SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. 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. Redefine it.

Scale 279

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 279

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. 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.

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR. 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.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

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

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

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

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 3, 2014

Startups benefit from a booming public market for three reasons. As a consequence of higher stock prices, stock increases in value and cash becomes easier to raise and relatively less expensive, both of which entice tech publics to acquire startups, extending the current vibrant M&A market.

Startup 100

Startup Trends AWS Marketing 100

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. That’s how early I was.

Investment 100

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 100

Chart Mogul

MARCH 2, 2021

What will fill the void left by the business you worked hard to build, scale, and sell? Further reading: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition. It might be awful. It’s tempting to rush into your next startup when you miss the feeling of running a company. Related posts: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition.

Startup 52

Startup Acquisition SaaS Scale 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 2, 2021

What will fill the void left by the business you worked hard to build, scale, and sell? Further reading: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition. It might be awful. It’s tempting to rush into your next startup when you miss the feeling of running a company. Related posts: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition.

Startup 52

Startup Acquisition SaaS 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

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Retail was mentioned twice, that’s it, and AWS was mentioned 78 times, so it’s probably not surprising that they’re doing this.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

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

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on? If it is a small startup, it may just be a single GPU, or it’s bigger with a cluster of GPUs where you need infrastructure management. If someone doesn’t want to switch from AWS because AWS has partnerships with OpenAI, they have tradeoffs.

AI Search 204

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 204

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 189

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 189

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. 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.

Scale 167

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 167

Frontegg

OCTOBER 14, 2020

Before AWS, engineering teams had to scale their own infrastructure. Spanning early-stage startups and hyper-growth unicorns, Frontegg is already integrated within the production environment of numerous customers and is looking to expand its North American customer base in the upcoming quarters.

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Innovation New CTO 52

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

But as the college-dorm-room startup matures, there’s a fascinating twist to be found in the way it applies its new mission to Workplace, a B2B startup within the (former) startup. You really have to think of Workplace as a SaaS startup within Facebook. When Workplace became a real thing at Facebook, I was in London.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

But these days, there are so many innovative and impactful tools that can massively streamline your workflows and help to set you up for success as you scale. This is especially important for small teams, where you need to operate at a scale far beyond your headcount (without burning out your team by working around the clock).

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 2, 2020

In some cases it can create the tipping point that not only helps a startup overcome big marketing challenges, but can even steal action away from big-name incumbents. The scale of the company and the size of the problem you were trying to solve kept changing dramatically.”. That was the exact case for MongoDB in their early days.

Marketing 54

Marketing AWS Scale Development 54

Neil Patel

JANUARY 8, 2021

Or perhaps you know how it works but don’t have the budget or urgency to invest in one. Amazon AWS is a similar product that provides access to its free tier products for 12 months. Should you decide to scale your business, you can leave the free plan and move to the premium plans starting at $12 per month.

Payment Methods 141

Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 141

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

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.

Scale 123

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 123

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

As a founder, you can use this 84 cents to pay salaries, office rent, dividends, or invest in R&D. Related read: Freemium vs. Free Trial: How to Know Which One to Pick for Your SaaS Startup. Scale reveals the depths of operational leverage. Offering free usage is par for the course as a SaaS customer acquisition strategy.

Scale 52

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Systems Review 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And then I’ve watched, since she made this comment to me about 13 months ago, then I’ve watched with some startups I’ve worked with, where the first marketing hire comes in, and I asked them what their top five priorities are, and then I asked the CEO. And notice that I said investments, not cost or spend.

Sales Hiring 204

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 204

SmartKarrot

MARCH 2, 2023

Here are the top 15 venture capital podcast leaders shaping the industry with their visionary and thought leading podcasts covering a range of topics from startups, investments, trends, interviews, and more! He invested in more than 20 early-stage companies. Azeem is also a creator of the Exponential View newsletter and podcast.

Venture Capital 10

Venture Capital Scale Entrepreneurship EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) 10

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? And I can only sell to other startups that were ready to take on risks and to whom I don’t look any different. And what will you bet on a four or five person startup? Manny Medina: And efficiency is a journey.

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 141

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

I just thought that if there was anybody left at the end of day two that had anything they wanted to talk about, scaling SaaS, fundraising, hiring, anything, and I could be helpful, we could do a little extra Q&A. All that money went from public to private because, holy crap, Sequoia invested at Zoom at a billion.

Sales Hiring 196

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 196

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

Tables have turned because I first met Mikkel when just after I was working for previous fund index, he had just invested. First of all, do we have any European SaaS startups here today? And there were no startup communities. No startup environment. Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader.

Cloud 178

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 178

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. That will never work.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

In a previous post , I talked about how product work post-product/market fit shifts from zero to one innovation to features, growth, and scaling work. You can read parts 1 and 2 here and here. But a question founders and teams often ask is when do we start layering in innovation work again that creates new value props.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

Upscope

JUNE 9, 2021

Working as a apple tech was awful but for the rude customers I would put on hold while I went outside to chat with co workers or grab something from the vending machine. I don't have a thick skin, which probably made it about 15 times worse, but I still can't think about it without having awful flashbacks. What can we learn from this?

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Management Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

Databricks’ CEO, Ali Ghodsi, shares why Open Source is becoming a multi-billion investment, why it’s taking over multiple industries, and why it’s here to stay. We’d rent a car, get on the road, and go to all kinds of startups and give talks on Apache Spark to build up a community around it.

AI 231

AI Enterprise SaaS AWS 231

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

One thing we’ve learned in helping our founders and operators scale their businesses is that cash is one of their most precious resources. Flex is a finance super app built around a credit card with unique Net-60 day terms that enables businesses to make an investment today and pay it back 60 days later with zero percent interest.

Metrics 91

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 91

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

Your default operating cadence should be to run – it’s important startups don’t compromise on speed. If you are a regular listener, you’ll know that we interview makers and doers from the worlds of product management, design, startups, and marketing. And now for something completely different.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Systems Review Underperforming Technical Team 178

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 1, 2019

. “Michael is the rare CFO who also leads up marketing, which makes him the perfect person to talk us through the company’s trajectory” As the head of Intercom’s Early Stage program for Startups, the fast-growing fintech startup is one company I’ve been keeping my eye on. From Wall Street to startup.

Strategy 36

Strategy Payment Methods Payment Services Startup 36

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

It’s a brutal, awful slog in the start. I would say, it’s always good to call out just how awful it is to be a founder, to be an entrepreneur, because that is a unique perspective that you bring to the board room that no one else shares. The angel investors are people who invest their own money. David : Here we go.

Underperforming Technical Team 239

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 239

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2019

It’s an essential skill in the toolkit of the modern marketer, and one that’s easy to get started with, no matter your company scale. Harry Stebbings: And so with that, I’m super excited to welcome Yousuf Khan, serial CIO, startup and VC advisor. This episode is sponsored by Brex. It’s that simple. Yousuf Khan: Yes.

Technical Advisors 153

Technical Advisors Scale Technical Review Payment Solutions 153