OpenView Labs

APRIL 12, 2019

Getting hiring right is absolutely critical. I’d like to talk about two different companies with two very different approaches to hiring post-seed raise. To get the team started we hired several junior developers. There is a binary feeling that comes from making those first few technical hires. We needed a CTO.

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CTO Hire Investment New CTO CTO 64

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Indeed this was also my #1 mistake and the #1 I see from so many startups learning to go upmarket. As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on. Are we sure?

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 264

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? Start by creating a new account from clicking the button New on the top-right. Use area charts for more detail. Let’s start with Payroll – Support.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

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. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote. Jason Lemkin: Our base.

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Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 180

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 252

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

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Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 88

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 CTO Hire Scale 151

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 142

OpenView Labs

MARCH 17, 2020

When you ask average questions, you get average hires. If a potential senior hire has gotten so far as to talk with the CEO , she’s probably someone the company wants. Mixmax isn’t the only company that tries to talk new employees out of staying. Zappos famously pays new employees to leave after the first month.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team 52

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. After building their initial prototype, the team presented at Startup Weekend in Columbia and won. “The Cadence: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup into an Army.”

Payment Services 100

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 100

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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CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. That is a natural hurdle for PLG motion.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

The 90-Day Rule , which argues that new managers need to be decisive about who stays on the teams they inherit. Startup CEOs generally fall into one of two categories and the category is likely to predict how they will approach the ownership issue. Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. The problem?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

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 209

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2019

250: Peter Yared is the Founder & CEO @ InCountry, the startup that allows you to operate globally with data residency as a service meaning they store your mission-critical data in it’s country of origin, without compliance. Previously, Peter was also the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive where he brought CBS into the cloud.

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VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 128

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.

Scale 160

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 160

Kellblog

JANUARY 29, 2020

The majority of startups solve a problem that is already being solved in some way today. Unless you are solving a brand-new problem (e.g., Unless you are solving a brand-new problem (e.g., If they are already solving the problem in some way, your new solution more likely represents an optimization than a breakthrough.

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Startup Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 99

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 20, 2024

And a lot of the time, GPT-3 could not write as good of an answer as what the best human answer was that had been written, but it could write an answer instantly to any question. The constraint for Quora had always been the amount of time that high-quality answer writers had to answer questions. David George: Sure. Yeah, of course.

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AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 138

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

In it, Co-Founder and CRO of Kronologic, Aaron Bollinger, shows us how to close enterprise level deals when you’re a startup. How to overcome no credible timing event. All right guys, welcome to the Sales Hacker’s Success Summit presentation, How To Close The Enterprise When You Are Just A Startup. What You’ll Learn.

Enterprise 69

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 69

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

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. Julien Lemoine | Co-founder and CTO @Algolia. So I’m Julien, Co-founder and CTO of Algolia. Want to see more content like this?

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Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 120

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 239

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

In this framework, you’ll learn how to design a scoring system that aligns to your growth strategy, brainstorm and select leader indicators of success, and operationalize the system across your startup. It’s not uncommon for early-stage teams to lean on CS to improve renewal rates and buy time for their software to catch up.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Along the way, we’ve interviewed trailblazers, business leaders, makers and doers to share their experience and insights on all things startup strategy, product management, design, marketing, customer experience, and much, much more. For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

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

MARCH 1, 2019

Today I wanted to talk to you about something a little bit unconventional, which is around doing M&A, as a startup yourself. I used to be a CTO and operator, co-founder of a SaaS start up. And something of insight so we are New York based, global venture and equity investor. So basically start ups, acquiring other start ups.

Outsourcing Services 106

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Technical Review 106

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.

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Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

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 213

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. Speed is every startup’s biggest competitive advantage.

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VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

403: Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Success @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 167

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. He was a VP of product at a series D startup, so a little bit ahead of us and we just had a real connection. We had no New York city presence. I had a good sense.

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CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 152

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

. * What are the biggest green lights for CIOs when startups are pitching them? What are the biggest red flags CIOs see when startups are pitching them? What must startups always remember when pitching CIOs? * What must startups remember about how CIOs think about price? Where do founders make mistakes in negotiation?

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CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 132

Teamgate

JANUARY 14, 2019

My journey started working with well-known brands such as VISA and TomTom, and since 2014 I started gradually moving to the world of startups and scaleups. Also, you are known to the media, meaning the public interest in the story is more obvious and placing a story takes less time.

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Interviewing Startup Technical Review Technical Advisors 81

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

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

Great to see a lot of repeat attendees and some new ones. 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. This is a program where we invite luminaries from the startup world to share their insights. I’m Travis Bryant.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 125

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. So, how does data science differ? Option 2: Become an Analytics Manager.

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CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO CTO 53

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Announcing new features, increasing customer satisfaction and retention are among the top functions of an online community. . #1 Our community is the best way for us to inform our customers about upcoming updates and new features. Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support.

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Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

297: Bob Moore is the Founder & CEO @ Crossbeam, the startup that helps companies find overlapping prospects and customers while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves? Yep, we did that.

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Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 131