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5 Interesting Learnings from Okta at $2.5 Billion in ARR

SaaStr

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.

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Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot: From Day 0 to IPO. What Went to Plan. What Most Certainly Didn’t (Video, Podcast + Transcript)

SaaStr

Hire the VP of Marketing, MBA, the VP of Sales, MBA, the VP of Customer, MBA, the VP of Engineering, MBA, and now, the odds of any semblance of survival, let alone success, are vanishingly small at this point. The issue the SMBs had was, “Well, I’m a 20-person consulting company.

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10 Years In Tech

Outseta

I can assure you that most people in the tech industry spend countless hours thinking about how to make this happen, investing only a fractional percentage of time thinking about their impact. There’s an awful lot of nuance here and the devil is in the details.

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Founder’s Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks by Algolia Co-founder (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

And we were using a solution from Amazon AWS… We had one big issue first, which was a number of regions they were supporting were not the same vendors. The engineering team was super, super small at this moment. When we did this studies and where we were having to sign the contract with the AnyCasts provider, we took some time.

Scale 124
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Engineering Your Own “Luck”: The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

I started right at the end of 2011, and I started in the role of VP of engineering. What I’m here to tell you today is that, it’s not only possible to build world-class, great development teams in places outside of San Francisco, but in actuality, it’s better. I had one year of Spanish in high school.