SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2023

In my first start-up, there were literally only a handful of engineers who understood our technology. The best we made our CTO. But what if our CTO gets hit by a bus? He scaled up our technology in a way folks for years had thought was impossible. Sometimes, still hire them. I remember when it happened to me.

CTO Hire 225

CTO Hire CTO Technology Engineering 225

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Some leaders like Slack have seen the same, but most Cloud leaders at scale with high NRR end up getting more and more of their revenue from their existing base, not new customers. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. They’re growing even faster at scale. More on that here.

Scale 270

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 270

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? Positions Needed: Enterprise AEs, Mid-Market & SMB AEs, SDRs, Sales Ops, Sales Engineer. CTO (40 Employees). CTO (114 Employees).

CTO Hire 249

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 249

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. It’s happened to me, and I think for whatever my faults, I have a pretty high EQ and am a half-decent manager. The three times it happened to me: A very senior engineer that we just HAD to have.

Part-Time VPE 273

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 273

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. But even if you’ve hired the world’s best VP of Sales … you can’t opt out of sales entirely.

Part-Time VPE 273

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 273

SaaStr

JUNE 12, 2022

SaaStr 559: Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal. Top 5 Mistakes Building & Scaling Global Product Teams | HubSpot GM & VP, Products Poorvi Shrivastav. with Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone.

Scale 173

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire CTO 173

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. But after a couple million in ARR, you can afford any hire if they’re accretive.

Part-Time VPE 185

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 185

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. Get on a jet, at least twice a quarter.

Part-Time VPE 268

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 268

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. My CTO and dev team is building all the features we need.

Sales Hiring 358

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 358

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2018

On day one as Reddit’s new VP of Engineering, Nick Caldwell faced a dilemma. He had just spent 13 years at Microsoft, most recently as the head of 300 engineers. At Reddit, he led a team of 35 – none of whom knew how to manage other engineers. Building trust can be tough when you’re a new hire in a leadership position.

Leadership 141

Leadership Engineering Part-Time VPE CTO Coach 141

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 94

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 94

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

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

As we scale, we’re working with larger mid-market and enterprise customers with more complex needs and specifications. Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team. The overlap and synergies between these teams means we can use automation to efficiently solve problems at scale while remaining lean. .

Data 118

Data compliance Technical Review CTO Hire 118

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Developer Success Manager Betsy Calender, and VP of Developer Experience Zeno Rocha share how to price your product for developers, how to market it to developers, how to how to support them as they scale and use the products. The contract size grows. Doing Business with Developers.

Underperforming Technical Team 183

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 183

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. Henrique and co-founder Pedro Franceschi founded the company as 22-year-old engineers in Brazil in 2017. At the time the duo had founded Pagar.me, a payment processor.

Payment Services 100

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 100

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Build, communicate, and execute a cohesive product strategy across feature, growth, scaling and innovation product work. Membership combines cohort-based programs, with a year-round experience to help you learn, execute, and scale your career and your company. Engineering Programs. Engineering Management.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO Scale 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

hiring in-house talent). Scaling companies that need insight can get it easily with the help of a specialized platform that guides them through all the necessary and applicable sales tax obligations and processes. . Leverage automation to support scaling. “But with AutoFile, we’ve scaled to doing taxes in 40+ states.”

Merchant Services 172

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 172

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. But as you scale beyond Series A, how can you be sure you’re choosing the right lane? There are plenty of resources and advice on unlocking the secrets of the engineering management career path. Janeen Uzzell , COO for Wikimedia Foundation.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

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. The very first few sales hire are I would say not your typical reps. Laura Bilazarian : Awesome.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 136

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

There are enough stories of data breaches and cyber attacks to chill even the savviest security engineer to the core. An aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur, Adam learned early the best way to earn trust was proving you deserve it. Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees. The LinkedIn Incident.

Scale 211

Scale compliance Software Review Technical Review 211

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. It’s the only way to scale the business. And you should do it right then.

CTO Coach 101

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 101

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business. The Gold: these are very rare and hard to achieve at the scale-up stage, so you’ll mostly encounter them with startups. Get marketing and engineering working together.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. This is why, when it came time to shift from a transactional to a subscription pricing model, our team at Hired didn’t hesitate for a moment. No sliding scale. – once.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 40

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Eyal Manor – VP, Engineering @ Google Cloud. And the same customer challenges that we were being presented, which was: How do you scale? Want to see more content like this session? Join us for SaaStr Annual 2020.

Cloud 168

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 168

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

What was Sam’s biggest lesson from scaling the sales team at Dropbox? 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. Let’s go do it.

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 174

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm. Q: FranConnect has customers of all sizes, from emerging and growing to scaling and enterprise. They’ve got a proven concept they need to scale. You run the gamut. It gets quite complex.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

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

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2022

Miguel Carranza, CTO at RevenueCat, shares ten learnings from firsthand experience in architecting an API & SDK that is currently on 5,000+ apps and has seen 3x growth Year-over-Year. . But at scale, people will use your API in crazy ways that you might not imagine, so some margin of the unexpected is unavoidable.

CTO Hire 224

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Scaling 224

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers. Get on jets?

Part-Time VPE 327

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 327

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. Register for SaaStr Annual and join 12,500 Cloud and SaaS Founders, VCs, and Execs at SaaStr Annual for three full days of workshops, sessions, and networking — all to help you scale faster.

CTO Coach 187

CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 187

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

At what scale does that become impossible? 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? What are the drivers of its death? How important is it to own the entire customer journey?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

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. But the pricing is just one element, so to speak, of the contract negotiation process.

CTO Hire 133

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 133

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Scaling a PLG company While it’s great to figure out a PLG model that allows you to scale your revenue with inbound, it cannot stop there. Take stock of customer satisfaction at each point of the journey—product, engineering, design, growth, presales, support, and post-sales. Hire a CTO and unify the entire data function.

Scale 194

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 194

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.

Scale 124

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 124

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 245

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 245

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 156

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 156

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

How can founders know when is the right time to make the move from SMB to enterprise? Where does Erica often see founders make mistakes with this scaling? With the scaling of departments and teams, what has Erica seen work really well when it comes to making cross-functional teams communicate really well?

Scale 171

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 171