OpenView Labs

APRIL 12, 2019

Getting hiring right is absolutely critical. I’d like to talk about two different companies with two very different approaches to hiring post-seed raise. I’m focusing on engineering in these examples, but the experience applies to other areas of the business. To get the team started we hired several junior developers.

CTO Hire 64

CTO Hire Investment New CTO CTO 64

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

It’s been 10 years since co-founders Eoghan McCabe , Des Traynor , David Barrett , and Ciaran Lee sat in a small Dublin coffee shop and dreamed of making internet business personal, and we’re still every bit as excited. Zanade Mann , founder of Black Women’s Business Collective. Will Larson , CTO of Calm.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2023

Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. What Your Job Is (And What It Isn’t) Your Job is to Make the Company Win A CTO may imagine their primary job is to provide technical expertise, lead engineers, and help build the product.

CTO Coach 201

CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 201

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Product: Product Leadership , Product Strategy , User Insights for Product Decisions , Product Management Foundations , Mastering Product Management , Data for Product Managers (new). Membership includes participation in 3 cohort-based programs per year where you will learn how to solve a key business challenge. Product Leadership.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO Scale 52

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely.

CTO Coach 101

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 101

Buffer Resources

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Plus, I knew these company leaders were busy — when would I have the opportunity to pick their brains again?    Thankfully, the conversations flowed, and I only had time for the question at the top of my list:  “Give me one piece of advice for succeeding at Buffer.

VP of Engineering 90

VP of Engineering Part-Time CTO New CTO CTO 90

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

To date, they have raised over $73M from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst and Point Nine to name a few. When is the right time to hire the first sales rep? Should you hire 2 at a time? What does one look for in their first sales hire?

Scale 180

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 180

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

But promotional paths are a-changing, according to a time-series by Spencer Stuart summarized in Harvard Business Review’s “ Finding the Right CEO.” I think it’s changing, and the Spencer Stuart data in Harvard Business Review show that it’s changing too. We hire a third-party firm.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

OpenView Labs

JULY 16, 2020

” I explain my job to my kids by saying that we help people in businesses get really important feedback so that people know what to do. We did a song to launch our new mission, vision and values at SurveyMonkey, and I also rewrote “Shallow” for our CFO who left last year, then performed it with our President, CTO and General Counsel.

CTO Hire 55

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Underperforming Technical Team 55

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves? Specifically with regards to the last two endeavors and the journey of business building, what did you mean by the no one’s coming to save you?

Sales Hiring 133

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 133

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

The question is not whether a CSM is a valuable asset to a SaaS business, but rather, how valuable are they? How many CSMs should you hire? On a global scale, on average, product marketers with strong leadership support earn almost $13k more a year than those without. What is their ROI? Here are a few teasers. And for some U.S.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

User Pilot

MARCH 7, 2024

of leadership roles. This could be explained by the fact that it was women, more often than men, who had to step down and work part-time to take care of stay-at-home children during the pandemic. I wanted to learn more about what challenges are deterring women from entering leadership career paths in tech.

Technical Review 104

Technical Review CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire 104

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 163

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 163

BetterCloud

AUGUST 11, 2020

A large portion of Deputy’s clients are retail and hospitality businesses—and many of them were impacted directly by the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, I probably undersell how intense those first few weeks were for me and some of my peers in the business, especially since we had to build a pandemic response plan.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire New CTO Identity management Scale 52

SmartKarrot

MARCH 4, 2021

This is where companies need another C-level executive to facilitate business growth via products. What makes a chief product officer (CPO) different from a CTO or a VP in the product department. Keep in mind that Chief Product Officers (CPO) are different from Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMO).

Part-Time CTO 16

Part-Time CTO VP of Engineering CTO CTO Hire 16

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

Is the CTO involved in these decisions? App contraction is still happening, and AI is absorbing all of the energy in the industry. You can lose deals to feature gaps, and Jason has seen rampant loss of business due to not having feature parody. Q: What Teams Should Be Involved to Fully Leverage AI and Get in Front of the Wave?

AI 258

AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 258

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

With 3 full days of sessions, featuring over 300 speakers from the best SaaS companies around the world, SaaStr Annual will be filled with actionable thought leadership to help grow your business. I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. Oh my gosh, you can run into him all the time. house at BlackLine.

Startup 275

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 275

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Well, let’s transition then to leadership. Excited to be back emceeing.

CTO Coach 129

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 129

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

Vlad will highlight what defines success in each stage of the growth journey, and how to create a winning business with the right product, team, and culture. Jonathan: And you describe yourself as a technologist first, or a business person? When the founder is a technologist versus a business leader? Jonathan : Hotel business?

Scale 151

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 151

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home. It was our largest contract to date, kind of helps the other quarter. I make time for it and that even means getting up, taking early morning flight and heading home on a red eye to do a day trip to the Bay area, I’ll do it.

CTO Hire 159

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 159

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. Prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214m in funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and Blackrock, to name a few.

Scale 184

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 184

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

376: In part two, ZoomInfo founder and CEO Henry Schuck shares how he built a business from scratch and grew it into one of the most successful IPOs of the 21st century—and what it was really like…the good, the bad, and most of all, the ugly. You start this business. They’ve invested in all of these other businesses.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Sam’s Corner [28:45]. Show Introduction [00:10]. What is LinkSquares?

Scale 107

Scale CTO Hire Scaling CTO Coach 107

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. The board might spend that same amount of time in a year [8]. However, some do [5].

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).

Part-Time VPE 223

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire New CTO CTO 223

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

To date, Karl has raised $114M with Lucidchart from some of the best in the business including K9 Ventures, Meritech, Iconiq, GV and Kickstart in Utah. How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why?

Sales Hiring 220

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 220

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 31, 2019

I am the CEO of a company called Woven, which is an intelligent calendar for busy professionals, and I have spent my entire career focused on the productivity of others. Tim: I was hired in 2010, when Facebook was what I like to call a “teenage company”. That was actually a pretty tall order at the time. Calendars are broken.

Artificial Intelligence 169

Artificial Intelligence Scale CTO Hire AI 169

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Intercom was created out of an epiphany in a small Dublin coffee shop because we realized that the impersonal, transactional way of doing business online just wasn’t cutting it for customers anymore. Ever since the beginning, our mission has been to make internet business personal, and the podcast has played a big role in that.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2020

I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. Yet, there’s a point to that because sometimes the best businesses are the areas that other people have overlooked because they’re not terribly interesting. Oh my gosh, you can run into him all the time. If you ask him what he does, he’ll tell you that he’s in the business.

Startup 161

Startup CTO Hire Scale CTO Coach 161

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

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. Julien Lemoine | Co-founder and CTO @Algolia. So I’m Julien, Co-founder and CTO of Algolia. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 127

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 127

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2018

At our inaugural SaaStr Europa last June, podcast host-with-the-most Harry Stebbings sat down with MuleSoft Founder and CTO Ross Mason to discuss the organization’s sales strategy, building a strong company culture, how to think about international expansion, and much more. perspective watching the evolution of the industry as a whole?

Technical Advisors 164

Technical Advisors Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 164

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Knowing these trends will help you gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the pack in your business decisions. Dev is also a prominent speaker who helps B2B SaaS companies scale their business through demand generation strategies and solutions. One of the top SaaS influencers is Dharmesh Shah , co-founder, and CTO of HubSpot.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Flexible integration with any other software, hardware or business workflow applications. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. Mallun Yen : And so, what led you to decide, that okay, my first 33 hires are going to be engineers?

Sales Hiring 133

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 133

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2019

Yousuf Khan: Well, the CIO is fundamentally owning the business technology function of the company. And by business technology function I want to define that because sometimes there’s a overlap with the CTO from an engineering side. My advice is hire earlier rather than later.

Technical Advisors 169

Technical Advisors Scale Technical Review Payment Solutions 169

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

My father was an entrepreneur, but he was building pump companies, very different businesses. And my education, I went to MIT to study mechanical engineering, and I think I would have thought I was going to go into the pump business like my father. And at that same time I met two Stanford computer science students.

Sales Recruiting 178

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 178

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

If everybody’s just doing a little sliver of the work, how do you roll it up into a meaningful business case? I mean, maybe you do, but I don’t know anyone right now with extra money, time, or people, right? They don’t know enough about their client, they don’t understand the business.

Payment Methods 216

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 216

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

Paul Rosania: But really more than anything, I think slowing down a little bit, spending a little bit more time writing things down and using long form writing or some equivalent, more thought out and edited way of communicating is actually what’s needed in a time when it’s hard for people to communicate.

CTO Coach 177

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Software Review CTO Hire 177