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 100

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 What’s their new CAC Payback Time? New Gross Margins? Cost of Revenue Let’s start with your Cost of Revenue. The gist of it is that Cost of Revenue includes costs that go into providing your Software as a Service.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

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. While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. What is Buffer.

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Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

Additionally, “leapfrog” candidates—those who come from a level below the C-suite, such as senior vice presidents—now make up roughly 5% of new chief execs. 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.

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CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

With that in mind, before we welcome the new year and all the good things to come, we’ve gathered our favorite insights and nuggets of wisdom from 2021 in a special wrap-up episode. Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. Zanade Mann , founder of Black Women’s Business Collective.

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VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

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? Are marketing becoming the new sales team with their content being used more and more in the sales funnel? Does it have to be tied to a number related to revenue?

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 178

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Don’t overextend your resources when testing new SaaS growth ideas. 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. You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense.

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Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

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. While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. What is Buffer.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

Your top subscription news. What’s the return on investment of your mom? What about the ROI of spending time with your family, friends, or kids? If we succeed, the benefits go beyond retaining revenue: successful customers spread positive word of mouth which makes it easier to attract more customers. Your mom has an ROI.

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Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Investment funds like Indie.VC The fact of the matter is there are countless ways that you can choose to build your business, and even amongst this new flock of independent SaaS companies there are significant, deliberate differences in the approaches these companies have taken. in debt to buy out their investors.

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CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

What other elements of the contract should startups really spend a lot of time focusing on? What can they do to enforce a sense of urgency when signing new clients? And second, just last week he started an incredibly exciting new opportunity with his new company. Where do founders make mistakes in negotiation?

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CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 133

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Gaetan Gachet : All right, so usually the way I start this session is I ask the crowd which revenue stage they’re in. So when I joined we’re pretty much pre-revenue. 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. One and 10?

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

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

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? In just four years, Podium has raised almost $100 million, with annual recurring revenue increasing to almost $60 million. Yep, we did that.

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Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

ProfitWell

JANUARY 24, 2020

Number two: Your efforts don’t necessarily convert to revenue. Traffic and impressions don’t always equate to resonance, and they certainly don’t guarantee more revenue. is a much worthier investment for your 2020. Brendan Schwartz , Co-Founder and CTO over at Wistia, has spent a lot of time learning to trust his instincts.

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Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 40

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2024

“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal?

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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. You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. You can’t hire a magician Head of Product.

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Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 241

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

In the last two years there have been so many new services around security, around machine learning that literally did not exist. Eyal Manor : But there is a lot of investment in that direction. Eyal Manor : So we spoke about security, but one of the biggest trend we alluded to was the emergence of new AI services.

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Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 171

Buffer Resources

JANUARY 30, 2023

Then he became CTO at Bezos Academy, a non-profit organization founded by Jeff Bezos. After leaving Bezos Academy, he decided to start a paid newsletter focused on career development, organization design, and hiring. “ I want to invest as little as possible to get 80% of the value. Each insight becomes a Buffer post.

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Social Media CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO 17

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales.

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CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 175

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%.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 155

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. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

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Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 221

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. Prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214m in funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and Blackrock, to name a few.

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Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 167

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 151

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 240

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home. It was our largest contract to date, kind of helps the other quarter. The catch was he had just moved his family four kids to New York city. We had no New York city presence. For example, I referenced hiring a Chief Revenue Officer, Bill.

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CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 161

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Hiring managers are also just trying to sell as well. Users come to us all the time and they say, Hey, this company looks awesome. Are they hiring? That goes to the hiring manager. And if you get hired, RepVue will actually pay you $500. And it’s easy to inflate that for companies during the hiring process.

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Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Data 96

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

One of the top SaaS influencers is Dharmesh Shah , co-founder, and CTO of HubSpot. Hiten has a weekly SaaS newsletter that helps readers know new strategies, learn techniques, etc. Liz writes in publications like Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He led early-stage investments in Box and Yammer.

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VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. If you're generating something that's brand new, like a brand new category, nobody understands about it. You need to invest at least a year or even two years. That will never work.

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Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

As for Karl, prior to founding the company he spent 6 years at Google in some fascinating roles including Head of Patents, Head of Business Development in China and running Google’s energy investments. How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? How does Karl structure the hiring process today? What works?

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Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 221

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

362: The Future of the Customer with Bernadette Nixon, CEO @ Algolia, Jay Snyder, Chief Customer Officer @ New Relic, and Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight. Nick Mehta: On a boat in Rhode Island and then our second guest Jay Snyder, who just recently took over as Chief Customer Officer of New Relic, publicly traded SaaS company.

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Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 196

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. And we were doing great in revenue. We doubled revenue every year since 2015. I do grocery delivery.

Merchant Services 79

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 79

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And then, invest your energy and time into the product. And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. 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?

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Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 136

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman , a former host of the podcast, asked Rachel what made that point when Rachel joined Slack in 2016 the right time to invest in growth marketing? For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. They had occasional advertising here and there. Here’s Rachel.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

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. How to Increase Revenue by 19% [36:37]. What You’ll Learn. Being Better [43:57]. Sam’s Corner [50:09].

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Sales Hiring Revenue CTO Coach CTO Hire 69

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

And then the sale will commence as far as the people and this was, we were multiple millions of dollars of revenue until I took the first call. So look, again, we were, the product was out there, we were at revenue in our case. Vlad: So what’s the new reality? So we needed to kind of get the new mindset going. Vlad : No.

Scale 148

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 148

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last night I read this question on Quora : In general terms, what is the ideal size and make-up of a team for a pre-revenue SaaS startup? I think the second part of the question is more important. This can be a huge advantage, especially for a bootstrapped startup that can't afford to hire many people.

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