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

SaaStr

When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Of course, not at scale.

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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. It got better.

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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. The company was 145 people, 40 of which were engineers. We had been still growing in San Francisco, one extra office in Mendoza, and in scaling our company we were finding that customer service was a really big expense for us.