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. In this interview, David Sacks talks about how 70-80% of investor time is spent looking at AI.

Scale 287

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 287

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Some of the things we talked about were operational overhead and cost of various data stores we were running, along with whether or not we needed to hire dedicated database administrators for various different technologies. Ciaran, our CTO , came up with this magical line. He said, “I want to run less software, not more software.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

But as time went on, we shared lessons, what best practices were in customer success and revenue retention and all these things are, right. But it was super interesting that the two big interviews I did were with Ben Chestnut from Mailchimp yesterday and with Dharmesh and Brian from Hubspot. And I don’t mean in an edgy way.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

OpenView Labs

MARCH 17, 2020

When you ask average questions, you get average hires. So I’m always on the lookout for provocative interview questions that help you learn much more about the person than just their canned answer to “What’s your biggest weakness?” Related: Are You Hiring for Culture Fit or Culture Add?

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team 52

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

You can watch the full session , and if you missed the podcast with the first half of the interview, you’ll find that here. 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.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

What started as a series of interviews by co-founder Des Traynor soon bloomed into hundreds of episodes where we explore how businesses are driving growth through customer relationships and how to build successful products at scale. I’m recording the first in what I expect to be a series of interesting interviews.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

Customer interviews are a powerful tool that can help you better position your B2B product to attract and retain more customers. That’s because B2B businesses address particular niches, where customers don’t spend as much time online. Believe it or not, it’s not rocket science: they perform customer interviews. Let’s dig in!

Interviewing 76

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 76

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. Excited to be back emceeing. That was the start of the Month of Scale.

CTO Coach 164

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 164

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 148

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 148

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Sam’s Corner [28:45]. Show Introduction [00:10]. Check them out.

Scale 120

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 120

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Instead, there’s one continuous streamlined customer-centric journey, leveraging the next generation of artificial intelligence, Outreach allows sales reps to deliver consistent, relevant, and responsible communication for each prospect every time enabling personalization at scale previously unthinkable. Are they hiring?

Marketplace as a Service 113

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 113

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

We do thousands of customer interviews every year, both with the individual and with the B2B buyers that buy our product. That was when we realized we had to go hire some experienced enterprise go-to-market leaders, like Heather Zynczak who runs marketing at Pluralsight. We’re going to change things.

B2B 173

B2B B2C Scale New CTO 173

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. What to do before building a team for your SaaS company You can’t just jump into hiring without some forethought, or you’ll make many mistakes. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. We chat with Maggie about all things sales – from laying down a solid foundation to hiring the right people and, finally, scaling the team into hyper-growth. Listen to the rest of the interview here. Listen to the rest of the interview here.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Technical Review Scale Outsourcing Services 118

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

That question has been on Will Larson ‘s mind for a long time. 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.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Simmone Taitt , CEO of HeartSpace Consulting , and a longtime sales leader and consultant in the New York community. How to build diversity into your hiring practices. It really starts in how you’re hiring. Unconscious bias is a part of all of us.

Sales Hiring 91

Sales Hiring Revenue CTO Coach CTO Hire 91

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

Customer interviews are a powerful tool that can help you better position your B2B product to attract and retain more customers. That’s because B2B businesses address particular niches, where customers don’t spend as much time online. Believe it or not, it’s not rocket science: they perform customer interviews. Let’s dig in!

Interviewing 52

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Tim: I was hired in 2010, when Facebook was what I like to call a “teenage company”. There were about 1,400 people, just under a billion dollars in revenue, and I was hired as the CIO of the company with the mission of driving the productivity of the workforce. That was actually a pretty tall order at the time.

Artificial Intelligence 169

Artificial Intelligence Scale CTO Hire Technology 169

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees. You can also read the full transcript of the interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity, below. So we’re hiring across the board, all departments. Caught your interest? SOC 2 compliance: A Beginner’s Guide. The LinkedIn Incident.

Scale 211

Scale Software Review compliance Technical Review 211

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 8, 2018

Follow the Demand and Hire Accordingly [16:07]. We’re interviewing Chris Degnan, who is the Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake Computing. Chris was actually the first sales hire at Snowflake. Follow the Demand and Hire Accordingly. Sam Jacobs: You get your first customer, at some point you start hiring.

Scale 81

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 81

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

We should probably do an interview together. And if we’re talking to the right profile of person, they’re very interested in doing that interview and doing that case study. If you are trying to overcome no brand and market, you can’t ask somebody for a three year contract. It’s helpful early on.

Enterprise 81

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 81

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

Underlying all the functional processes are myriad systems supporting and handing off each business activity to the next step, from quote to cash, from customer interview to product development to customer engagement analytics in the product. Chief Product Officer.

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

To get more practical, I recently interviewed over 10 SaaS companies and asked them 4 questions: Which platform(s) do you use to run your community? . Your online community may become your first destination for interviewing company representatives, turning those answers into articles, and improving your organic rankings. #2

Marketing 98

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

Sales Hacker

MAY 5, 2021

As Director of RevOps, he scaled his team at Sendoso by hiring smart generalists to lead their own teams of MOps, SOps, CSOps. Ask him about his thoughts on what companies are looking for in a RevOps role or where companies go wrong trying to hire/ build their RevOps function.). Alex Miller , Director of RevOps at Sendoso.

Scale 122

Scale Technical Cofounder Technical Advisors Sales Hiring 122

Mucker Capital

OCTOBER 22, 2018

Through Mucker, I met my CTO and co-founder, Taylor Bayouth. We’ve been hiring and really growing the team, and we’ll continue to do so. They saw the value and they were super interested. That’s what I needed. I needed someone to see what I had actually built, and “get it,” even though I didn’t have a team or a shiny background.

Interviewing 40

Interviewing CTO Hire New CTO CTO 40

OpenView Labs

JUNE 18, 2020

And hiring people who are better than you. Read more interviews with the most interesting humans in SaaS. ICYMI: Meet Mailchimp’s CTO Eric Muntz. Then I make breakfast for my kids, have a cup of coffee, take a shower and go to work. What are the most important qualities of a leader? Who is your role model?

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Software Engineering 52

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

We’ve got an interview with Angus Davis. Today’s sponsor is Outreach , the leading sales engagement platform that enables sales reps to humanize their communications at scale, from automating the soul-sucking manual work that eats up selling time to providing action-oriented tips on what communications are working best.

Payment Methods 62

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 62

Crafty CTO

APRIL 17, 2023

What are people “sleeping on” … I’m borrowing the “sleeping on” reference from an interview Willison did on the Changelog podcast , where he said : This is the thing I worry that people are sleeping on. The fact they can do even a fraction of the things they can do is, quite frankly, unbelievable.

Artificial Intelligence 8

Artificial Intelligence CTO Hire ChatGPT AI Search 8

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

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. After the Series A, Buffer fell into a similar trap to Wistia - they hired too quickly, specifically to accelerate product development. The company even took $2.5M

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

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. That third-party firm does what they call IDIs, or in-depth interviews, to get a sense of the customer experience. We also need to change the way that we make hiring decisions.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

About My First 16 Our new video podcast series My First 16 features interviews with founders and CEOs of fintech companies about how they acquired their initial customers and the hard lessons they learned along the way. It was just being in, I think it was in Copenhagen at the time as where the Money20/20 first started.

Merchant Services 81

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 81

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. Tell me, explain how you think about testing this in an interview. Chances are you'll hear some nuance in there.”.

Company Culture 40

Company Culture Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 40

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

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

Now, without further ado, let’s listen to this interview with Jeff Winters. We know, by persona, by ICP, how people respond to what, for a long period of time, and how we can, more specifically, get meetings with these individuals,” because that was the name of the game. I see this online all the time.

Scale 91

Scale Artificial Intelligence Sales Recruiting Consulting 91

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

To get more practical, I recently interviewed over 10 SaaS companies and asked them 4 questions: Which platform(s) do you use to run your community? Your online community may become your first destination for interviewing company representatives, turning those answers into articles, and improving your organic rankings. #2

Marketing 40

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 40

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 231

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 231

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).

Part-Time VPE 261

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire New CTO CTO 261