SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2025

And we delivered something unprecedented—a live board meeting discussion featuring Snowflake’s leadership and Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe, who sits on Snowflake’s board and runs a company 100% built on Snowflake’s platform. But this year, attendees wanted something different: a real board meeting.

AI 269

AI DevOps as a Service Scale Outsourced Development 269

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth. And I know you’ve had some great experience, particularly while you were at AWS, running different partner sales, channel sales.

Outsourcing Services 115

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 115

Teamgate

JUNE 27, 2025

Meanwhile, Adobe , SAP , and AWS lean on CHAMP to navigate intricate, multi-stakeholder sales processes. Related posts Best Sales Leadership Podcasts in 2025 What Is Team Selling?

Scale 52

Scale SaaS Payments Underperforming Technical Team Payment Solutions 52

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 13, 2025

This success was underpinned by five distinct phases of growth, each requiring a unique type of sales leader and leadership approach. With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth.

Scale 106

Scale Sales Hiring Artificial Intelligence SMB 106

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

After writing An Elegant Puzzle about the challenges of engineering management in high-growth organizations, his focus shifted to a career path that’s much less understood – the technical leadership track. Solvers tend to be reactive to what leadership is really worried about. The core challenges of leadership roles.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Successful co-innovation for our customers needs strong partnerships between Customer Success and Product Leadership. Customer Success is a team sport – we play well with Sales and Solution Architecture.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. When partnering with big folks like Drata does with AWS, you have to bring business to them. Drata was one of three companies mentioned on stage by AWS’ Head of Partnerships because they did the most transactions on the marketplace than any other company. That’s a high value for AWS.

AWS 279

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

The reality was that they were heavily relying on the enterprise deals closed by the leadership team. Even after that exciting third year of growth, leadership at Treasure Data began noticing the lack of product-market fit. Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud. million and $1.2 million deals led by the founders.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 307

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2022

Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. Yes, you now know how to make customers successful and happy now. But it is so slow. You have 2,000 customers now. But at $10/mo, that’s still just $20,000 a month. And each month, you barely add enough new revenue to hire just one of those great engineers you need.

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SaaS Headcount AWS Churn 350

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. You know they’ll demand your products, so it’s time to show up with the right leadership, support, services, training, and whatever else you decide you’ll need for your business.

Scale 259

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 259

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 But also it’s allowed us to get much closer to our provider, I mean, we host and run 100% on AWS, but pull data from everywhere. It was pretty easy to drive that from our side.

Scale 260

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 260

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Our engineers also write a lot of Ruby code, which knits together a lot of AWS, infrastructure, platform and SaaS technologies that form the core of Intercom’s backend infrastructure. We quickly discounted this as it didn’t fit with our three pillars of Run Less Software and decided to consolidate on MySQL, specifically on AWS MySQL.

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Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 26, 2020

Our leadership team is fully engaged in the active management of our response during this challenging period. All of Intercom’s production infrastructure is provided as a service to Intercom by Amazon Web Services (AWS). All of our recovery and resilience mechanisms are tested regularly, and we update processes as required.

AWS 192

AWS Business Scale Cloud 192

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In many ways, your Quality of Life will simply be awful. Your quality of life will simply be awful if your co-founders aren’t as committed as you, and if they aren’t at least close to as good as you. The pay is terrible. The risk isn’t worth it. You lose one critical employee, the world is over. Do not pass go.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 293

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

But, sometimes a founder is >so< terrible at sales, so awful at it, that literally, it’s hopeless. But not to figure out if you really have a repeatable sales process. This is the “best” process because it’s the fastest and most efficient. In that case, hire someone to do sales for you before you’ve even closed 10 customers yourself.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 274

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

It includes leadership development courses, and responsibilities of managing and hiring one or two reps to get experience. . Pothole #4 – Promoting Your Best Salesperson to Manager. It’s a common occurrence in SaaS –– the highest-performing sales rep gets promoted to manage a team.

Sales Hiring 257

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 257

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. In its early days, the company made many decisions that boosted user growth, but there wasn’t deep thought about the cost implications.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2023

The IPO window is mostly closed now, but it won’t be forever: In general, maybe sell 20% now. You can give up some future gains to lock in some actually liquidity today. Taxes are important, and confusing. Paying a ton of taxes now to hold for the future can be awfully risky, especially if the taxes are very high.

Startup 273

Startup AWS Pricing Marketing 273

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

If you go back 10-15 years, when people ask about build vs. buy for the long-term, people would consider building their own data center if they were spending $100k/month on AWS. Today, companies spend over $10M/month on AWS — companies like Lyft, Pinterest, and Stripe.

Enterprise readiness 283

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 283

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. Leadership injections as you scale are tricky. They’re also growing fast and are nicely profitable. Let’s dive into it. The more SMB you are, the faster the sales cycle and the quicker the team learns.

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 277

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. Yes, you now know how to make customers successful and happy now. But it is so slow. You have 2,000 customers now. But at $10/mo, that’s still just $20,000 a month. And each month, you barely add enough new revenue to hire just one of those great engineers you need.

Headcount 246

Headcount AWS SaaS Churn 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

But they are often just awful managers. You probably haven’t done it before. Turns out, first-time CEOs are often the most successful. Because they don’t know it’s impossible. Or at least, far worse than they are the second time. This means more employee churn, friction, drama than you need.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 280

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? So is SaaS cursed?

Scale 293

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

But not making the hire at all is pretty awful, too. A bad VP of Sales is a total disaster. The worst hire you can make (maybe a bad VP of Engineering is even worse, but we’ll put that aside for now). I think my net net advice is give on a lot, but there are two things you can’t give on.

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 284

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

They had open cores and created enterprise features around it to protect the business model until it got torpedoed by AWS early on. You’ll notice an evolution in how you approach customers, board meetings, and leadership. That would have been counterproductive. What are the benefits of building open source?

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

When you go upmarket, they’ll likely want you to integrate with some legacy technology, like MS Dynamics or AWS. You’ve built your product today, and maybe it integrates with Salesforce or Hubspot CRM for your downmarket customer. Finally, don’t forget about service partners.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 300

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 15, 2015

There is no shortage of awful sales leaders. They cause confusion amongst team members, ignore important business decisions, and lack passion for the profession. When the team is underperforming, bad sales leaders blame everyone else but themselves.

AWS 52

AWS Sales Business Leadership 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

When new hires joined the APAC Alliance, they would fly to our San Francisco or Dublin offices for two weeks of onboarding, as it’s an awesome way to get immersed in our company culture, meeting Intercom leadership and new colleagues while experiencing our values first hand. Working on your own also makes you incredibly resourceful.

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Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 6, 2023

Get your leadership team together, re-evaluate each juncture in your GTM process from customer discovery to upsell, and re-imagine a better way to engage your customers using these new advancements in AI. A few years ago, each of your teams would have run out to buy the latest AI point solution because of FOMO.

Artificial Intelligence 121

Artificial Intelligence AI Generative AI Blockchain 121

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And then I spent a year at Salesforce working on Marc Benioff’s extended leadership team, and really had a chance to learn how important trust can be, and also really learn from Salesforce, from Mark, how do you really build a global SaaS leader at scale? And that company grew very quickly. They can make donations for those charities.

Software Review 254

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 254

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Products like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the rise of engineering talent globally have reduced the barrier of entry for software startups in recent years. Building a culture of transparency needs to start at the leadership level if you want it to cascade through every part of the organization.

Software Review 162

Software Review AWS Social Media Machine Learning 162

Sales Hacker

JUNE 20, 2022

This is an awful place from which to make decisions. Present a united leadership front. In a recession, sellers will also look to the whole leadership group (HR, Product, IT etc.) They will notice any break in the leadership chain and this can lower their confidence, even if the sales leader is doing all the right things.

Sales Hiring 113

Sales Hiring Strategy Sales Leadership 113

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

Sameer Dhokalia: It turns out if you do ask those two basic questions of 100 people in your business, you will learn an awful lot about what needs to be focused on. And that was an important shift, I think, for our leadership team. What are we screwing up that you would say, “Please, Sameer, help us go fix this tomorrow”?

Scale 155

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 155

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 109

Development Technical Review AWS AI 109

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 113

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 113

ChurnZero

AUGUST 11, 2020

You and I both know how awful it feels to have someone disregard what we say and focus on their end goal instead. David Ellin, chief customer officer at Centric Leadership Strategies , recommends expanding relationships as much as possible: .

Retention 97

Retention Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Software Review 97

FastSpring

DECEMBER 21, 2020

In about 2002, I got into more of a leadership position for satellite offices of larger companies. But I do enjoy running an awful lot. I’m going to date myself. My first job in tech was in 1998 as a software developer. I started with Java 0.9 and have been working in tech ever since.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Development Team Review Software Review AWS 78