SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2025

100+ scale-ups and start-ups showing you how they do it! With 1:1 Meet-a-VC matchmaking and curated sessions, youll have unparalleled access to the capital you need to scale. From seasoned founders to rising stars, every session is handpicked to deliver actionable insights and real-world strategies to help you scale faster.

VP of Engineering 195

VP of Engineering CTO Coach VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Scale 195

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

With so many incredible sessions to choose from, we thought we’d highlight a few for you here: Building & Scaling Global Product Teams. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

Tom Tunguz

JULY 8, 2020

The cloud data lake architecture enables companies to achieve scale, flexibility, and accessibility. Various roles in your organization, like data scientists, data engineers, application developers, and business analysts, can access data with their choice of analytic tools and frameworks.

Data Analysis 258

Data Analysis Cloud Data Scaling 258

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. What once took millions of dollars and a team of engineers to create, a lone developer could suddenly hack together in half an hour. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Instead of requiring a scale-out database in the sky, most analyses are faster with an optimized database on your computer that can leverage the cloud when needed. For the last ten years, the data ecosystem has focused on big data - the bigger the data set, the more exciting. But most workloads aren’t massive. Motherduck raised a $12.5M

Cloud 356

Cloud AWS Data Analysis Benchmarks 356

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

For the very first time, we’re releasing Engineer Chats , an internal podcast here at Intercom about all things engineering. Previously hosted by Jamie Osler , a Senior Product Engineer at Intercom for over seven years, it’s now up to Principal Systems Engineer Brian Scanlan to pick up the baton and keep the chats going.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

Tom Tunguz

JULY 24, 2024

Most large-scale AI products have yet to be built. So AI products aren’t electric motors with one or two moving pieces, but more like the gas powered engines with many moving parts. AWS & others have stopped charging to move data. AWS cut prices more than 100 times in its first five years.

AI 306

AI Artificial Intelligence AWS Innovation 306

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2021

Alert fatigue is a common problem among engineering teams that handle operations and maintain infrastructure. Naturally, this approach doesn’t scale very well, but as the number and complexity of features and infrastructure grows, improving alerts is usually way down the priority list. Is the alert still relevant?

Engineering 209

Engineering Software Review Systems Review AWS 209

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2021

It’s a familiar problem for all companies that scale fast – how do you keep your core technologies manageable for the increasing number of teams that depend on them? Instead, it would be an internal core technologies team that would take long-term views on how we build and scale Intercom. Our first challenge – Elasticsearch.

Scale 216

Scale Technical Review Technology Scaling 216

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

AWS, Twilio, Heroku, etc. Makes capacity planning harder : With less visibility into maximum usage requirements, engineering teams may struggle to provision infrastructure appropriately. Often, a straight UBP pricing model doesn’t scale into the enterprise. So does Expensify, which decreases the time to file expenses.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2022

So follow AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Let’s look a whole level up to the real canaries-in-the-coalmine: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. And AWS grew 37% at a $74B run-rate , down a bit from 39% the prior quarter but still adding an insane amount of new revenue. That’s the engine we’re all building on.

Cloud 293

Cloud Azure AWS Engineering 293

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

FastSpring

APRIL 29, 2025

When payment partners fail to adapt to player demand and scale quickly, players leave your web shop empty handed, creating dissatisfaction that could have been prevented. Tailored Scaling for Your Unique Game At FastSpring, we know that every game is different. Predictive planning to anticipate peak demand.

Payment Services 133

Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods 133

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2022

Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. And each month, you barely add enough new revenue to hire just one of those great engineers you need. A related post here: 6 Things in SaaS That Are Only Obvious At Scale. But it is so slow. You have 2,000 customers now. note: an updated SaaStr Classic post).

SaaS 350

SaaS Headcount AWS Churn 350

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

This is a big deal for scaling companiesit means you can deliver more value at a lower cost, which is a competitive advantage. . We are all becoming prompt engineers now. And how the CEOs of Monday, HubSpot, Rippling and more scale. One Thing is Clear: AI Makes a Lot of Business Software Look Awfully Expensive Today.

AI 141

AI Trends SaaS AWS 141

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. It’s to scale a tiny engine into something bigger. But, sometimes a founder is >so< terrible at sales, so awful at it, that literally, it’s hopeless.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 274

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Founder CEO Todd McKinnon was VP of Engineering at Salesforce and left to start Okta in the depths of the last downturn. Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2.

Fractional VPE 282

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 282

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. In this battle, I’ve found a secret weapon hidden within one of our core engineering strategies, an idea called Run Less Software. When I say “execute”, I don’t simply mean the engineering challenges of building something. The same is true in software.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. When partnering with big folks like Drata does with AWS, you have to bring business to them. Drata was one of three companies mentioned on stage by AWS’ Head of Partnerships because they did the most transactions on the marketplace than any other company. That’s a high value for AWS.

AWS 279

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 279

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on? Historically, Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure help with the sporadic needs of renting a GPU for a few hours for training vs. long-term use, which would cost thousands of dollars. They’ll need GPUs. What do you do instead?

AI Search 287

AI Search AI Scale Artificial Intelligence 287

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 20, 2022

Here, Waheed discusses our engineering principle “Be technically conservative”. This principle is best illustrated by a few examples from over the years, demonstrating how “ Be technically conservative” allows us to scale fast while ultimately not being a constraint. We were scaling faster than our datastore would allow.

Technical Review 160

Technical Review Scale Scaling Software Review 160

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

In engineering, you want to move fast, ship often and solve real customer problems. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich: Today I’m the Senior Director for Foundations Engineering at Intercom.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

In that case, is PLG cheaper for expanding the base than their sales-driven process? “I think it’s both if you look at scale,” Henry says. “PLG is cheaper, right? For example, Google and AWS are already ZoomInfo customers, but only certain sub-segments within those businesses – not the entire org.

New CTO 312

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 312

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. He or she doesn’t have to jump start the engine. It’s true.

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 284

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2022

Focusing on smaller developers, in some ways it’s been a bit overshadowed by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. DigitialOcean doesn’t want to take AWS, Azure and Google on in the enterprise and doesn’t really try. So DigitalOcean is the quiet Cloud platform that keeps on growing. Wow what a story!!

Azure 272

Azure AWS SMB Cloud 272

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. But it’s the $1M+ ones that are fueling the big numbers at this scale. Also you can see sales & marketing headcount is basically flat, while hiring is almost all in engineering / R&D. So when CFOs and others tighten budgets, they’ll also try to buy less Snowflake.

Headcount 246

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 246

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

Come and hear about the typical pitfalls (and how to avoid them) from Pat Poels, an executive with over seven years under his belt leading Eventbrite’s now 300+ strong engineering team that sits across North America, South America, and Europe. I started right at the end of 2011, and I started in the role of VP of engineering.

Engineering 184

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 184

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2021

Cloud Data Lakes are the future of large scale data analysis , and the more than 5000 registrants to the first conference substantiate this massive wave. Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Global Vice President for AWS Storage will deliver one of the keynotes. Data engines query the data rapidly, inexpensively.

VP of Engineering 203

VP of Engineering Cloud Data AWS 203

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

How can that scale over time? How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective? What will your ACV really be? What evidence is there that you can charge what you think you’ll be able to? What will it really, truly cost?

Scale 279

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 279

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 6, 2023

In the cloud, AWS, Azure, & GCP have created about as much market cap as all the top 100 B2B & B2C publics built on cloud (Netflix, ServiceNow, AirBnb, etc). Startups can integrate with a plug-in, build a prompt-tuning engine (a little model on top of a bigger model), or develop & train their own models.

Generative AI 228

Generative AI AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 228

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale). The renewals, upsells, and pre-paid contracts just are cash engines if you are growing fast enough. Churn burns a lot of cash at scale.

Scale 293

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 293

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Most sophisticated data teams run like software engineering teams with product requirement documents, ticketing systems, & sprints. Semantic understanding of code and ephemeral developer environments enables data engineers to reduce costs and work more fluidly together (SQLMesh).

Artificial Intelligence 228

Artificial Intelligence Trends Data Software Review 228

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2019

We all know this from AWS and Twilio on down, but Fastly is a visceral reminder. Just 58 sales professionals (vs 151 in R&D/engineering). 34% of engineering team in SF. It’s also a great one to learn from, at $200m+ ARR ($45.5m 5+ learnings for founders: Developers control a lot of spend today.

Outsourced Development 259

Outsourced Development AWS Retention Enterprise 259

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

If the company wasn’t built around this purpose, it would be hard to scale. If you go back 10-15 years, when people ask about build vs. buy for the long-term, people would consider building their own data center if they were spending $100k/month on AWS. It removes the need to hire engineers, executives, and talent to keep pace with it.

Enterprise readiness 283

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 283

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. For example, at Intercom, we primarily focus on return for effort; the estimated savings we will make per engineering hour required to execute the work.

Management 211

Management Government Cost optimization & reporting Engineering 211

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2018

The EU was kind enough to provide a stress test for our email delivery pipeline during the GDPR surge on a scale that I doubt our engineering team as a whole would have agreed to, and we passed. A little context first: here at Intercom we have one of the largest databases in the AWS Cloud. We scaled up considerably.

Scale 204

Scale Engineering AWS Scaling 204