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 255

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 255

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.

Scale 242

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 242

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. The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling.

Scale 236

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 236

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

MARCH 8, 2020

The first place to start is to learn to sell your startup’s product well. To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. The sales team asks for more leads. These sales teams go by many names: agencies, system integrators, value-added resellers.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

ARR, Zendesk today gets 14% of new business from startups. On top of that, if you look at their top accounts globally, 33 of the top 50 customers by ARR are startups. Some things to think about as you craft your offer are: Does it align with your sales motion? You don’t want conflict with the sales team. A free term.

Startup 251

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 251

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Alison brings the perspective of all sides of a startup, from investing to SaaS to Cloud. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, is in a very different set that also competes with Microsoft, but AWS is considered their biggest competitor in the market. Right now, 70% of the GenAI startups are using Google Cloud.

Cloud 302

Cloud Scale AWS AI 302

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 164

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 164

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

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 305

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 305

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally.

AWS 271

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 271

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

At Glasswing Ventures, they tell their AI-native companies not to lead with AI because it’s such a superficial indication of interest. When you take the data, you may have a business goal of making more sales or delighting the customer. What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on?

AI Search 278

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. 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 ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? In fact, great sales teams are accretive. Why was Netsuite?

Scale 286

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 286

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Head of Sales – What Corners Can I Cut?

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 278

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

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. AWS alone generated $175m of contract value for Okta, growing 130%. Way, way too many startups focus 100% on direct sales.

Fractional VPE 275

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 275

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. Why VCs Love Founders That Respond to Email Almost Instantly 90%-95% of Salespeople Won’t Make It At Your Startup. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 243

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 243

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

3 days, more than 100+ sessions and 300 expert speakers, who will be sharing their best practices to help you scale faster, build smarter, and close more customers. From AWS to Vimeo: this year’s speaker lineup is packed with incredible speakers and content. We just launched the entire SaaStr Annual 2021 Agenda !!

Scale 199

Scale AWS B2C SaaS 199

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 25, 2021

The Intercom team is looking forward to showcasing our latest features and improvements to the world’s leading Business Messenger and powerful customer support product. Our leading customer communication platform is used by the most innovative companies worldwide, such as Unity, Spendesk, (add approved customer logos in here).

AWS 199

AWS Scale Innovation Startup 199

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. Best in class Late-stage Startups (e.g. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. Four, people in the sale? Kristen Habacht: Well, there’s none in sales.

Merchant Services 238

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 238

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

LLMs are fantastic first-pass filters and phenomenal classifiers that extract insight or build machine learning features from unstructured data like customer support conversations or sales calls. Software startups are rising to meet the need. Looker did this within the context of a BI system.

Artificial Intelligence 228

Artificial Intelligence Trends Data Software Review 228

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). net retention and CAC payback).

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2022

And inflation is awful. And startups that had planned on a big up round this year are in many cases, really struggling. Alteryx, a leading public SaaS ETL company, announced it was growing 33% at $730m in ARR! . — Jason 2022 SaaStr Annual Sep 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 3, 2022. So are we in a downturn in SaaS?

Venture Capital 321

Venture Capital AWS Cloud Scale 321

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

A problem many founders are trying to solve right now is going upmarket to Enterprise, and Lemkin and Grinich have a passionate perspective that every startup should take steps to check those Enterprise boxes in their first year. If the company wasn’t built around this purpose, it would be hard to scale. It’s not an option.

Enterprise readiness 277

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 277

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Until now, Intercom has been a multitenant application hosted in a single region in AWS. However, we’ve been talking to our customers and prospective customers about European data hosting for a long time – we knew what we had to deliver and the problem we had to solve : Intercom, but with the data stored and processed in Europe.

Scale 235

Scale New CTO Engineering CTO 235

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. . #1: At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 293

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

In B2B, you also have fixed costs, but you can diversify monetization based on tokens or seats, or in the case of AWS, however you like. You also don’t want to get someone half-integrated and then tell them to contact sales. Consumer SaaS has a lot of drawbacks, but it also has the benefits of scale. You’ll lose people.

Subscription 294

Subscription Payment Features B2B Mobile 294

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. Anna Khan | VP @ BVP.

Scale 141

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 141

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Keys to success when scaling a company [10:56]. Sales enablement is easy: all you have to do is create perfectly targeted content, stay informed on email best practices, drive more engagement quarter over quarter, spend less money, and do all of this with less time. We’re on iTunes.

Scale 117

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 117

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2018

The EU was kind enough to provide a stress test for our email delivery pipeline during the GDPR surge on a scale that I doubt our engineering team as a whole would have agreed to, and we passed. That resulted in the email delivery pipeline operating at high output for several days leading up to and following the GDPR deadline.

Scale 204

Scale Engineering AWS Scaling 204

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Since 2016, SaaS North has been recognized as THE Canadian hub for rapidly-scaling SaaS founders and their teams. It is the largest in-person event in the country—2,000+ attendees, 800+ companies, and 100+ speakers—along with features such as Betakit Keynote Stage, AWS Pitchfest, Workspaces Tradeshow.

Merchant Services 158

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Services 158

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

Automation in infrastructure can lead to pretty serious blunders. 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.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). This begs the question: how much room is left for emerging startups? The median growth rate of startups with $1-2.5M

Scale 96

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 96

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

Mike has been in and around startups for the better part of three decades: as a consultant, as a co-founder and now as the Managing Director of Salesforce Incubator, which propels new startups into the marketplace. He joined me for a chat that ranged from the role of AI to how they choose startups to incubate. Short on time?

Scale 151

Scale Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 151

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

This is the revenue growth for HubSpot leading up to the IPO. One is, lots of folks that have been through the startup cycle, you have this extrapolation from a single data point problem, which is, “OK, we have this story. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a 7, if you round up from 6.3. This is what we did.

Part-Time VPE 282

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 282

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

I joined intercom remotely two years ago as the first person in Sydney, and since then we have scaled the APAC team (lovingly referred to as the APAC Alliance) to almost 20 people across 4 countries. Due to our rapid growth, we needed to scale the team remotely before opening an office.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149