Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Some of the brightest minds in data founded MotherDuck including BigQuery founding engineer Jordan Tigani & a broader team from Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Meta, Elastic & Firebolt, among others. Because of these advantages, MotherDuck is the best place for startups to build their first Modern Data Stack.

Cloud 339

Cloud AWS Data Analysis Benchmarks 339

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. . Our tooling allows for high availability.

Scaling 252

Scaling AWS Software Review Technical Review 252

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

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 307

Blockchain AWS Engineering Startup 307

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.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

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. Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. It’s hard to win a battle you don’t realise you’re in.

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 30, 2024

I had my own startup, but then really it was the internet that changed everything. And so when Amazon called me and they’re like, “Hey you want to come with us and do you want to actually start the mobile services, backend business within AWS?” Because engineers they tend to start from the how.

Development 106

Development Technical Review AI AWS 106

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2024

Previously, Amit led marketing efforts at startups like Tact AI (1st AI Assistant for Sales backed by AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce), HP Inc (next-gen computing) and Spire AI (Human Capital SaaS). 35:57) Advice for startups entering a market with established incumbents. (43:00)

AWS 79

AWS AI Advertising Finance 79

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

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. He or she doesn’t have to jump start the engine. The worst hire you can make (maybe a bad VP of Engineering is even worse, but we’ll put that aside for now).

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? The renewals, upsells, and pre-paid contracts just are cash engines if you are growing fast enough. I’m doing a lot of this financial planning now. Some are barely burning any cash. So is SaaS cursed?

Scale 286

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 286

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 18, 2019

The direct listing becomes the standard way for startups to go public in 2020. Most startups at IPO have plenty of cash and don't need to raise more in the public markets. Most startups will be distributed (have several offices) before they reach 50 employees. Data engineering is the new Customer Success.

Blockchain 155

Blockchain AWS Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 155

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 16, 2022

“The secret to Intercom’s success in this realm is simple: years of consistent, careful, and multi-faceted cultural, organizational, and engineering work”. The secret to Intercom’s success in this realm is simple: years of consistent, careful, and multi-faceted cultural, organizational, systems and software engineering work.

Software Review 118

Software Review Technical Review Management Systems Review 118

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

Sylvia Ng

FEBRUARY 17, 2016

Putting together a job description for a Growth Engineer? The below tidbits are taken from 30+ job descriptions for Growth Engineers, all from tech companies such as Asana, Airbnb, AdRoll, Cybercoders, Mircosoft, UXPin, and Zenefits, to name a few. What do all these job descriptions tell us about growth engineering? Innovative.

Engineering 74

Engineering Growth Hacking Scale Social Media 74

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. Startups and younger companies don’t have this luxury. Or hire less engineers but write more code with tools like GitHub Copilot. Or hire less data engineers but write more SQL queries.

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

Some investors bet on the best engineering teams. Folks with bigger investor wallets may be OK with this, but when I’ve invested in SaaS startups at the late seed-stage who just have too high a burn rate … it never works out. The converse is, a bad arse hacker/engineer that has also learned to love sales.

Sales Recruiting 339

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 339

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

From premature optimization to over-engineering solutions for your product, it’s easy to get caught up in making technology decisions that slow you down instead of speeding you up. Day one of your startup is probably not the time to be learning Kubernetes. The top ten technical strategies to avoid. Multi-cloud architectures.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

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. For our engineering teams at Intercom, there was a much more short term impact last week, which we think is interesting enough to share more widely.

Scale 204

Scale Engineering AWS Scaling 204

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 Systems Review Underperforming Technical Team 178

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2015

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

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting SaaS Data AWS 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 17, 2014

The concept of negative churn is a bit amorphous so let’s illustrate the impact on a startup. This startup acquires 100 customers per month, each paying $1 per month to use the product. In the 5% monthly churn case, the startup exits 2014 with $919 in MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and the typical customer is worth $77.

Churn 103

Churn AWS Startup Revenue 103

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

If it is a small startup, it may just be a single GPU, or it’s bigger with a cluster of GPUs where you need infrastructure management. 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.

AI Search 239

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 239

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2022

Liam: Was it challenging to get to this point with Mode in the startup journey? Every startup is going to be a challenge, and Mode is no different. They could solve that by saying, “Hey, let’s put our product in more data centers in AWS,” or in whatever hosting product they were using. Benn: For sure.

Data 151

Data Airlines AWS Underperforming Technical Team 151

Frontegg

OCTOBER 14, 2020

Before AWS, engineering teams had to scale their own infrastructure. Spanning early-stage startups and hyper-growth unicorns, Frontegg is already integrated within the production environment of numerous customers and is looking to expand its North American customer base in the upcoming quarters. About Frontegg.

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Innovation New CTO 52

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

By building a strong business tech stack for your startup – covering everything from incorporation to growing long-lasting customer relationships – you can not only win back time and establish best practices, but create a solid foundation for your business to grow. Ready to take your startup to the next level?

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

Chart Mogul

JUNE 23, 2022

SaaS startup growth has taken a hit as well as we noted. You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. . — Josh Kopelman (@joshk) May 18, 2022. Trust us, we did it recently and you can read more about our migration here. Further Reading.

SaaS 52

SaaS DevOps as a Service Marketplace as a Service Forecasting 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Retail was mentioned twice, that’s it, and AWS was mentioned 78 times, so it’s probably not surprising that they’re doing this. I think it’s a really staggering stat.

Cloud 101

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 101

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Products like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the rise of engineering talent globally have reduced the barrier of entry for software startups in recent years. Buyers aren’t locked into long-term purchases the same way they were with on-premises solutions. There’s more competition and more choices for software buyers.

Software Review 162

Software Review AWS Social Media Machine Learning 162

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

” Was obsessed with mathematics, went to college at 16, became an engineer. Thought I wanted to be an engineer, quickly realized I actually prefer the customer facing side of the startup world. There’s no UX engineer. ” I’m like, “I actually grew up on a farm.” So that’s me.

Investment 101

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 101

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

If you’re setting out on your roadmap journey it’s important that it reflect the point of the journey that you’re on – having everyone in a startup of 5 or 6 sharing daily tasks each morning makes sense as they work together to build a feature but in a larger company it’s a recipe for chaos.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

If you’re setting out on your roadmap journey it’s important that it reflect the point of the journey that you’re on – having everyone in a startup of 5 or 6 sharing daily tasks each morning makes sense as they work together to build a feature but in a larger company it’s a recipe for chaos.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

Befofe that Manny was a Senior Product Manager @ Amazon where he engineered the compensation system for Amazon Associates and Web-Services which accounts for 15% of Amazon’s traffic. And I can only sell to other startups that were ready to take on risks and to whom I don’t look any different.

Scale 145

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 145

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

Henry’s found that with SMBs and startups, they’re typically consuming content on social media, primarily LinkedIn, while Enterprise customers aren’t consuming that messaging on social media. So, that’s where the battle happens of going to market for Enterprise customers without neglecting SMBs.

New CTO 280

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 280

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 150

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 150

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. 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.

Scale 194

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 194

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

For example, James, a Senior Product Manager, writes: Heap is great for getting answers quickly on user behaviors without needing to spend engineering effort. Customers praise Heap mostly for its easy and code-free set-up and intuitive user interface. Heap vs Pendo: Heap Review. His is not an isolated opinion. With an average rating of 4.7

Software Review 96

Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Systems Review 96