Tom Tunguz

JULY 19, 2022

Here’s my mental model: Imagine a startup that sells sports cards. We swapped the transaction database from PostGres to a blockchain like Ethereum or Sui , and the file storage from AWS S3 to a decentralized storage provider, perhaps Filecoin or ArWeave. What is the difference between web2 & web3, really?

Blockchain 333

Blockchain AWS Engineering Startup 333

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

The first place to start is to learn to sell your startup’s product well. To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. Different roles in a company may have different goals for channel development. Here are my notes. Where to Start. Types of Partnerships.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Alison brings the perspective of all sides of a startup, from investing to SaaS to Cloud. Pursuing Two Different Segments: The Tale of Startups vs. Enterprise From a marketing perspective, the GTM marketing position and product market messaging differ between Google Workspace and Google Cloud.

Cloud 309

Cloud Scale AWS AI 309

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. are making it easier and faster for software developers to develop complex software applications atop this infrastructure. What took you months to ideate, design and develop can now be copied in days or weeks thanks to these new tools. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

A problem many founders are trying to solve right now is going upmarket to Enterprise, and Lemkin and Grinich have a passionate perspective that every startup should take steps to check those Enterprise boxes in their first year. Developer-Led Growth Differs From Product-Led Growth WorkOS is a developer platform.

Enterprise readiness 283

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 283

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 25, 2022

This allows us to develop teams of deep domain experts to support and enable product engineers as they build the next generation of Intercom, and provide world class observability tooling, scaling, reliability, and secure-by-default build patterns. . We exclusively build on top of a very small set of core technologies.

Scaling 252

Scaling AWS Software Review Technical Review 252

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 25, 2023

Cloud LLM Infrastructure Microsoft OpenAI Snowflake Nvidia Databricks Mosaic Google Anthropic Oracle Cohere Amazon HuggingFace Microsoft has invested over $10b, plus significant development efforts to work with OpenAI. For startups building LLM-based applications & infrastructure, this alters the calculus of selecting a cloud.

Artificial Intelligence 240

Artificial Intelligence AI AWS Cloud 240

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2021

As a startup, you’re doing a million things at once: building a product, answering customer tickets, developing a sales playbook, trying out different marketing hacks, and keeping the lights on. Unfortunately, the process is long and can feel like a blackbox for startups starting from scratch.

Enterprise 278

Enterprise Software Review GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure 278

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 25, 2021

On November 3rd, our co-founder Des Traynor will be on the stage sharing his keynote on “ How to grow up without growing old “ Later that evening we partner with AWS and Aircall for a “Startups Happy Hour” party, where you can decompress and have one (or a few!) drinks on us and celebrate a little taste of normality.

AWS 198

AWS Scale Innovation Startup 198

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

TJ Nahigian, co-founder and Managing Partner of Base10 Partners, and Luci Fonseca, Partner, deep dive into the current GenAI landscape, incumbents vs. startups, and the six questions founders should ask themselves to drive value from GenAI. Startup platforms are OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Cohere. How are they doing this?

Generative AI 293

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 293

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2023

AWS re:Invent : AWS re:Invent is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) annual conference, focused on cloud computing and SaaS-related services. The event brings together developers, architects, and IT professionals to explore the latest AWS developments.

ChatGPT 189

ChatGPT AWS SaaS CTO 189

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. Business Development Identify and assess partnership opportunities to drive growth Business Intelligence Turn data into insights to inform decision-making.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

During those 30 years as an Open Source platform, multiple developers and professionals adopted and contributed to it to the point where, today, Linux is everywhere—supercomputers, AI, IoT, embedded devices, and so on. For the first twenty employees, we were working on developer relationships.

Enterprise 246

Enterprise AI SaaS AWS 246

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. Sell To Customers How They Want To Be Sold To When Lenta first started building AWS in Australia, they were crude in how they thought about customers. Of course, we all know how that turned out.

Scale 259

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 259

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Data Teams are Becoming Software Teams : DevOps created a movement within software development that empowers developers to run the software they wrote. Software startups are rising to meet the need. The same thing is happening in data. Executive teams and boards are demanding innovation with LLMs and data.

Artificial Intelligence 228

Artificial Intelligence Trends Data Software Review 228

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

Backed by an army of developers, data engineers, and finance professionals, this events-based billing model allowed these large companies to directly link the value that their services provided with the cost presented on a customer’s invoice. How AWS Does It. What Amazon Web Services and Twilio Get Right.

AWS 98

AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

I started at Amazon before they had Amazon Web Services (AWS) so I was lucky enough to see AWS born out of the guts of all of the great operations work done for the amazon.com retail website. You can think of them beginning from very base infrastructural technologies, and in our case we’re betting exclusively on AWS as a cloud vendor.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Most startups play defense when discussing pricing with customers. Startups operate in newer markets where pricing standards haven’t been set. But throughout this turmoil, startups must adopt a process to craft a good pricing strategy, and re-evaluate prices periodically, but at least once per year.

Pricing 124

Pricing Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 124

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

As Chief Product Officer at DigitalOcean and a developer-turned-entrepreneur, Gabe Monroy shares how founders can avoid the trap of over-engineering products that customers won’t pay for and how to de-risk product development through a simple analogy of candy, vitamins, and painkillers. That’s when OpDemand was born.

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Development AWS Engineering 130

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

2: What Keeps Someone Motivated In The Startup World Jason has been successful, has had exits, has invested in great companies, and has built SaaStr into what it is, so what motivates him and other founders to keep going? 7: Having the CMO Report to the CRO is a Terrible Idea Having marketing under a CRO is an awful idea for two reasons.

Sales Hiring 302

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 302

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 28, 2021

Startups are designed to grow quickly, but high growth rates can generate huge costs as new infrastructure is introduced and scaled to meet demand. How can we maximize returns without introducing developer friction and slowing company growth rate ? Exploring new or different instance options for performance and cost benefit.

Management 211

Management Government Cost optimization & reporting Engineering 211

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Until now, Intercom has been a multitenant application hosted in a single region in AWS. In a recent Intercom on Product podcast , our co-founder Des talked about that old Jedi bell curve meme, and how it often applies to startups’ speed. Learn more about European data hosting with Intercom.

Scale 234

Scale New CTO Engineering CTO 234

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 30, 2024

In this conversation, a16z General Partner David Haber talks with Marco Argenti, the chief information officer at Goldman Sachs, about bringing fintech processes into financial services, turning developers into clients, and how AI is a major inflection point in the history of technology. And then I started selling.

Development 109

Development Technical Review AWS AI 109

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR. Whether starting an Internet startup has really become 10x cheaper depends on how exactly you phrase the question and is debatable. Let me rephrase that. Every founder who accomplishes this deserves a huge amount of respect.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 28, 2022

A few months ago, we retired our last pieces of infrastructure on DigitalOcean, marking our migration to AWS as complete. Our journey was not your regular AWS migration as it involved moving our infrastructure from classic VMs to containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Ultimately, we decided to go with AWS. Team expertise.

K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) 52

K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

Together we felt like we were growing something from scratch, everything from our work processes to our team identity contributed to a strong sense of being part of “a startup within a startup”, related to but distinct from the broader Intercom family. So much of how we learn on the job involves guidance from colleagues.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

Your default operating cadence should be to run – it’s important startups don’t compromise on speed. If you are a regular listener, you’ll know that we interview makers and doers from the worlds of product management, design, startups, and marketing. So, I think that disambiguation is at the entire product development process.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

Mike has been in and around startups for the better part of three decades: as a consultant, as a co-founder and now as the Managing Director of Salesforce Incubator, which propels new startups into the marketplace. He joined me for a chat that ranged from the role of AI to how they choose startups to incubate. Short on time?

Scale 151

Scale Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 151

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 Example of SaaS Chart of Accounts for Marketing Expenses Research & Development (Engineering) There are fewer direct benefits from splitting out your tech team from the rest of the expenses, but I still recommend doing it.

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

Baremetrics

FEBRUARY 19, 2018

After all, as a startup founder, you want to have a solid idea of what your true gross margins are and what it actually costs to acquire a customer! Most startups I’ve seen often get at least some of this wrong, particularly if they are doing around $100k in MRR or less. that will fit the use case of most small to medium SaaS startups.

Startup 81

Startup DevOps as a Service Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 81

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

It has a portion of its revenue that’s very sensitive to the economy and a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? We’re seeing pockets of strength and then we’re seeing pockets of startups that overnight not only are struggling but might even want to immediately stop their spend, right?

Merchant Services 257

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 257

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 28, 2021

If you’ve seen our recent articles on AWS migration, the updated stripe integration and the acquisition of Flightpath Finance, it will come as no surprise to you that our team is getting pretty busy! Just look at the Baremetrics dashboard and the Open Startups project to see how we try to empower founders with financial transparency.

AWS 94

AWS Forecasting Onboarding Finance 94

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2015

SaaS startups are either competing within these categories or creating a new category. PagerDuty, AWS and New Relic are the three listed in Okta’s reports. Fourth, software serving engineering teams tie collaboration applications for the fastest growing types of SaaS products.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Data SaaS AWS 100

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 16, 2022

Intercom is a product-led company, focused on maximizing product innovation and development velocity. This is why our customers – from small startups to massive, complex enterprises – put their trust in us. The foundation of our operational health is availability. Without rock solid availability, nothing else matters.

Software Review 118

Software Review Technical Review Management Systems Review 118

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. The second constituent there is the developer. Why do developers love SaaS products? Your developers are busy. MRR, obviously.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Chargify

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a poster-child for the Relationship Economy—they truly understand the modern B2B customer. AWS powers a majority of the websites and applications that you use in your day-to-day life. while targeting different customer niches (startups, government, etc.). Salesforce is another great B2B example.

Payment Features 75

Payment Features Subscription AWS Scale 75

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

One is, lots of folks that have been through the startup cycle, you have this extrapolation from a single data point problem, which is, “OK, we have this story. Another piece of very, very good startup advice that I’ve given myself a hundred times is the “Do one thing exceptionally well.” This is what we did.

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290