Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 4, 2023

To improve the efficiency of spend on cost of goods sold (COGS), most growth-stage leaders can optimize seat-based spend or renegotiate consumption-based contracts in a quarter or 2. Focus on performance management of your product and engineering teams as early indicators for what R&D investments are working, and which aren’t.

Underperforming Technical Team 124

Underperforming Technical Team Benchmarks CTO Hire New CTO 124

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects. They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams. Much of the success here depends on how competent and motivated the CTO and their team is.

Sales Hiring 95

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 95

Valerian Tech

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

However, they are still relatively new and their value can be extremely volatile, making them a high-risk investment for some people. How can CTO’s help ensure the Success of a Cryptocurrency Project? Foster community engagement: The CTO should engage with the community and seek to understand their needs and feedback.

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Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Coach CTO Hire 52

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

We do that by: Investing in your trust through compliance with industry security and privacy ISO standards or frameworks such as SOC 2. Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team. Investing significantly in safeguarding our customers’ trust. Shipping quickly and securely. Intercom is no exception.

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Data compliance Technical Review CTO Hire 118

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

For those who don’t know him, Will has over 10 years of experience in the likes of Yahoo, Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and he’s currently the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app that helps millions of people to lower their stress levels and sleep better. If you’re a senior engineer and want to further your career, what skills should you develop?

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

In engineering, you want to move fast, ship often and solve real customer problems. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich: Today I’m the Senior Director for Foundations Engineering at Intercom.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They were aware of it, but startups that I work with closely or invested in, if they got all the way to 25 million with 75% NRR, I would tell them to quit today. Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. VCs can only invest in outliers. I want to invest in her.”

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Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 197

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… “When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster. David Sacks has a long history in tech from his time as a Founder and CEO of Geni.com and Yammer to his stint as COO of Paypal. So, how do you choose amongst the stable of unicorns?

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Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 101

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

OpenView is thrilled to announce our recent $9M Series A investment in Loopio , a software platform that helps sales teams respond to RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires seamlessly with up-to-date, accurate, and approved content. Loopio co-founders from left to right: Matt York, CTO; Jafar Owainati, COO; Zakir Hemraj, CEO.

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Investment CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 40

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Example of SaaS Chart of Accounts for Marketing Expenses Research & Development (Engineering) There are fewer direct benefits from splitting out your tech team from the rest of the expenses, but I still recommend doing it. First of all, you should compare your current engineering spend and compare it against your forecast.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. There are plenty of resources and advice on unlocking the secrets of the engineering management career path. Karen Peacock: In college, I studied math and computer science and engineering. Janeen Uzzell , COO for Wikimedia Foundation.

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VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

That’s the advice, Petri Hollmén picked up on the more technical side of things from the opening session on Day 2 with Cal Henderson, CTO of Slack. You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense. Get marketing and engineering working together. Full post. . Full post. .

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Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. It can be hard to convince PE firms to invest in the customer. How did you get your PE colleagues to invest in the customer experience? We hire a third-party firm. Find the hardest problems to solve and you will succeed.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

I looked back at our investment memo, it was a 2K ACV when Jason invested after Y-C. So you were the first sales hire. Talk to me about the sales hires that you made back in the early days and talk to me about how it changed through the different stages. So my first sales hire was beginning of 2015.

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

What other elements of the contract should startups really spend a lot of time focusing on? 300: When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. I think the third thing is really about the level of investment that you want to be able to make and how you measure that.

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CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 134

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. The Solution: Invest in a revamped data infrastructure. Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. What is Buffer. Click To Tweet. Click To Tweet.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

Casey Accidental

JUNE 26, 2018

Technology companies are rapidly hiring analyst roles to pair with their product teams. And while my previous post discussed how to hire analysts and structure their teams within organizations, I haven’t written about how analysts should approach their careers. This is more than just a higher-power analyst role though.

CTO Coach 53

CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO CTO 53

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.

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CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 193

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

Eyal Manor – VP, Engineering @ Google Cloud. Eyal Manor: So I’ve been building SaaS services for over 10 years now in an engineering capacity, and just before we start can we get a sense from the audience, I know it’s kind of hard to see but who here is kind of in a technical hat? Join us for SaaStr Annual 2020.

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Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 171

BetterCloud

MAY 17, 2021

Since then, he’s risen rapidly through the ranks and has established himself as a true thought leader in the world of quality engineering. Prior to joining BetterCloud as our new VP of quality, Waithe was a director of engineering at MailChimp. Now that you’re a manager, how do you build trust with the engineers who report to you?

New CTO 52

New CTO Part-Time VPE CTO Coach CTO Hire 52

Mattermark

AUGUST 23, 2017

Fred Wilson counters the argument that Resource Constraints make it difficult to succeed as a startup, saying that great operators are never limited by a lack of funding or engineers. Our CTO Kevin says: “It’s like the beginning of people’s imagination with computer games, which is awesome.”

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Startup CTO Travel 40

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

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? We were hired into the same role, same start date, competed head to head. Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook. I met Molly, who was the COO at the time, Molly Graham.

Scale 181

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 181

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. There are no Cloud magicians, and you can’t hire a PLG magician. Let’s jump right into the questions.

Scale 256

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 256

Crafty CTO

JULY 21, 2023

They want to own the whole stack, and will want to have their own secret source as part of it. It’s not like they don’t have the capital to invest in training… (NotAFood) Apple has shown time and time again that they have the human capital and money to tackle massive projects discretely.

Artificial Intelligence 40

Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Generative AI AI 40

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? Bob Moore: And I was t nerdy engineer in college, so getting the opportunity to have to pitch, it’s really a sales job at the end of the day.

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Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. The Solution: Invest in a revamped data infrastructure. Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. What is Buffer. Tweet this quote. Tweet this quote.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

Having invested in 9 B2B marketplaces and gathered data from 20+ different investors, here are our findings on what it takes to raise money in 2021 for B2B marketplaces. A technical co-founder or CTO is always a great-to-have at this stage and becomes a must-have as the business scales beyond seed. Market Characteristics ??

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Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Kellblog

JANUARY 29, 2020

Unlike traditional databases, our technology is built using a hybrid of database and search engine technology and thus provides excellent capabilities for storing, indexing, and rapidly querying both structured and unstructured data. Why are you and your team the best people to invest in? Ditto for most hiring across the company.

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Startup Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 99

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Investment funds like Indie.VC The company had for a few years prior followed a growth-first path, hiring aggressively and prioritizing projects designed to make an immediate impact on their growth rate. Wistia Funding History $650,000 from angel investors in 2008 $775,000 from angel investors in 2010 $17.3M of the $3.5M

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

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 161

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 161

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Take stock of customer satisfaction at each point of the journey—product, engineering, design, growth, presales, support, and post-sales. The next hiring focus should be growth marketing. At the same time, you can start hiring for unpaid channels—someone who understands SEO and how to build a community.

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Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 200

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

They’ve invested in all of these other businesses. Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 245

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. 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. Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

Scale 129

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 129

SmartKarrot

MARCH 4, 2021

What makes a chief product officer (CPO) different from a CTO or a VP in the product department. A CPO is one who manages products and teams to engineer better outcomes for customers. 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

JULY 28, 2021

I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. Bootstrapped because nobody in their right mind would have actually invested in us back then and took it up until 2014 as a bootstrapped company. We have a business problem, we don’t have any engineers, we have money. I said, “You have engineers.

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Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 278

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Being an engineer can give you the upper hand as a CEO because you understand the product. And then, invest your energy and time into the product. 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. It’s too hard?

Sales Hiring 136

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 136

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. ” We didn’t do any annual contracts.

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Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 237