “remote”, so how does Parker feel about the building of remote teams? What are the most important things when establishing your first remote team?

VP of Engineering 137

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review 137

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

I’ve been in software since the ’90s and for over 20 years, nearly that entire time, we’ve been talking about digital transformation, developing strategies, architecting new technologies, and moving beyond digitization to rethinking our businesses, our products, and our services in a way that’s optimized for a digital world.

Scale 165

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 165

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 14, 2022

What the soon-to-be podcast host and venture capitalist calls to mind is a somewhat forgettable scene where Peter Thiel becomes Facebook’s first major investor. It was the first time Harry came across venture capital, and, he tells us, he was instantly hooked. There’s no right way to do venture. Delighted to have you.

Venture Capital 129

Venture Capital Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 129

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 279

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 279

Kellblog

AUGUST 13, 2019

If you’re immediately dispatched to Sand Hill Road in search of capital, you’ll be out pitching the company poorly instead of learning the business and making plans to improve it. But that thinking basically assumes the venture capital market mispriced LeaderCo. First-time, non-founder CEOs.

Software Review 76

Software Review Startup Sales Hiring Software 76

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Now, I’m a venture capital investor. Many of these are names that you know, and this is actually the largest we’ve seen in history. How long can this last?

Cloud 101

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 101

Outseta

AUGUST 23, 2017

You can’t have a top down budget created by an executive team and approved by the board, while also having self managed teams that are empowered to make decisions by sensing and responding to what the market and the business is telling them. The executive team needed this plan to drive alignment.

Forecasting 52

Forecasting Scale Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review 52

Trint

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

I’d never been exposed to software developers and the mysterious world of coding. I was introduced to a team of software engineers who’d been working on tech that aligned audio and text so that you could follow it like karaoke. I remember saying to the team, “We just invented the future.” I ran one of my interviews through it.

Branding 130

Branding Advertising Underperforming Technical Team VP of Engineering 130

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 1, 2020

If you missed episode 137, check it out here: Team Selling: A Comeback Story for 2021 with Trish Bertuzzi. Learn how modern sales teams win deals now at 6sense.com/saleshacker. It’s a bad look, it’s a bad way to end your relationship. And a lot of that early founding team came from ExactTarget lineage.

VP of Engineering 63

VP of Engineering Branding Scale Marketing 63

Baremetrics

APRIL 16, 2021

If so, how much money will you need to build your product and get it to market and what types of capital will you employ to do so? This capital should be used for product development and the people required to help you build it. These programs generally push companies onto the venture capital path. Venture Capital.

Venture Capital 66

Venture Capital Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SaaS 66

Point Nine Land

MARCH 7, 2019

Lemkin recently posted a tweetstorm about his observation that most startups are bad at finance. If there’s a trade-off between hiring a CFO and, say, a marketing leader or 1–2 developers, most founders will understandably go for the latter. Like, all of them. So, when is the right time to hire a CFO? Some time around the $0.5–1.5

Sales Hiring 72

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Payment Services Finance 72

Neil Patel

JANUARY 11, 2021

You can then use it to arrange for the required capital to launch your product or service. Follow this up by building your team and finding a location if you’re opening a physical store. After all, your customers would prefer more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. Solve a problem you identify.

Underperforming Technical Team 128

Underperforming Technical Team Business Sales Hiring Scale 128

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

And we had a variety of software offerings, everything from WordPress themes and plugins, a local development tool called Local and then had very SaaS like elements to our offering there. And that’s not a bad situation to be in when you’re looking for new levers of growth for your software, SaaS business.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 20, 2018

Take notes, highlight the best parts, and share important takeaways with your team. Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast. Producer/Host: Bowery Capital. Bowery Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm with a soft spot for tech startups. If you can’t solve their problems, you will NEVER sell anything.

Scale 111

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Social Media 111

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Venture capital is not inherently bad or the manifestation of greed and commitments to impossible-to-deliver growth. and paid it out to the Founders and early team members. After the Series A, Buffer fell into a similar trap to Wistia - they hired too quickly, specifically to accelerate product development.

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

But it sounds like the bad news is you’ve got a limited runway. It’s not the investor’s problem if you have an expensive team. I believe you, it’s true, but venture capital is a weird niche thing that… Frankly, venture capital at any stage only wants to invest in folks that are already off to the races.

Scale 213

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 213

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

We trust leaders to make decisions on what tools they need to get the most out of their teams. Guide to SaaS Revenue Recognition and Deferred Revenue in SaaS by Ben Murray, The SaaS CFO SaaS revenue recognition is an ongoing priority for SaaS accounting teams. Keep an eye out as we will be making regular updates.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52