article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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 125