Sales Hacker

JULY 1, 2025

With a background in investment banking and venture capital, Austin brings a uniquely analytical and first-principles mindset to modern B2B growth. I had a to-do list item on my, notepad of I needed to go out and find some sort of solution to, employees understanding equity compensation, it’s a huge problem at startups.

Technical Advisors

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

Q: How do Venture Capital Firms really feel about founder salaries? Let me add just one thought to the discussion on founder salaries, once you are venture-backed. If the founders are the highest compensated people in the start-up, at least pre-Scale (e.g., 10k a year. 10k a month. One thing I have learned, though.

Venture Capital

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2021

Assuming you have at least a partial track record, then, there are two-and-a-half basic paths on how to start a venture capital firm. Start Small before your start a Venture Capital Firm. Grow within a Venture Capital Firm. Partner with someone starting a Venture Capital Firm. Possibly zero.

Venture Capital

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2020

The post Why Do Some People Consider Venture Capital a “Young Person’s Game”? So starting before 30 can help. That way, you peak around 45-50. It’s not necessary. But it has been the Sequoia way for a reason. appeared first on SaaStr.

Venture Capital

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

When reps want a $160k+ OTE for hitting say a $400k attainment, really, that’s only possible when fueled with a lot of venture capital. Either higher quotas, lower attainment, or for a while, even more venture capital. At least, unless there is a ton of venture capital funding the gap.

Scale

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2023

The company is trusted by more than 30,000 companies, over 5,000 investment funds, and half a million employees for cap table management, compensation management, liquidity venture capital solutions, and more. Carta manages over two trillion dollars in equity for nearly two million people globally.

Scale

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2023

SaaStr 664: What You Need to Change at $10M to Scale to $100M with Sameer Dholakia, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners  2. 5 Interesting Learnings from Monday.com at $640,000,000 in ARR Top Podcasts This Week: 1.

CTO Coach

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2013

Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Capitalization structure risk - does the company have enough room in the cap table to take more investment necessary to grow while still ensuring employees and executives are well compensated? How strong is their relationship?

Venture Capital

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2021

And Pay Them Back once you make it: Finally raised that Venture Capital? You can ask people to take some equity instead of cash. For a while. But you have to Pay People Right, at least when you can. You may need to not just make those new hires, but set aside some cash to bring the early guys back up to market.

Venture Capital

Sales Hacker

APRIL 19, 2022

In this article, I’ll outline the principles of compensation design , how to build sales compensation plans , and include resources to set OTEs and quotas that keep your reps happy and hungry for more. Bravado’s 2022 State of Sales Compensation Guide showed that 54 percent of reps missed their quota.

Compensation

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2023

Pepper shares that ICONIQ, a venture capital firm with $10B under management, made fewer investments last year than ever before. AE and SDR compensation is another tactic to align GTM with what you want. PST, to unveil the data behind effective scaling. Incentives for multi-year contracts are another tactic.

Outsourcing Services

Baremetrics

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

What is the difference between Equity Financing, Loans, and Venture Capital Funding? Venture Capital Funding When should you be thinking about Equity Financing? What is the difference between Equity Financing, Loans, and Venture Capital Funding? Table of Contents. What is Equity Financing in SaaS?

Finance

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

And most of our data now as a software company it’s because that’s my background, but you as a sales professional can go to RepVue and view detailed analytics about sales organizations related to compensation data. It’s not venture capital money. How many people are hitting quota? Sam Jacobs : Smart people.

Marketplace as a Service

Kellblog

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

Per this Cornell Law site : To indemnify another party is to compensate that party for losses that that party has incurred or will incur as related to a specified incident. An indemnification agreement is a contract that specifies that, provided the director meets a minimum standard of conduct (e.g.,

Compensation

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 30, 2020

Top SaaS CEOs Talk Compensation, Automation, and Investors. Customer Success Compensation Catches Up to Sales. In the next three to five years, compensation between Customer Success and Sales will become close to equal.”. What’s Next For Customer Success? Nick Mehta CEO, Gainsight. . . .

Customer Success

OpenView Labs

MAY 14, 2020

First things first: Not every business is a venture-scale business . The model of a venture capital fund is to invest dollars in exchange for shares at some entry price, and sell those shares in exchange for dollars at some exit price that’s ideally several multiples of the entry price. .

Venture Capital

Kellblog

JANUARY 23, 2022

pricing, metrics, GTM planning and modeling, sales process, positioning/branding, product strategy, and reluctantly, compensation) and find them invariably superior to jumping into a hard topic with a big heterogeneous group. Personally, I’ve participated in numerous such working groups on various topics (e.g.,

Compensation

Baremetrics

MAY 7, 2019

million – about half of all the cash they had on hand – to buy out their main venture capital investors after eight years since founding. This capital can also greatly accelerate the progress and trajectory of the business with resources that others may not get for years down the road. Venture Capital.

Finance

Baremetrics

APRIL 16, 2021

Sweat equity and credit cards, personal lines of credit, direct cash investment into the business in the form of an equity stake or a related-party loan to the company, deferring cash-pay compensation. Future capital providers love to see that you’ve invested more than your time into your endeavor. Venture Capital.

Venture Capital

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

For instance, if a venture capital firm backs them, the percentage of failure drops to 75 percent. Sometimes you may receive shares in the company instead of compensation. According to Forbes, 90 percent of all start-ups fail. But there are ways to protect yourself and mitigate the risk of taking one of these roles.

Scale

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Expanding internationally means managing differences not only in language and time zone – but in culture, business norms, law, taxation, labor, employment, compensation, and competition. International expansion is hard. It’s no small undertaking and it’s not for the faint of heart. But it is nevertheless, absolutely essential.

Startup

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

394: Where is Venture Capital today? Sunil Dhaliwal: I was at one of the biggest firms around and I think we had a $200 million fund and people were like, I can’t believe we’re running $200 million in venture capital. And how do you hack it? This episode is sponsored by Outgrow. Jason Lemkin: Crazy.

Sales Recruiting

Outseta

FEBRUARY 2, 2019

By Geoff Roberts 12 min read When we first started building Outseta we stated outright that we weren’t interested in raising venture capital—instead, we planned on bootstrapping the business and remaining independent.

SaaS Payments

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

You’re in the valley, you raise venture capital. There’s no amount of positive output that can compensate for someone who’s outputting negativity because their blast radius is so big, and it actually affects the core team that is actually getting stuff done. The first executive hire we made did not work out.

VP of Engineering

Kellblog

JANUARY 3, 2022

It’s not because VCs like high compensation packages and dilution. The whole Silicon Valley model is about isolating and removing risk from the equation. That’s why boards want startups to pay high salaries and lure experienced talent with lucrative stock options. ” [3].

Sales Hiring

Kellblog

JULY 20, 2022

” Standardization of the model and labor pool serve as risk isolators in Silicon Valley. VCs know that, which is why in general they prefer hiring veterans to up-and-comers.

Sales Hiring

SaaSOptics

MAY 22, 2018

Technology companies attract huge amounts of venture capital and the best, brightest, and most innovative workers in the world. Within an organization, these types of key metrics can be used to measure performance against objectives, to determine where to invest capital, and how to compensate employees.

Subscription

SaaSOptics

MAY 22, 2018

Technology companies attract huge amounts of venture capital and the best, brightest, and most innovative workers in the world. Within an organization, these types of key metrics can be used to measure performance against objectives, to determine where to invest capital, and how to compensate employees.

Subscription

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

While it is easy to dismiss the small fraction of a percent of equity as trivial, balk at what looks like a low offer or focus on cash compensation because it’s more tangible, equity offers can carry real value ( just ask employees of Slack, Uber, Lyft and Pinterest ). Is this an exciting amount of compensation?

Compensation

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

On the side, I do some stuff in the venture capital community, some scouting for a wonderful VC firm, Cowboy Ventures. Likely, the compensation structure is just not going to be figured out. About four months ago, I came over to Webflow. I also do some formal advising for a couple of smaller startups.

Scale

Point Nine Land

MAY 20, 2021

a problem we’ve been wanting to solve for a while Payroll, the process of compensating your employees for their work, continues to be a complex and convoluted process for companies of all sizes.

Outsourcing Services

Kellblog

AUGUST 18, 2019

Remember to always talk to your financial and tax advisers before making key decisions about equity-based compensation. # # #. Finally, I’ll point you to my favorite book on this subject (which covers both stock-options and RSUs), Consider Your Options 2019 , and which has a nice website as well.

Technical Advisors

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

How to Raise Venture Capital with Poor Customer Retention by Mark Roberge, Stage 2 Capital However, if a startup’s customer retention is off the mark, even significantly, they can still position the company as an attractive investment. Source Stock Options 101: How to Reward and Compensate Employees?

Scale

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2025

The implications stretch from individual career choices to venture capital strategies, suggesting we’re in the early stages of the most significant economic disruption in modern history.

AI

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

You have any advice on how to optimize the compensation for that one person? And most of us can’t access that much venture capital anyway. Koyfin (@KoyfinCharts): Hey, this is Rob from Koyfin. I just had a question on your point previously about hiring your first salesperson. You don’t want to be that.

Scale

Outseta

OCTOBER 12, 2020

The compatibility of your idea and life circumstances with bootstrapping The debate over the merits of bootstrapping versus going the venture capital route when building your company rages on—I for one am guilty of fanning these flames. The question is not do you prefer bootstrapping or venture capital.

Venture Capital

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2020

If 15 to 20% are COVID beneficiaries, can that absorb all the ventured capital? Does venture capital even need to bother? Venture capital, no matter how it looks, it’s not a huge asset class. I invested in a company called Gorgeous, which is a contact center for SMBs on Shopify. March was rough.

Investment