Sales Hacker

MAY 13, 2025

And so I kind of had to bone up on the history of, what had gone on between, call it the late nineties and 2007 in the search space, we’re in a moment there in 2008, 2009 where we’re just getting our. When Yext started our core business as it exists today in about 2009 or 2010 Yelp was something like 65% of all online reviews.

AI Search 74

AI Search AI ChatGPT Software Review 74

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Launched by the Chinese technology company Sina Corporation in 2009, Sina Weibo, or simply Weibo, is, a microblogging platform that compares to Twitter and Instagram. Sina Weibo 598 million MAU “ Weibo ” (微博) means “micro-blog” in Chinese.

Social Media 126

Social Media Payments Branding Payment Methods 126

Sales Hacker

JUNE 13, 2025

In 2005–2009, the 99th percentile venture exit was around $1.4B. Exits are compounding faster Liquidity is great, but what about upside? The data shows that venture outcomes are getting significantly bigger. In fact, the 99th percentile exit today is more than 7x higher than it was just a decade ago. It’s over $10.2B.

AI Search 94

AI Search Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale 94

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

in May 2009 … but then returned to normal 2% by 2010: #4. You can also see highly elevated gross churn in 2009 here — the Mar-June on the left side of the X-axis. But even by July 2009, it had returned to normal once we worked through a cycle of churn. SMBs just plain went out of business in ’08-’09.

SMB 361

SMB SaaS Churn Enterprise 361

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2020

A Good Day: Dec 31, 2009; Dec 31, 2010; Dec 31, 2011; Dec 31, 2012. A Bad Day: The Day My Mentee Quit on Me to Go Off and Do Better in 2009. Beyond that, bringing someone super talented into the company that brings a positive attitude and a whole team with him — just epic. And again, Dec 31, 2018 and Dec 31, 2019. And again in 2018.

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring SaaS Revenue Churn 357

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2020

2020 is not the same as 2009. At least, those of us who were CEOs in 2009 sort of know what to do at an operating level. Folks in SaaS that were CEOs and execs in ’08-’09 have seen some of this before. We will do a webinar ourselves on this next week. But it might end up being pretty similar in SaaS. We’ll see.

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Forecasting Enterprise Metrics 312

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 19, 2022

All this took patience: Amazon’s share price exceeded the dot-com high Oct 23, 2009, a decade later. A remarkable accomplishment in the most unforgiving capital markets environment the company had seen. Ten years after that, the company’s value had compounded 20x.

Construction 321

Construction Finance Pricing Startup 321

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Even when the global economy literally melted down, and >froze< in 2009 — the buyers in SaaS still came. Some are much more impacted post-Covid, like Shopify and Zoom. But even there, the growth is real. Churn went way up, for sure. But buyers still came. More on the actual data here.

Marketing 357

Marketing Startup Cloud Churn 357

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

The old sales playbooks of 2009 and even 2019 may not work as well in 2021. Given that, realize if your outbound sales team isn’t performing at all, maybe it’s not your app, or the competition, or the market, or that there are too many vendors in the space. It’s their approach.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 356

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Marc Benioff said not hiring more sales reps in 2009 was one of his top mistakes. Thank goodness we didn’t need more capital. VCs came back in force by early ’10, but they sort of evaporated in ’09. Something to think about. These are unique times. But if your customers are larger and happy, they will renew.

Sales Hiring 349

Sales Hiring SaaS Churn Enterprise 349

Tom Tunguz

JULY 22, 2018

Median round sizes have increased from 2009 dramatically across seed and Series A-C. In the chart above, I’ve drawn dashed lines from the values in 2009 across the graph. The dashed blue line is the median series A from 2009. Seed rounds have not surpassed 2009 Series A levels. Two blocks of the ladder have flipped.

Startup 197

Startup Finance Marketing Investment 197

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2020

Marc Benioff said one of his top mistakes was not hiring enough salespeople in 2009, during the peak of the last downturn. There are no easy answers, but we do know one thing: When things come back, you will need everyone great. At almost every company, if we’re honest, the “bottom” 10% doesn’t contribute that much if any value.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success Scaling 298

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2023

Even the 2008-2009 downturn, while truly brutal, didn’t hit SaaS as hard as the rest of the economy. Not easy, but easier and easier: There was a bump in 2016, a Flash Crash in SaaS, when budgets were slashed, but it didn’t last long enough to really impact renewal cycles. SaaS markets had fully recovered later that year.

SaaS 314

SaaS Churn Sales Software 314

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2023

I sold a sales tool in 2008-2009 when the global economy was in total meltdown, and I’ll tell you, we sure didn’t stop selling. We had a great conversation on how much harder it is now with Gong’s incredible CRO here: But is that an excuse to sort of quiet quit? To give up a bit? I say No. In fact, I always say No.

Sales Hiring 273

Sales Hiring Sales Startup Investment 273

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2023

Wildly Profitable — And Profitable Since 2013. The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 and began to take off in 2012. Top-tier growth + top tier profits beats Insane Growth in today’s world. As perhaps it always should have. #2. By 2013, it was profitable and never looked back. Today, it’s insanely profitable.

Scale 317

Scale Advertising Scaling Revenue 317

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 21, 2024

For a period from December 9, 2009, to approximately March of 2016, technology companies produced nearly 5% free cash flow yields on average. That’s my mental model for it, anyway. Software companies top the charts at 3% over the last 20 years, according to data from New Constructs , a financial research firm.

Software 291

Software Business Construction Government 291

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 1, 2019

Startups going public from 2006-2009 showed a median ROIC of 0.42. The chart above updates that analysis. As a reminder, the bars represent the ROIC for 4 year buckets starting in the year marked on the x-axis. One venture dollar bought forty-two cents at IPO. In 2010, one venture dollar bought $1.24 of revenue at IPO.

Startup 279

Startup Software Review SaaS Acquisition 279

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 31, 2020

I remember reading the Netflix culture deck published in 2009 and feeling inspired. The words on the page resonated with me because they conveyed a logic and thoughtfulness not often underpinning cultural decisions broadly. They are brave because they don’t appeal to everyone.

Interviewing 267

Interviewing Management Data Marketing 267

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2019

It stayed small until 2009 when the founders were bought out by a private equity firm. SurveyMonkey is one of the Old School SaaS companies that has followed an interesting path. Founded back in 1999 (like Salesforce) in the Web 1.0 days, for years it was run by a tiny team and dominated the self-service side of surveys.

Scale 273

Scale SaaS Payments Payments Payment Services 273

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 6, 2023

In Q4 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos for $1b. But, it didn’t feel that way in the moment - at least not from my vantage point - the markets felt like molasses. Companies chewed gravel, gritting out each quarter. About 5 quarters later, the exit market offered a little sprig of hope. Then GreenDot’s IPO in Q2 2010 at $1.4b

Venture Capital 231

Venture Capital Acquisition Investment Marketing 231

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

We still doubled sales in 2009. Since leads still came in, and the internet still grew, and SaaS still had true ROI, everyone was sort of unprepared for when the economy got even a little better in 2011. That sort of sums it all up. So if you are worried about the downturn that has to come at some point, what’s actionable?

SaaS Payments 280

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale SMB 280

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 18, 2019

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by 3 former Amazon engineers who were often on-call. To engineers, being on call means carrying a pager to respond to crises when software breaks or services go down. In the 10 years since that day, PagerDuty has built an exceptional business.

Metrics 222

Metrics Benchmarks Software Review Engineering 222

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2021

They bring together their respective strengths to drive remarkable product-led growth for PagerDuty, the incident response SaaS that’s been invaluable to tech teams since 2009. CMO Julie Herendeen and CPO Sean Scott are PagerDuty’s product & marketing power couple.

Product Marketing 274

Product Marketing Marketing B2C Metrics 274

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

While working at LinkedIn back in 2009, she was offered the role of building out the first SDR and BDR organization. This was probably the most important decision for her because it led to an appreciation of the different types of deals and segments, and starting at the bottom and working her way up was a great learning experience.

Scale 300

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 300

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

2009: Fully localized platform. . “Do you want 80% of your customers to be able e-sign your contacts? ” Today, table stakes. But back then, believe it or not, we had the only cross-platform solution.

Scale 246

Scale Mobile Branding Engineering 246

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2019

He moved the company to San Francisco in 2009. PagerDuty was founded in 2009 and recently began trading on the NYSE under ticker symbol $PD this April, seeing a whopping 50% pop in the stock right at open. He served as CEO for the company until 2002 before moving on to Materna. Henrique Dubugras Brex Founder/CEO.

Sales Recruiting 173

Sales Recruiting Software Review Technical Review PayPal 173

Andreessen Horowitz

JULY 21, 2022

Since our inception in 2009, Andreessen Horowitz has been a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. This was highly intentional on our part.

Cloud 145

Cloud Venture Capital Technology 145

Andreessen Horowitz

JANUARY 25, 2021

We embraced speaking directly to our audience — from the builders of the future to the tech-curious — right as the firm was started in 2009. It started out with blogging about why we invested in a founder/founding team. Initially, … The post Doubling Down on the Future appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

Investment 145

Investment 145

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 18, 2022

Kerrest co-founded Okta – an enterprise identity management company – in 2009 and currently serves as its executive vice chairperson and chief operating officer. This is an excerpt from Zero to IPO: Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Frederic Kerrest, pp. I’ve heard a lot.

Startup 143

Startup Management Identity management Enterprise 143

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2024

In 2009, that spiked to 35%. That might level off or increase, but these companies are hoping that, even though multiples have compressed, they’ll be able to grow into a number that is higher than the prior round they raised. While the number of down rounds raised has gone up and doubled over 2023, it’s still very low on a historical basis.

Venture Capital 300

Venture Capital Management Scale AI 300

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. I broke into SaaS in 2009 I was the second sales hire and the 10th overall hire at a New York City based SaaS business called Zocdoc. Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

Sales Recruiting 330

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 330

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2019

2009: Fully localized platform. . “Do you want 80% of your customers to be able e-sign your contacts? ” Today, table stakes. But back then, believe it or not, we had the only cross-platform solution.

Scale 210

Scale Mobile Branding Engineering 210

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 5, 2023

What You Will Learn: May’s perspective on the economy now compared to that of 2008/2009. Highlights: (6:12) May’s learnings from Lehman Brothers and the economic crisis of 2008/2009. (14:11) Writer’s decision to make PLG table stakes and how they leverage their motion to secure enterprise customers.

Sales Recruiting 125

Sales Recruiting Enterprise Banking AI 125

Hitenism

JANUARY 6, 2017

At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing. We launched it in 2009 with a pretty good idea, a strong product, and a vague plan for growth. Twitter didn’t begin to hyperlink the hashtags in search results until mid 2009. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. Kind of bland, right?

Startup 182

Startup Marketing Engagement Content Marketing 182

Natalia Luneva

JANUARY 14, 2023

The post Artcut 2009 software free download for windows first appeared on Natalie Luneva. The post Artcut 2009 software free download for windows appeared first on Natalie Luneva.

Software 40

Software Compensation Marketing 40

The Angel VC

JULY 17, 2015

It took a few years – which shows how much ahead of its time 37signals was – but eventually other SaaS companies redesigned their websites or rebuilt them from the ground up: Campaign Monitor in 2008 (click for a larger version) The trend was clear: Less and less text, bigger font sizes, larger images, videos.

SaaS 188

SaaS Software Review B2B Trends 188

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 20, 2020

While many things in our industry have changed since we started the firm in 2009, closing these funds … The post Fund VII and Growth Fund II appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz. Today we are excited to announce the closing of two new funds, bringing our total assets under management to nearly $16.5

Management 116

Management 116