Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud. The hyperscalers benefit from massive scale, distribution, trust and depth of customer relationships in ways no other software companies do. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cost optimization & reporting 161

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 161

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

PE wants to invest in leaders, if not necessarily always #1 in a category. The startup I invested in that were acquired by PE in the 2020-2021 Boom were acquired for 8x in one case, 12x in another, and 15x in a third. Products that are as close to an annuity as possible, that are amenable to efficiency gains. is interesting to see.

AWS 253

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 253

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW, is a cloud spend optimization solution that guarantees to cut down your AWS bills by 5-15%. With CloudKeeper, we have helped 200+ of our customers optimize their AWS spend with a guaranteed reduction in their AWS bills. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr!

Cloud spend optimization 213

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 213

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2022

So follow AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. And it is stressful, especially if you invested at those peaks or as founders raised money at relatively high valuations and multiples. Let’s look a whole level up to the real canaries-in-the-coalmine: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. If they stumble, we’re in for a rough patch.

Cloud 255

Cloud Azure AWS Engineering 255

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q3 ‘23 Not a great signal for software this week from the Cloud Giants (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)…After Q2 (3 months ago), the tone from the Cloud Giants around optimizations was largely: optimizations have started to ease, and net new workloads have picked up. Staggering scale already.

Cost optimization & reporting 152

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 152

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

Are you growing and want to scale? If you want to scale, you need to make the investment of time and money and make sure your infrastructure suits your size of business. A lot of our workload was getting moved to AWS, and wouldn’t you know it: they want you to move compute to them so they have migration services to match.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 6, 2023

In the cloud, AWS, Azure, & GCP have created about as much market cap as all the top 100 B2B & B2C publics built on cloud (Netflix, ServiceNow, AirBnb, etc). It’s likely startups start at plug-ins & then move down with scale that affords more usage & more capital to invest.

Generative AI 212

Generative AI AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 212

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. And that’s exactly why we created a playbook to help companies scale to $100+ million ARR with this model. Ready to scale to $100+ million ARR?

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2022

ChurnZero lets your CS team manage and expand accounts at scale with proactive, personalized engagement that helps every customer succeed. Our best-in-class app tools, automation, dashboards and reporting help you drive strategic customer conversations, boost productivity and scale effectively.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 197

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS Enterprise readiness 197

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

Next, they moved to credits, which are very popular, with AWS and Google Cloud being great examples of companies that are always giving credits out to startups. As you think about building out a partnership program, remember that you need to be able to operate at scale but prioritize your top partners. Do they have a CRO in place?

Startup 189

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 189

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

Or of my investments, ones like Algolia and Salesloft, that yes, in theory, were playing in larger markets, but in practice, their entry points were quite narrow. How can that scale over time? Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective? Worth investing 7+ years of your life in.

Scale 211

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 211

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale). Don’t wait to invest in customer success and account management. Churn burns a lot of cash at scale. So is SaaS cursed?

Scale 280

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 280

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

This is why the consumption players (Snowflake, Mongo, Confluent, Azure, AWS, etc) so more variability in the macro slowdown. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 30, 2024

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?” David: Maybe you can talk about that transition, coming from a business like AWS to financial services, which I think was new for you.

Development 83

Development Technical Review AI AWS 83

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably has less predictive value concerning a company’s ability to get to true scale than most people think – or at least thought some years ago. Being a seed investor I’m trying to find SaaS companies that can scale before they have scaled.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 30, 2024

Then I went into banking, specifically investment banking in the early ’90s. Angela: One of the interesting things we notice about CEOs that are able to scale really quickly is that they often sit at the intersection of a few different worlds and are able to bring these trends together. It’s terrific to be with you today.

Payment Solutions 85

Payment Solutions Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 85

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. Basic marketing and selling at a global scale is becoming easy too. The second army are your main competitors. Google, Microsoft, Apple).

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 19, 2022

As businesses grow and scale, they need to continue to earn and build on that trust in every way they can – but with rapidly expanding tech stacks, it’s not just their own company policies they need to monitor, it’s those of every company they partner with. We build our services with disaster recovery in mind. data deletions or exports.

compliance 138

compliance Data Software Review Scale 138

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 16, 2022

To achieve our mission of making internet business personal and scaling to support larger and larger customers, we have been continually, thoughtfully, and carefully investing in our people, systems, and processes to maintain Intercom’s high standards of availability. The foundation of our operational health is availability.

Software Review 118

Software Review Technical Review Management Systems Review 118

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Rich Archbold , Senior Director of Engineering, has been at the forefront of codifying and scaling this philosophy over the past few years. Our chat covers the origins of Run Less Software, how it has evolved at scale, and how it differs from the equally valid approaches of other engineering teams. What it means to Run Less Software.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

I thought it might be helpful to assemble a checklist of 22 reasons I almost immediately pass on investing in start-ups that are still interesting. This one you can’t really control, but I only want to invest in founders that can build a management team. This is sort of awful. Others bet on traction. They never catch up.

Sales Recruiting 336

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 336

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. So, OpenView worked out for me.

Investment 100

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 100

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Updating the data engineering stack streamlined data processing; reducing the time and effort invested in manual data handling. The aim was to ease data access across the company and allow data engineering functions to scale. Nowadays, these are packaged and deployed in docker images, and executed via AWS lambda or EKS pods each day.

Engineering 52

Engineering K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Data AWS 52

CloudGeometry

MARCH 14, 2022

If there’s one thing we’ve learned as we build full-stack SaaS across industries and user cases, it’s this: SaaS is a 3-sided balancing act: feature agility; compliance readiness; and return on infrastructure investment. And without a focus on features and customers, spending money on infrastructure alone won’t cut it.

DevOps as a Service 130

DevOps as a Service Well Architected Framework SaaS AWS 130

CloudGeometry

MARCH 3, 2022

In this blog series, we explore how these three dimensions figure into key technical recommendations which enable scale in pursuit of SaaS business growth. Feature value: a function of time investment of users and customers The set of problems that your SaaS solves won’t survive long in the digital age if all it does is cut prices.

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) SaaS Cloud 130

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

Neil Patel

APRIL 8, 2021

This means it’s vitally crucial for businesses to understand what they’re investing in and how they can make the most of cloud computing. For businesses running e-commerce sites, this means they don’t have to worry about the highly technical aspects of running a web application and they don’t have to invest in expensive infrastructure.

Outsourcing Services 119

Outsourcing Services Cloud Outsourced Development Azure 119

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies With Ed Lenta, SVP and GM of Databricks Back in the early 2000s, people didn’t entirely accept that a virtual machine could be as good as a physical one. Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks.

Scale 203

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 203

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS. You must build a lean, impactful team to help your business scale. Hire a Junior Team You can recruit your junior team from investment banking or other Strategic Finance teams. Sign up for free HERE

Scale 179

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 179

Audacix

JULY 28, 2022

There are the most obvious and often quoted reasons for investing in robust application security standards and processes: It helps to protect your business. A cloud server, like an AWS EC2 instance, is still a server. The only difference is that it is sitting in AWS' datacentres, rather than in your office. Great question.

Cybersecurity 52

Cybersecurity Underperforming Technical Team AWS Scale 52

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The scale is extraordinary. The wave of SaaS companies that built themselves on the likes of AWS and Azure have reinforced the pre-eminence of cloud computing. Here, we trace some of the biggest trends and stories in technology over the past decade, and try to find a narrative to make sense of it all. There are about 3.2

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on? 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. What about ROI? What do you do instead?

AI Search 217

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 217

Blulogix

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Scalability Startups and enterprises alike can scale their technology usage in alignment with their specific needs. Here are some notable examples: Cloud Computing Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer pay-as-you-go pricing, enabling businesses to access computing resources based on their actual usage.

Technology 52

Technology Pricing Payment Features Subscription 52

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 3, 2014

But Amazon’s massive EPS miss has more to do with large scale capital investment in AWS than a lack of a profitable business or customer base. Advertising-driven models, SaaS business models, consumer hardware and marketplaces are all represented in the earnings figures so far.

Startup 100

Startup Trends AWS Marketing 100

Panintelligence

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

She points out the need for non-stop investment in cybersecurity: A lot of money goes into banks in protecting the customers, but fraudsters are also investing heavily in cybercrime. You must constantly be innovating, and companies will be spending more and more on this for an awful long time."

Payments 52

Payments Data Payment Services Payment Solutions 52

Frontegg

MAY 27, 2021

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a consumer-centric scaling, conversion, and retention philosophy that uses the product itself as the primary growth driver. Making the bottom-up shift: You are shifting from the top-down to a bottom-up mindset, which means more money and time to invest in R&D efforts. Best For: Product Adoption.

Payment Solutions 98

Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payments Scale 98