Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2022

Last week, David Heinemeier Hansson explained why his company, Basecamp, is leaving the cloud. They will manage their own servers to reduce the $3m annual AWS bill by 60%. For a hypothetical startup, a 60% reduction in infrastructure costs boosts sales efficiency by 11% & net income margin by at least 12%.

Sales Hiring 266

Sales Hiring Cloud AWS Sales 266

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

” – Colin Jones, CRO Emeritus at Wiz You may have seen the news that Google is making its biggest acquisition — by far — of Cloud and SaaS security leader Wiz for a stunning $32 Billion (!). Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 174

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2023

And yet, overall Cloud spend continues to grow to record levels. Salesforce is back to aggressive hiring. Their Cloud business is on fire. SAP expects to close the year out with their Cloud and SaaS businesses at a $15 Billion run-rate. And even at that scale, Cloud sales are growing a stunning 16% (!).

Cloud 278

Cloud Sales Hiring Scale Business 278

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Beyond Traditional Boundaries: Rippling’s Three Clouds What makes Rippling fascinating as a compound startup is how it has expanded far beyond its initial HR focus. The company now has three distinct “clouds”: HR Cloud : Traditional HR and payroll functions.

Startup 152

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 152

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

So far: Since October, closed 5,000 Agentforce deals, including more than 3,000 paid Salesforce says Agentforce has managed 380,000 conversations , with only 2% escalated to humans and an 84% resolution rate So far, at the public company level, it’s the infra players that are seeing the crazy growth. Nvidia, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.

Scale 190

Scale Sales Hiring Azure Cloud 190

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 2, 2021

Databases, application servers, streaming technologies, application deployment, and container management - many modern tools were born open source. But the clouds are rolling in for open source companies (pun intended). Today, open source software faces an identity crisis: what does it mean to be an open source company in the cloud?

Cloud 279

Cloud Sales Hiring Banking Enterprise 279

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2025

The Great Spending Showdown: AI vs SaaS in 2025/2026 — What Every B2B Leader Needs to Know We’re witnessing the most dramatic shift in enterprise tech spending since the cloud migration began 15 years ago. billion valuation after 175M round Scale AI : $29 billion valuation / “sale” with Meta’s $14.3

AI Search 274

AI Search Artificial Intelligence AI CTO Hire 274

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2021

We’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on how to make sure your VP of Sales and top hires really work out. We can pretty much summarize a lot of it into the following: Your VP of Sales should have lots of experience selling at your average ACV. for that type of sale. That they are the right ones.

Sales Recruiting 328

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 328

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2024

It’s tougher times for many, job hunting is tougher, and in general meeting the best of the best in SaaS and Cloud IRL is more valuable than ever. And when we polled the 400+ CROs, CMOs and CCOs attending SaaStr Annual, almost 100% of them said they were hiring. Literally, every single CRO at SaaStr Annual I talked to was hiring.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Travel Sales SaaS 274

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Unparalleled Networking Opportunities SaaStr Annual brings together thousands of SaaS, Cloud and AI executives, founders, VCs, and industry leaders under one roof across our 40+ acre campus, May 13-15 in SF Bay! Many companies strategically use the event to meet potential hires, conduct interviews, and build their talent pipeline.

Sales Recruiting 187

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 187

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2021

It is still doable even in today's cloud. At $10m ARR, you can begin to aggressively fund hiring just out of your incoming cash flow. Much earlier than that though, and you’ll be capital constrained on aggressive hiring. Fourth, you need a capital-efficient way to hire your dev team. It happens all the time.

Sales Hiring 361

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 361

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2020

But beyond real estate and the office itself, there are a few things we can all think about in SaaS: It’s already much easier to hire a “Bay Area VP” as a remote hire than before. One of the top reasons to come to the SF Bay Area in SaaS was to hire your VPs. Go hire 1 or 2. This is profound.

Sales Hiring 358

Sales Hiring Enterprise Branding Cloud 358

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Lead generation tools do change, but the basic motions of sales and marketing haven’t changed much.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 278

SaaStr

JULY 23, 2020

And because talent is so over hired (Google hiring 3,000 new engineers a year, Facebook over a 1,000, every hot startup hiring like mad) — the stigma to job hopping has been lost. And job hopping has come to sales, too. So many AEs trying to quickly make the move to a VP of Sales role.

Sales Hiring 344

Sales Hiring Engineering Startup Cloud 344

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 10, 2022

So our economy is going through some unpredictable transitions, with Cloud and SaaS companies powering through with still-strong growth and unemployment remaining at near record lows, while inflation, interest rates and more batter us at the same time. Everyone became a manager, few wanted to do the real work, leading to even more hiring.

Sales Hiring 316

Sales Hiring Pricing Cloud Startup 316

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations. Unlike product-led or sales-led growth, Notion is focused on community-led growth. You can get this wrong.

Scale 304

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Innovation 304

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2022

What are some of the foundational ways sales leaders can think about building their sales teams as their company continues to expand and grow? There’s no shortage of ways to tackle this challenge, but one thing is clear: build sales teams thoughtfully and intentionally. Principle #1: Ownership is Key.

Scale 246

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 7, 2020

Many Cloud leaders grew 500% or more this year. ” When will this incredible run for Cloud and SaaS end? A Framework For Your First SaaS Sales Comp Plan. 6. “What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One” Another SaaStr Classic that is just as relevent today. What a crazy year for Cloud.

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Sales Hiring AWS Cloud 332

SaaStr

OCTOBER 22, 2019

We’ve learn a lot over the years and really we only want to hire folks that know and believe in SaaStr. This job can expand on many vectors, but job #1 is taking over ticket sales and attendance for our global events, and growing it in a founder-centric way to $10m. The post What We Are Hiring for at Team SaaStr!

Sales Hiring 32

Sales Hiring Scale Social Media B2C 32

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2025

His unique position spans both product and business functions including sales, marketing, and customer success – giving him a holistic view of bringing outside perspectives into product development. “But also own your commitments to customers and stay accountable to them.”

AI 204

AI Scale Sales Hiring Technical Review 204

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t new, but the conversations have evolved as the world has. SaaStr’s own Jason Lemkin shares the top 10 mistakes he sees during the hiring process during Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. The last 18 months have seen the biggest changes in the VP of Sales in his SaaS career.

Sales Hiring 152

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 152

SaaStr

APRIL 27, 2023

Organizations using Bob are able to accelerate hiring, retain the best talent, and elevate employee engagement. QuotaPath is the most adaptable compensation solution to bring Sales, RevOps, and Finance all on the same page. appeared first on SaaStr.

Cloud 257

Cloud Scale Startup Sales Hiring 257

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Communication is easier You can ramp people faster You can hire junior people The tradeoff is global talent. Cloud was a big unlock for monetization. All they sold was the visualization layer with no sales team. Stage three was going all-in into the Cloud. How do you approach monetization as an open-source company?

Scale 284

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 284

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

Q1 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. These charts clearly show the ZIRP pull forward, the ensuing cloud cost optimizations, and then the recovery. GCP data is a bit more noisy as they don’t disclose GCP itself, but rather Google Cloud which includes GSuite.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Maybe: – Go grab that office lease at half off – Hire Bay Area VPs now while they'll work anywhere. Things were slow for a while during the last downturn, but then the Cloud just picked itself up and … ran. Go hire those VPs now that aren’t in your city. Move on from any mediocre hires now.

Underperforming Technical Team 328

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 328

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 253

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2021

We’re hiring for several roles for our tiny but might team at SaaStr, but our top priority is really professionalizing customer and account success by bringing on a great seasoned customer success leader. some experience in account management, customer success, or client management.

Customer Success 269

Customer Success Sales Hiring Cloud Strategy 269

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Many top sales and marketing apps saw growth plummet to close to 0%. Private and public SaaS and Cloud companies didn’t just get a little more efficient in 2023 — they got stunning more efficient. At some point, you reach your Rule of 40 gains, and you have to start hiring and spending again to grow.

Sales Hiring 311

Sales Hiring Cloud Startup Pricing 311

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Yes, when hiring stopped, so did the automatic seat upgrades that come with hiring But silos still expanded a bit, and business process change did not end. We still doubled sales in 2009. Don’t worry about customer success hires and scaled sales reps. Cloud is a tidal wave. Upsell slowed way down.

SaaS Payments 280

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale SMB 280

Tom Tunguz

JULY 10, 2024

Salesforce Einstein 1 Service & Sales Cloud 330 170 0.51 Instead of hiring a sales development rep, hire a robot. Company Product Base Price AI Price Ratio Github Github Enterprise 21 10 0.67 Gitlab GitLab Duo 19 20 1.05 Google Workspace Business Plus 18 20 1.11 Loom Business 12.50 Microsoft Office 365 45 30 0.67

AI 276

AI Pricing Sales Hiring Strategy 276

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2022

Cloud Stocks May Be Down. But the Cloud Remains on Fire. The #1 Mistake I See Founders Make When They Hire Their First VP of Sales. SaaStr 552: 5 Lessons on Building Your Sales Organization for Scale with Than Hancock, EVP of Sales @ Podium and Carlie Adams, Head of West Coast Sales @ Podium.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Payment Features Marketing 293

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

Jessica Alexander, Senior Director Cloud Technology & OEM Partnerships, Crowdstrike. So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. Rico Mallozzi, Sr.

Scale 256

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 256

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

And Salesforce noted it’s slowing down hiring, and taking a break from bigger acquisitions, for now. It’s not slowing down Salesforce, Snowflake, or almost any other SaaS or Cloud leader. Take it from Gartner, who is now predicting SaaS to grow 20% overall next year to $200 Billion in total sales. 2021 $21.25B 2020 $17.1B

Sales Hiring 345

Sales Hiring Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 345

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

When it launched in 2011, Treasure Data’s positioning was a Hadoop-based big data warehouse in the cloud. The Treasure Data platform instantly analyzed large amounts of data, which meant that companies didn’t need to hire lots of computer scientists or put up a considerable upfront investment for data projects. . million and $1.2

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 300

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2022

The Cloud is bigger than ever, CIOs are buying more than ever, and SaaS is still on a roll. So many of you will want to manage the burn more carefully. Let go of your bottom 20% of sales reps, concentrate leads in the best reps. They hire mediocre folks on their team. But you can’t cut your way to growth. More here.

Sales Hiring 316

Sales Hiring Management Airlines Venture Capital 316

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2022

From Asana to Zoominfo: this year’s Europa lineup is bringing the best Cloud speakers from around the globe together for two days of incredible learning and insights. There will be over 2,500+ SaaS and Cloud professionals joining us there in person. Get your ticket now and get a front-row seat when the Cloud comes to Barcelona.

Sales Recruiting 205

Sales Recruiting Cloud Sales Hiring Scale 205

SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2020

A key question for the Cloud infrastructure leaders (Amazon, MSFT, and Google) is how deep do they want to go on the application layer. So to keep the engine going, the leaders have to be asking themselves if they can leverage the SaaS / application layer to win overall in Cloud. Who is #1 in the SaaS layer of Cloud? Salesforce.

Sales Recruiting 290

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 290