article thumbnail

The VP of AI Trap: Why Hiring One Exec Won’t Transform Your Company. In Fact, It May Make It Worse.

SaaStr

” I saw a term sheet the other day where a leading VC firm reserved $1m of the round … for hiring a “VP of AI” Leadership teams scrambling to post job descriptions for “Head of Artificial Intelligence.” Would you hire a “VP of Internet” in 2010? Think about it.

article thumbnail

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.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

From PLG to PLG+SLG – How Lucid Scaled to 70M+ Users

SaaStr

Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company. Lucid hired someone with a business background under a special project. This is where product-led sales comes in.

Scale 307
article thumbnail

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 325
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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 245