AWS Headcount Revenue 
SaaStr
JUNE 4, 2025
Imagine telling your board you’re only using 40% of your AWS infrastructure or 40% of your engineering team’s output. When your sales team can only meaningfully engage with 40% of their assigned accounts, you’re essentially running your go-to-market motion at 40% capacity.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 28, 2017
Above, I’ve charted the headcount growth rate for 10 of the fastest growing software companies in recent history. I’ve normalized the years for when all the businesses were roughly at the same headcount - fewer than 50 people. This is a proxy for when the business established product market fit. They start around 25 people.
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SaaStr
JUNE 4, 2022
But a few thoughts on “the hardest part” for the first few stages: From $1-$100k in ARR, the hardest part is often how little revenue you get from each customer. So much work, so little revenue. Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. You start making up for it in volume — with headcount.
SaaStr
MAY 31, 2023
It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates: Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part. AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. Not none, just less.
SaaStr
JANUARY 25, 2022
But a few thoughts on “the hardest part” for the first few stages: From $1-$100k in ARR, the hardest part is often how little revenue you get from each customer. So much work, so little revenue. Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. You start making up for it in volume — with headcount.
Clouded Judgement
MARCH 22, 2024
Subscribe now ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. Many investors laugh (and some rightly so) at the fact that software companies’ valuations are often described as a multiple of revenue.
OpenView Labs
FEBRUARY 3, 2022
To find out which of these features are most common, OpenView surveyed over 500 SaaS companies ranging from pre-revenue to $100 million in ARR. All too often, companies omit certain acquisition costs, over-inflate recurring revenue by failing to strip out one-time revenue, and/or leave out some of the ongoing costs of serving a customer.
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