SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2025

100+ scale-ups and start-ups showing you how they do it! With 1:1 Meet-a-VC matchmaking and curated sessions, youll have unparalleled access to the capital you need to scale. From seasoned founders to rising stars, every session is handpicked to deliver actionable insights and real-world strategies to help you scale faster.

VP of Engineering 188

VP of Engineering CTO Coach VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Scale 188

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

With so many incredible sessions to choose from, we thought we’d highlight a few for you here: Building & Scaling Global Product Teams. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

They use pricing as an offensive tool to reinforce their product’s value and underscore the company’s core marketing message. Startups operate in newer markets where pricing standards haven’t been set. In addition, these new markets evolve very quickly, and consequently, so must pricing.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

But the markets dont love smaller IPOs and especially smaller IPOs that are growing at slower rates. But that doesnt make your life scaling your start-up any easier. Thats $500m ARR growing 50%. Add in the ones that shutdown, etc. and probably 2/3ds of The Last Batch of Unicorns wont be able to IPO, probably far more. Yes, you can.

AWS 191

AWS Scaling SaaS Data 191

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

Technology Alliances: The tech alliances offer important integrations, especially critical for ServiceNow’s target market of enterprise customers. Examples include AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market.

Outsourcing Services 284

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

In the new episode, Jason sits down with Drata CMO Sydney Sloan to talk about what’s new at Drata, the role of CMO at Drata vs. Salesloft, partner marketing, customer marketing, and more. Sydney pulled someone from Salesloft with a product marketing background who understands operations, running programs, and being strategic.

AWS 279

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 279

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2022

But even there, to truly scale, they went more enterprise and built out a full enterprise sales and marketing function. The next 5 also always work, but you need someone in marketing that’s done them well before to own them: #1. But third-party events like AWS, Dreamforce, SaaStr, Shoptalk? Partner Marketing.

Scale 330

Scale Sales Hiring Marketing SaaS 330

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 258

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 258

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. 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 Rico Mallozzi: So marketplaces are fundamentally changing, go to market motions for a lot of enterprise technology companies.

Scale 259

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 259

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2021

220m in ARR, $13B market cap. Shopify has exploded to $3B+ in ARR and a $135B Market cap, growing an incredible 96% during Covid. But as Shopify scaled, its revenue as a percent of commerce on its sites — “Merchant Solutions” — began to eclipse its recurring SaaS revenues. Only half does. And 162% NRR.

Merchant Services 360

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 360

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 30, 2020

Prior to HashiCorp Adam was the Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS and held senior positions at Pivotal, VMware, and SpringSource. With two decades of experience, Adam is well-versed in developer evangelism. My partner Astasia Myers will be leading the discussion. She writes often on topics like these on our blog Memory Leak.

Development 317

Development Scale AWS Scaling 317

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2023

Something that’s both not surprising but also pretty impactful: 57% of venture-backed startups will have to go “back to market” in 2024 to raise more capital. They typically give them just enough to see if it will work, and the startup grows and scales to the next stage. What does Pilot’s latest data say?

Startup 357

Startup Venture Capital Azure AWS 357

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

So we’ve had a lot of fun in our 5 Interesting Learnings profiling the top SaaS and Cloud companies at scale, from Slack to Zoom, from Shopify to Datadog, from Box to DropBox. But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud is one of the greatest case studies of all time.

Cloud 287

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 287

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

With the marketing team, there are a lot of the classic functions — brand marketing, product marketing, and partner marketing. When it comes to marketing Workspace, Alison shared they’re double down on showing off the value off of Duet AI, Google Workspace’s AI assistant.

Cloud 309

Cloud Scale AWS AI 309

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 260

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 260

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

They were $1.7B+ ARR in October , so let’s call it close to $2B at the end of the year, growing 40%+ at that scale –and profitable! (or But not always — marketing costs can often overwhelm the smaller revenue per customer. But we at least know enough to put together 5 Interesting Learnings!

AWS 307

AWS B2C Scaling AI 307

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

Recently, we welcomed Lisa Lawson to SaaS Office Hours to talk about building a channel go-to-market strategy for SaaS companies. After scaling sales enablement successfully, the next step is to understand where your customers are. OEM relationships can be a good way to get to market quickly. Here are my notes. Where to Start.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. He had a friend help him hire an email marketer to send ticket emails to the events. At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said.

Sales Hiring 301

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 301

FastSpring

APRIL 29, 2025

When payment partners fail to adapt to player demand and scale quickly, players leave your web shop empty handed, creating dissatisfaction that could have been prevented. Tailored Scaling for Your Unique Game At FastSpring, we know that every game is different. Predictive planning to anticipate peak demand.

Payment Services 133

Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods 133

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

In fact, this data bolsters the notion that management team’s top priority is recruiting, especially after the business has reached product market fit and capitalized itself well. This is a proxy for when the business established product market fit. This is a proxy for when the business established product market fit.

Headcount 187

Headcount Scaling Software Business 187

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

SaaStr 644: Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks with Databricks SVP and GM Ed Lenta  4. Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks 5. SaaStr 643: What’s Holding Up Buyers?:

Scale 246

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

Typically support consumes about perhaps 5%-7% of your revenue at scale (excluding customer success) in most SaaS models. Another 5%-7% go to core infrastructure costs (AWS, Azure, Snowflake, etc). It’s your top marketing and customer retention investment. It could be more or less, but that’s a rough way to think about it.

Azure 273

Azure AWS SaaS Customer Success 273

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Well, certainly it exploded in 2021, in my portfolio at least, if perhaps not as dramatically as in the public markets. And also while many of the above names had seem growth slow at scale, bear in mind they are all awfully good SaaS companies. Products that are as close to an annuity as possible, that are amenable to efficiency gains.

AWS 318

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 318

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2024

Overall Cloud spending has bounced back off lows for sure: AWS at a $105B run rate growing 19% Quarterly YoY growth trends below. Yes, AI has fueled Nvidia and Google Cloud and Microsoft and AWS to massive growth, and growth that has accelerated the past few quarters. OneStream had an epic SaaS IPO at $500m ARR, growing 34%.

AWS 235

AWS Scale Social Media SaaS 235

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

Now, he has five more marketing strategies that are sure to generate more leads if done right. If you aren’t spending money on marketing, it’s time to step it up. Most SaaS companies don’t spend enough on marketing, and that’s a mistake best avoided. Yes, it’s expensive — a booth, flying SDRs out, buying swag. It’s too much.

Outsourcing Services 259

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 259

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

It’s market cap is almost $50 Billion. Ok times are tough for many out there But not Crowdstrike: – Almost $3B in ARR – Growing 37% (!) – 26% Free Cash Flow – 125% NRR – $48B Market Cap — Up 94.58% this year (!) Security remains hot. And in fact, the stock is up 94.7% this year! ” #7.

Cybersecurity 293

Cybersecurity AWS Benchmarks Cloud 293

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

The real conflict is around trying to serve both sets of messaging and marketing at the same time since how you market to SMBs is very different than Enterprise customers. So, that’s where the battle happens of going to market for Enterprise customers without neglecting SMBs. Is it Cheaper or Better to go PLG?

New CTO 311

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 311

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

So the public markets are in tumult. This is just starting to roll through the private markets and is going to make a bumpy rest of the year. Revenue multiples are how much VCs, investors, and ultimately, an IPO and public markets will value each dollar of revenue. And generating real cash flow at scale. #2.

SaaS 348

SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 348

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2023

So there was a quiet SaaS IPO you may have missed in the craziness of 2021 — SEMRush, a tool your marketing department quite likely uses to keep track of the performance of your SEO and marketing site. It’s tough out there in the public markets, folks. Still, always helpful to see how any leader does free to paid at scale.

Scale 258

Scale AWS Scaling Revenue 258

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). As a public company with significant scale, it’s hard to grow quickly if you have to rely solely on new customers for that growth. However the market that day (using the Nasdaq as a proxy) was up 1%.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” So if you start an online shop, offer products at a loss, get listed on some of the biggest comparison shopping sites and do some affiliate marketing, you can easily get to tens of millions in revenue. Now let’s talk about SaaS. Every founder who accomplishes this deserves a huge amount of respect.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Salesforce and Marc Benioff at first said the core market, security identity, was too small of a market. 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.

Fractional VPE 282

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 282

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 626: 10 Lessons Learned Scaling to $1B Valuation with Drift Co-founders David Cancel and Elias Torres  5. A 6 Part Test to Help You Get It Right.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2022

Courtney Pallotta, VP of Marketing @ ChaosSearch. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Sarah Din, VP of Marketing @ Builder.io. Alberto Cantor, Senior Director of Demand Generation & Corporate Marketing @ ArisGlobal. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Olga Perez-Bonnelly @ Elastic. See you there!!

CTO 279

CTO Scale New CTO AWS 279

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

I have a strong, semi-proven thesis that in SaaS, market size doesn’t matter that much … at least in the traditional top-down sense. Yes, many of the big winners in SaaS entered already large markets, from CRM (Salesforce) to ERP (Workday) to Collaboration (Workday, Asana). How can that scale over time?

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 278