Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. If we believe that AI will ultimately allow us to do “more with less,” we may see headcount growth slow for traditional roles. Subscribe now Share Clouded Judgement Leave a comment Follow along to stay up to date!

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

So Snowflake is the high flier in Cloud. It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates: Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part.

Headcount 214

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 214

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2023

Gotta Radically More Efficient in 2023 This is really the theme of the year in SaaS and Cloud. Freezing Headcount is How They Got So Much More Efficient Again, a common story. But for now, AppFolio is staying leaner, with less headcount this year than last — despite impressive +29% growth. #4.

Payment Services 254

Payment Services Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payments 254

SaaStr

AUGUST 1, 2023

The macro impacts for most in SaaS and Cloud are real. But this time, instead of headcount, it was apps. Yes, some bigger companies went through layoffs too, but in many cases, they hired more folks back, and really just kept headcount flat or slowed its growth. But still pretty strong growth at $1.5B The list goes on.

Headcount 223

Headcount Finance Cloud Startup 223

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 31, 2023

Public cloud companies have demonstrated strength in the last quarter. AI Efficiency Gains +2% Headcount Reduction ? Headcount reductions in the last year, which impacted every company, should increase the pipeline coverage ratios for the remaining team members. Gartner projects an 8% increase in overall spend.

Headcount 183

Headcount Sales Hiring AI Cloud 183

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2022

Atlassian has gone almost 100% Cloud since then, and has held up nicely in the overall public markets even as others have taken bigger hits. Cloud product pricing went up 5% a year last year, and legacy server products went up much more. Transition to Cloud takes time at scale. Headcount up 7%, while revenue is up 37%.

Scale 312

Scale Marketplace as a Service Headcount Cloud 312

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2022

So we’ve taken a look at Monday several times in this series , but with so much change in the world of SaaS and Cloud the past few months, it seemed like a great one to dig in on. Like many tech companies, Monday added a ton of headcount in 2021. Because Monday remains on fire — growing a truly stunning 65% (!)

Headcount 304

Headcount SMB Engineering Scaling 304

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

Almost all Cloud and SaaS leaders have become profitable. How SaaS Is Fairing in the Macro Economy It’s crazy how much more efficient the leaders in SaaS and Cloud have gotten in one year. By freezing headcount for a year. SaaS and Cloud leaders have become incredibly efficient over the last year. Lemkin asked him.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 245

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Getting More Efficient — Like Almost Everyone in SaaS and Cloud. Headcount Down 25% Since September 2022, But Revenue Still Up. Headcount Down 25% Since September 2022, But Revenue Still Up. Never a fun exercise, but a reminder and example of just how much more efficient SaaS and Cloud companies are now vs. the Boom Times.

Headcount 181

Headcount Cloud Communication Acquisition 181

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

Cloud revenue growing 55% — and Atlassian reaffirms 50% Cloud growth for 2023 and 2024 also! 2000,000 Cloud Customers with an NRR of 130%, and 140% from “Large” Customers. Atlassian plans to double its headcount over the coming few years. 5 Interesting Learnings. #1. No slow down from Atlassian. #2.

Scale 243

Scale Headcount Cloud Business Model 243

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2024

Customers are being much more cautious, not buying ahead of their needs or being able to anticipate things like headcount growth or budget certainty as effectively as they had in the past. Contracts are going all the way up to the CEO for signature, which is almost unbelievable. Roles will evolve into higher-value work over time.

Generative AI 253

Generative AI AI Technical Review Software Review 253

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

Vimeo just hired their first sales rep 3 years ago to spearhead $20k+ deals … and now they have 100 reps, and are on track to double that headcount. Even Now, It’s Still a Land Grab in So Many Segments in SaaS and Cloud. My Top 10 Learnings: #1. Lean In Early With a Strong Lead on International Expansion — Even Now.

Enterprise 252

Enterprise Scale Sales Hiring Headcount 252

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Sequoia Capital’s India arm put together a terrific summary of all their learnings about SaaS and Cloud from SaaStr Annual this year. Often, founders are unsure about the headcount split between India and the US. Example 1: your retail customers may not want to be hosted on a certain cloud vendor.

Scale 232

Scale Sales Hiring Cybersecurity Underperforming Technical Team 232

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

Today, Veeva is at $45B Cloud juggernaut dominating pharma and life science Cloud applications. We’re building the industry cloud for life sciences, so our customers are people like Pfizer and Novartis, etc., We provide a variety of cloud solutions for them. that are making medicine to help improve life.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 337

OpenView Labs

MAY 24, 2021

” Bessemer called product-led growth one of “three GTM strategies top cloud companies employ in the New Normal” in their State of the Cloud report. According to the company’s most recent investor day presentation : Veeva’s Commercial Cloud customers have adopted an average of 3.72 Veeva makes a great case study.

Scale 98

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Benchmarks 98

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Any great VP of Sales knows other VPs of Sales and up-and-comers because sales is usually half the headcount in a startup. This isn’t new, but it has accelerated because the number of SaaS and Cloud leaders has accelerated. The last thing a VP of Sales wants to do is start without a team. There are so many great logos to hire from.

Sales Hiring 152

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 152

BetterCloud

DECEMBER 13, 2022

CIOs are being asked to accelerate time to value on these new investments, which include SaaS and other cloud-based services. This places a big burden on IT teams, who almost never get headcount even as expectations increase. However, this comes with high expectations for IT.

Operational efficiency. 52

Operational efficiency. Headcount Cloud Technology 52

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 30, 2021

Powered by a modern business messenger , it scales your ability to answer more questions from more customers without increasing headcount, budget, or hours logged. Cloud-based phone support: Aircall. Cloud-based phone support tool Aircall connects with Intercom to empower your agents to make a call right from the Intercom Messenger.

Technical Review 249

Technical Review Customer Support Payment Methods Payment Solutions 249

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2022

Confluent has been one of the top Cloud IPOs of the past year or two, crossing a $10B market cap at a $500m run-rate and importantly, holding up well during the multiple compression we’ve seen in 2022. Put differently, Confluent is just the type of Cloud IPO the markets want right now. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

Scale 54

Scale Cloud Headcount Scaling 54

OPEXEngine

JULY 27, 2021

We could talk about this all day, but one of the key points here to focus on is managing costs on the process side, where appropriate, by using outsourced, cloud-based finance process vendors, so that your expensive Finance personnel can provide value-add but aren’t tied up doing the low-value process work.

Finance 52

Finance Outsourcing Services Scaling SaaS 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

By the time he left to join Google Cloud as EMEA VP of Operations and Customer Growth, Salesforce had around 17 billion dollars in revenue and almost 50,000 employees. It was the start of the wave of the cloud. In 2005, I was very lucky to join a company called Salesforce, which had just IPO’d.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2024

The combination of Workday Talent Management, Workday Skills Cloud, and HiredScore’s Talent Orchestration solutions, will provide customers with a comprehensive, transparent, and intelligent talent acquisition and internal mobility offering, helping them better address their ever-evolving people needs.

VP of Engineering 71

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS AI Search 71

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 6, 2021

Founded in 2013 in New York, this is a cloud-based budgeting solution that appears to be bootstrapped and has fewer than 10 employees. While the product appears still in development, the vision looks clear: dynamic headcount management, that ties together the departmental (budget owner) manager, finance, recruiting, and people ops.

Finance 86

Finance Forecasting Software Review Systems Review 86

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 31, 2019

SaaS companies tend to have more Finance headcount than traditional, non-Cloud companies. Median Finance headcount in private, growth SaaS companies averaging $25M is 7 Finance executives. And faster growth companies have more Finance people than slower growth SaaS companies.

Finance 40

Finance CTO Hire Headcount SaaS 40

FastSpring

MARCH 14, 2023

It takes an enormous amount of time, money, and headcount for SaaS companies to handle VAT, GST, and sales tax (and any other form of indirect tax) in-house. Request a demo or sign up for a free account to see how FastSpring can help you expand globally almost overnight without adding headcount.

Payment Solutions 82

Payment Solutions Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Methods 82

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 18, 2020

Like let’s take a more conservative approach in the earlier months of the year in terms of adding headcount. Maybe a little bit more provisional, and maybe a little bit more conservative.

Customer Success 87

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Finance Sales Hiring 87

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2023

Founder and CEO of SaaStr Jason Lemkin deep dives into the current state of SaaS and the Cloud. Okta is a market leader in identity and app management, and they’re a derivative of everything happening in Cloud and SaaS spend. Monday will probably add 25% headcount this year. A Cautious Recovery? Salesforce is back to hiring.

Sales Hiring 254

Sales Hiring SaaS Headcount Compensation 254

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 1, 2019

The past 15 years have seen a massive shift in the tech industry where million dollar, multi-year, on-premise deals have given way to try-before-you-buy SaaS contracts, delivered through the cloud. Cloud-based SaaS products have allowed companies of all sizes more flexibility around buying new technology.

Customer Success 40

Customer Success Startup SaaS Sales Hiring 40

Chart Mogul

APRIL 2, 2021

Even if you are only going to analyze data stored in SaaS/cloud services, you will still need to write (and run) your own scripts to extract, transform, and load the required data into your data warehouse. Examples of this layer include Fivetran and Stitch.

Subscription 72

Subscription Payment Features Headcount Trends 72

Chart Mogul

APRIL 2, 2021

Even if you are only going to analyze data stored in SaaS/cloud services, you will still need to write (and run) your own scripts to extract, transform, and load the required data into your data warehouse. Examples of this layer include Fivetran and Stitch.

Subscription 52

Subscription Payment Features Headcount Trends 52

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2024

Do you see massive disruption in workforces and marketing headcounts shrinking because of AI? “I’m His first company was Personify and he went on to be a VP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, then hire number 11 at Dropbox, CEO at Heroku, and an investor and on many boards before landing as the current CEO at Vimeo.

AI Search 242

AI Search SaaS Advertising Sales Hiring 242

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2023

Some SaaS and Cloud leaders have seen big impacts from the post-2020 hangover, but others keep accelerating. That’s about as good as it gets in SaaS and Cloud! Are we near or past the lows in SaaS and Cloud buying patterns? 9 — Almost All Cloud Leaders Got Radically More Efficient In One Year. We’ll see. #2 And it worked!

Revenue 208

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 208

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

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). Using Brex also saves time for your finance team (or, depending on headcount, your finance person ??) AWS – Cloud computing.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 27, 2022

As companies and their headcounts grow, so do their tech stacks. Wayne Stewart, Head of Customer Success and Support, Cloud Growth, Dev Ops & IT, Atlassian . The scale of enterprise businesses makes them inherently complex – they rely on a suite of tools tailored for specific workflows.

Enterprise 205

Enterprise Headcount Engineering Cloud 205

BetterCloud

APRIL 25, 2024

According to a study by Foundry , IT decision-makers reveal that 31% of their budget will go toward cloud computing, and two-thirds expect their cloud budget to increase in the next 12 months. Allocations can be manual or automatic, depending on the headcount of users. Go with your gut.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Strategy Marketplace as a Service SaaS 52

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 21, 2024

On a much smaller scale, we’ve also started to see some leaders deploying their genAI budget against headcount savings, particularly in customer service. While some leaders addressed this concern by hosting open source models themselves, others noted that they were prioritizing models with virtual private cloud (VPC) integrations.

Generative AI 145

Generative AI AI Enterprise Artificial Intelligence 145

BetterCloud

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Headcount and person-hours necessary for development and support is often a total guess unless you’re working in an organization that has done this sort of work before,” writes Blair Reeves, Product Principal at SAS Software. “In The further out those predictions go, of course, the less reliable they become.

VP of Engineering 45

VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Engineering 45