SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

At SaaStr Miami, former Founder’s Fund Partner and CRO of Brex Sam Blond — host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast — sat down with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin for a fireside chat about finding success as a SaaS company in 2024. We were coming off an environment where startup funding was as fruitful as ever.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 245

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2024

At SaaStr’s AI Day, George Kreitler, Global IBM Embeddable AI Sales Leader, talks about the paradox of AI, three equations that relate to the world productivity and AI, a little math to help guide the next decade, top use cases, and the importance of responsible AI. What Makes Up AI Success Today? Lastly, you need use cases.

AI 215

AI Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Government 215

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

So when I started writing venture checks in 2013, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a strong start: First was Pipedrive co-leading seed, then acquired for $1.5B Any misrepresentation about the financials, no matter how small If the financials are misrepresented even a smidge, I’ve lost all my money or almost all.

Investment 267

Investment Scale Churn SaaS 267

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

I didn’t really know why until I dug in with Harry: If VC’s were willing to hand a founder $100m to buy some of their shares, what’s wrong with that? What I mean is, for founders, the order of priorities was basically: First came the team. They were going long, after all. Even in secondaries.

Startup 221

Startup Venture Capital Investment Scaling 221

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

For Sam, when he was originally building outbound sales at Brex, they were focused on not purchasing a sequencing tool or system that provides contact information and then blasting that ICP. Sam has talked about their champagne campaign , where they picked a few hundred companies in the Bay area and sent a bottle of champagne and a note.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 239

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2024

“What have we got to do to go all the way?” And that dwelling on it kept Alabama, as good as they were, from getting into the Sweet 16. It’s a game yes, but it’s also about the game. Almost there. Alabama basketball kept getting upset, and the call went to Coach Saban. Next, Next, Next.”

Business 238

Business 238

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Tracy Young , CEO and co-founder at TigerEye, sits down with three CROs to talk about how they navigated the journey to revenue leader. For Laurabeth Harvey, President of Field Operations at Lattice, there were two pivotal moments. Each of these CROs describes what their worst day is.

Scale 230

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 230

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Surprised The Most About First Getting VC Funding? At Adobe Sign / EchoSign, the vast majority of investors that I met with understood what we were doing at the time — but not why it was changing/creating a market. The post Dear SaaStr: What Surprised The Most About First Getting VC Funding?

Technical Review 208

Technical Review Technology Marketing 208

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

So what do they pay on average? The startup I invested in that were acquired by PE in the 2020-2021 Boom were acquired for 8x in one case, 12x in another, and 15x in a third. What did he find? But the companies were far more efficient. You might be worth less ? is interesting to see.

AWS 239

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 239

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2023

So few things were more coveted than unicorn status from about ‘16-‘19. It was a sign you were one of the elite, and it made recruiting and so much more easier. Hundreds of new SaaS unicorns were minted, sometimes as early as $10m ARR and is some cases, even earlier. What are you worth? The biggest issue?

Startup 294

Startup SaaS Scaling 294

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Will Venture Capitalists Do if Our Startup is a Loss? Bill said] ‘most startups do fail, so the odds were that Fanbase would fail , not succeed. “[Bill said] ‘most startups do fail, so the odds were that Fanbase would fail , not succeed. Especially, if you’ve only raise one VC round or so.

Startup 222

Startup Investment Leadership 222

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

And there were so many comments, thoughts, and more. It reminded me of a golden rule it took me years and years to figure out: If a new hire doesn’t work out, it’s always 100% your fault What do I mean? Were you really sure they could do the job? They almost never can truly know what it takes to succeed at your org.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Social Media Interviewing Education 244

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Yet, we don’t know what the new world is, but it won’t be the same. But there is debate happening about how to achieve that. If there were one or two metrics or data points that Nick learned at Gainsight by sitting in on board meetings, what were they? They stayed flat, which means people were grinding it out.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 239

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Given the massive downturn that started 18 months ago, many SaaS founders are nervous about what it takes to raise capital in SaaS in 2023 / 2024. Christoph Janz, General Partner of Point Nine Capital, shares what it takes to raise capital in SaaS, overall investment activity in 2023, and how to develop a convincing AI strategy.

AI 194

AI Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Strategy 194

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Was Your Experience At Your First Big Enterprise Pitch? They asked me about our LDAP integration. At the time, I had no idea what LDAP was. I had a deck to use, but it was more a VC-pitch type deck and not enough about the product. The interactive demo didn’t work (a browser bug). We lost the pilot.

Enterprise 212

Enterprise 212

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

They will generate about $2b in revenue this year. “We continue to see AI-related usage manifest itself most accurately with next-gen AI native customers who contributed about 2.5% “We ended the quarter with about 3,130 customers with an ARR of $100,000 or more, up from about 2,600 last year.

Scale 229

Scale AI Cloud Mobile 229

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

When Sam joined, there were two AEs, and he hired four additional AEs. You can watch the full episode of the CRO Confidential with Sam and Ashley about dominating outbound sales here. These were already experienced SDRs, and they were in-network — two points worth noting. The answer didn’t show up in the data.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Revenue 171

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2024

Last Friday’s post about delegation called The Class Missing from Business School, spurred a deluge of great advice from readers. Both sides provide feedback on what worked & areas of friction. Paul sent this graphic about Hostinger’s Task Relevant Maturity. Record a video/Loom/Scribe* detailing the process.

ChatGPT 223

ChatGPT AI Metrics Revenue 223

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

If I had to summarize venture capital today, it would be like this: There is Very Little Oxygen Today Above $200m Valuations What do I mean? But the problem in SaaS especially is that the average public SaaS company is trading for about $2 Billion, and at about 6x ARR. Unicorns are hurting, but — Nasdaq is at an all-time high.

Venture Capital 304

Venture Capital AI Investment SaaS 304

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2023

It’s not even achieved by asking your customers what they want because people don’t know what they want, even if they think they do. All the lines below the horizontal line are people that weren’t working on the card, and the brighter colors were working on it. What did Expensify do? Launched it anyway.

Outsourcing Services 231

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale SaaS 231

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

At a recent SaaStr Workshop Wednesday, he shared a behind-the-scenes look into what this process looks like and five key takeaways for other founders who are want an inside look the process. But then growth flatlined for a couple of years, and it was time to talk about selling. Otherwise, you need to stop and think about it.

Underperforming Technical Team 164

Underperforming Technical Team Data Development Team Review Technical Review 164

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin and Partner at QED Investors Amias Gerety chat on the Fintech Beat podstream about all things SaaS, money, and what makes a great founder. What Makes SaaS So Great If you’re here on SaaStr reading this, you don’t need to be told why SaaS is so great. Let’s dive right in.

Sales Hiring 219

Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 219

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

The boosts Zoom (can’t go to the office anymore), Shopify (can’t go to a store anymore) were real, but could never be sustained. But what matters most for founders? You can see a lot of VCs and others talking about this on Twitter. And what it says it times will bounce back pretty strong.

SaaS 326

SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 326

SaaStr

OCTOBER 2, 2023

Earlier this year, we shared how the big theme from a Sponsorships perspective leads from SaaStr Europa 2023 were up 153% from 2022. So of course, we had to run the numbers to see what changed: the percentage of attendees attending SaaStr at a VP level and above rose to 56%. The result?

Trends 211

Trends New CTO CTO Data 211

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep? She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. From an R&D perspective, they invested in what they called vertical solutions to support those new use cases.

Scale 217

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 217

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2022

Dear SaaStr: Dear SaaStr: What Were Aspects of Your Startup That Were Easier Than Anticipated? More here : The post Dear SaaStr: What Were Aspects of Your Startup That Were Easier Than Anticipated? 120% NRR: Your revenue doubles in 5 years even with no new customers. appeared first on SaaStr.

Startup 249

Startup Retention Customer Success Revenue 249

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

In this CMO panel from SaaStr, Rick Schultz, CMO at Databricks, Janine Pelosi, Former CMO at Zoom, and Ryan Carlson, Former CMO at Okta, joined Carilu Dietrich, Advisor at Hypergrowth B2B Startups to talk about the seven biggest mistakes CMOs make. “It was always thinking about the company first,” said Janine Pelosi of Zoom.

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 237

Clouded Judgement

JANUARY 12, 2024

Subscribe now Reinventing Founder Friendliness - Back to the Future This week I joined Ed Sim (Founder and Managing Partner at Boldstart Ventures) on Harry Stebbings podcast to chat about the state of venture backed companies heading into 2024 and 2025. Series Bs and Cs were raised when companies were at the typical Series A milestones.

Cloud 284

Cloud Venture Capital Acquisition Metrics 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Common Problems With “Founder CEO’s”? Here’s Tiago Paiva, CEO of $10B Talkdesk, talking about how he spends 80% of his time recruiting now … up from 0% at $1m ARR: It’s OK you haven’t done it before. The post Dear SaaStr: What Are The Common Problems With “Founder CEO’s”?

Scale 248

Scale Interviewing Engineering Content Marketing 248

FastSpring

MARCH 15, 2024

In this episode of Growth Stage, host and CMO of FastSpring David Vogelpohl interviews Todd about his thoughts on: Why marketplaces can be a difficult way to attract new players. Todd said that “One thing that we found is that many marketplaces were not cannibalistic with our own direct-to-consumer channels.

Payment Methods 179

Payment Methods Marketplace as a Service Payment Solutions Payments 179

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Previously in SaaS, it was widely seen that anything > 1 was healthy if you were venture-backed, and anything > 1.5 If you were well-funded, 0.7 What you actually end up with is quite an unprofitable business operating with -25% operating margin despite having a revenue scale of more than $600M. What does this mean?

VP of Engineering 213

VP of Engineering Scale Marketing Benchmarks 213

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

I thought we’d be behind them by now, that the cuts were sort of a one-off. But don’t the headlines obscure what’s really happening, because they tend to shout out quieter trends. With “SaaS” about $200 Billion of that. So layoffs still fill the headlines in 2024. Even now. So cuts continue.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 255

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

So what were the best attended and most upvoted SaaStr Workshop Wednesdays ? The Seven Things all Founders Should Know About Sales. The ones you actually just have to catch up? The 2023 list below! And sign up for FREE Workshop Wednesdays here.

Generative AI 229

Generative AI Scale Compensation AI 229

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2023

So two recent data analyses across both private and public SaaS companies interestingly showed basically the same thing: for the best SaaS companies, on average, growth in Q1 was down about 33% or so from a year ago. What did they see? SaaS has gotten about 33% harder overall. SaaS has gotten about 33% harder overall.

Cloud 277

Cloud Startup Trends SaaS 277

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

In today’s world, there’s a clear shift in what founders, boards, and investors are all after — scalable, low-CAC (customer-acquisition cost) growth strategies. When they outbounded a prospect with an intent or predictive signal, the dollars per contract average were 3-4x higher than those with no signal. So you have a 2.4x

Scale 216

Scale Sales Hiring Strategy Marketing 216

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2022

There were a bunch of things I didn’t like about it: NPS is backward-looking. It doesn’t tell you much about your prospects, the future, or your most recent customers. I saw Big Companies celebrate their NPS scores, even knowing their products were on the way to obsolescence as new entrants were displacing them.

Metrics 280

Metrics Churn Engineering Innovation 280