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.

Part-Time VPE 282

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 282

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

They’re able to actually swipe a credit card, and what starts off similar to a freemium self-serve product can turn into a six-figure contract in just a few months. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform. The contract size grows.

Outsourced Development 207

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 207

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. And the best CTO I know in the world is the CEO. Anyhow, so then he went and he was a romantic and he did a search company, great engineer, hard problem, search. We have a 60% chance that we can do it. He made a little bit of money.

Outsourcing Services 242

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 242

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. I wouldn’t say I have an exact metric, but-. Excited to be back emceeing.

CTO Coach 164

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 164

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. Average salary: $192,383/yr. Average salary: $151,254/yr.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Discussed in this Episode: When to hire your first account executives Key traits to look for in early sales hires Structuring compensation for first sales reps Should you ‘hire the buyer’ to be your sales rep? 31:55 Hiring for grit, curiosity & determination. What does Joe look like at that time?

Sales Hiring 89

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale VP of Engineering 89

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Emilie : The way I see it, the bar is higher because on the … because of education, there has been a metrics war. So what we see when our companies are pitching to investors is that you know what metrics investors will open the email. Everyone probably knows all the metrics that Jason talks about.

New CTO 161

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 161

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.

Cloud 171

Cloud Scale Trends Artificial Intelligence 171

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. MRR numbers were changing all the time. I realized we had a moving target for the most important metric in our company. 2 different North Star metrics?

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

Time and time again SaaS companies are promising customers that they will save hundreds of thousands of dollars, but their pricing strategies are only capturing a tiny fraction of that savings. The Value Metric: Optimize Your Pricing Strategy for High Growth. Building a Self-Funding Product Qualified Lead Engine.

Pricing 135

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

I just came out of Stripe, I just came out of Datadog, I came out of Fastly, I’m an engineer, I love the guy that was the CTO of Fastly who [inaudible 00:08:34] making it up. Just like a whole bunch of people said, “I’ll never hire remote.” I want him or her. Yet, what if it’s their biggest check?

Sales Recruiting 190

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 190

Sales Hacker

MAY 5, 2021

RevOps is still developing as a function, so people with a lot of different experiences, like moving from engineering to marketing for example, find RevOps to be a great place to put their problem solving skills to work. In fact, many RevOps leaders think of themselves as ‘generalists’ rather than ‘specialists’ in their field.

Scale 119

Scale Technical Cofounder Technical Advisors Sales Hiring 119

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

MRR is the best way to start measuring revenue but as you grow, different metrics will come into play. They will help align teams and all the different metrics. When Co-founder and CTO of Chargify , Michael Klett isn’t brewing his own beer, he’s crafting billing experiences. You need a RevOps team or manager focused on revenue.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 98

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

The main benefits of categorizing your SaaS company’s expenses are more accurate metrics and forecasts, and getting a better understanding of your company’s overall spending. While not a GAAP-metric, it’s widely adopted and understood (examples here , here and here ). This is a v2.0 Don’t forget the payroll’s subaccounts).

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 8, 2018

Chris is a 20 year Silicon Valley veteran having launched the first part of his career at EMC before finding his way to Snowflake in 2013. At Snowflake, he was the first rep and single-handedly built the outbound-engine on the way to scaling the business from pre-revenue all the way past $150M+ in ARR. What You’ll Learn.

Scale 77

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 77

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

If you are trying to overcome no brand and market, you can’t ask somebody for a three year contract. Or, if you do ask for a three year contract, have some terms in there that show that you’re going to prove ROI. Down the road, you can say, “ I demand a two year contract. You would approach it by hiring more people.

Enterprise 79

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 79

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

In HubSpot’s case, we eventually hired a world-class data science team, but our scoring only improved by a few points,” notes Redbord. You’ll need someone familiar with your data—perhaps a CTO or someone responsible for business operations. Watch out: It can be easy to fall into the trap of over-engineering your health score.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Engineering: Scaling Product Delivery , Technical Strategy , Engineering Management (new). Programs are 4-6 weeks in length, part-time, and held in a virtual format, guided by an executive. Unlock your full potential as a Product Manager by learning to drive impact for the metrics that matter most for your product.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO Scale 52

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. They have a core philosophy that you cannot have a successful high-growth software company if your core metrics around Customer Success are not strong, including NPS. We hire a third-party firm. They give us NPS goals.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. MRR numbers were changing all the time. I realized we had a moving target for the most important metric in our company. 2 different North Star metrics?

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Outsourcing Services Payments 52

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

To add to this, B2B marketplaces tend to have various different business models (commission, SaaS, not monetizing in the beginning), which makes it very difficult to come up with one-size-fits-all metrics for each funding round. Experienced VPs with a track record of building successful companies have been hired across multiple functions.

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

It's very hard for PLG to be the only or main motion with infrastructure products because it's not something one engineer will just test and buy. Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. That is a natural hurdle for PLG motion.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

The challenge in each case is the same—the company is hiring you at a lower level of commitment than a full-time hire, usually with the expectation that they will see some ROI relatively quickly. Full-time Head of Marketing I’ve been hired to lead marketing teams at four companies in a full-time capacity now.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

ProfitWell

OCTOBER 1, 2019

When HubSpot first launched its culture code, Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Founder of HubSpot, felt it was important to share it with candidates. Since then, its culture code has been viewed more than 4 million times. In fact, that's probably better for everyone than if you found that out after they've been hired.

Company Culture 40

Company Culture Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 40

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

MARCH 30, 2025

Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. It took 12 years to fix these metrics. Establish a path to $100M ARR and profitability.

Scale 177

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Scaling 177

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Public valuations are still at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, but seed rounds are more expensive than ever. Investors should immediately engage with the CTO to assess their technical capabilities and potential, as great CTOs can demonstrate their exceptional skills quickly. Is it sustainable?

CTO Hire 277

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 277

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 145

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 145

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Leveraging the power of cloud technology, SaaS has re-engineered the way we look at modern technology and software. Know the best strategies to enhance your SaaS career Make use of key insights from leaders, companies, and communities Engineer your SaaS marketing strategy based on their expertise. Aaron Levie. Dharmesh Shah.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

And we’re constantly aligning the metrics in that business plan back to the technology and understanding which dials we need to turn, which types of implementational product feature functions do we need to use that will directly equate to these types of things. As announced today, that’s a public metric.

Payment Methods 261

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 261

Hull

JANUARY 22, 2019

Over the past few years, we've seen a new role emerging at within scaling startups - the growth engineer. These roles are filled by engineers that roll up to the CMO/COO (not CTO) as part of a growth team. In this post, we're going to share where growth engineers come from and why they're here to stay.

SaaS Payments 77

SaaS Payments Technical Advisors Engineering Payment Solutions 77

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

. * 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? * Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why? How does Karl structure the hiring process today?

Sales Hiring 227

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 227

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

When I was a couple of years into my tenure at Oracle, I moved down to Latin America to Argentina, sight unseen actually, and built out a telesales group in Argentina and then later in Miami, hiring about 100 people from 11 different countries and that early building experience really whet my appetite. I came back to North America.

Scale 206

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 206

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. She kicked my butt in every metric you could possibly imagine. I met my wife in sales boot camp.

Scale 214

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 214

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

So the external one is, the metrics bore out that we have made the right decision here. Is there hiring decisions? But I think in most organizations you can maybe budget 25 to 50% of your forward progress on engineering, toward lining up with these narratives and still have tons of room for the things that happen in engineering.

CTO Coach 191

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Software Review 191

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

Before that Bob co-founded RJ Metrics, where he built a global base of online retailers leading to their acquisition by Magento Commerce in 2016. What were the core mistakes that he made with RJ Metrics? How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Loving our podcast content?

Sales Hiring 144

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale CTO Hire 144

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? He was like, "You should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role, for your growth.".

Payment Methods 140

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 140