SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

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. 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.

Scale 146

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 146

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

This is a relationship worth investing in. 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.

Enterprise 79

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 79

Hacking Revenue

AUGUST 4, 2016

We can put together a WordPress website and we have some fancy badges in CodeAcademy, but no CTO in his right mind will let either of us touch their production environment and/or keyboard. We know the tools, we know the methods and we know how to hire and manage people. With the full BOOK of instructions, we get busy hiring.

Software 75

Software CTO Hire Scale New CTO 75

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support. 5 Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO at dofollow.io (B2B PR SaaS) says: “ Our community is primarily on Facebook and Linkedin and it has been live for over a year. But mostly our members help each other, and it works like a charm.

Marketing 98

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital with over 20 years of operational experience. Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital, but has over 20 years of operational experience. We invest in technology companies typically at the earliest stages.

Payment Methods 61

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 61

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

What’s the return on investment of your mom? What about the ROI of spending time with your family, friends, or kids? He references Dan Steinman from Gainsight , who says, “the natural tendency for customers is towards churn.”. How many CSMs should you hire? And Sprinklr acquires Nanigans. Your top subscription news.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

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 ??

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support. 5 Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO at dofollow.io (B2B PR SaaS) says: Our community is primarily on Facebook and Linkedin and it has been live for over a year. But mostly our members help each other, and it works like a charm.

Marketing 40

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 40

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Ok the title here is a bit dramatic, but certainly seed investing is in an odd place in 2024. Public valuations are still at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, but seed rounds are more expensive than ever. The best investments grow from $1 million to $10 million in 5 quarters or less. Venture capitalists are investing more money.

CTO Hire 292

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 292

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

And so once I had the idea I convinced my father to invest and become a customer. He was investing in internet companies. And I thank a lot of that to actually Met Gourniak, who I hired at that time. And our whole goal with G2 is to make that much easier because you will also tend to tax your references.

Sales Recruiting 231

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 231

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

From contract signature to launch. It doesn’t take the massive amounts of infrastructure investment that it required before. Touching it, playing with it in a way a CIO or CTO might not before? Jason Lemkin: One question because I think this is interesting to founders, even though it’s going back in time.

Payment Methods 268

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 268

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

That means lots and lots of hiring and I don’t want to say firing, we did fire anyone, but people get reshuffled, you know? Okay, so what were the stages of investment rounds that you took? So once we had Sequoia and Khosla in, we had these references people could call them, so that was fine. That’s like who you’re hiring too.

Scale 203

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 203

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 210

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 210

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 4, 2023

To improve the efficiency of spend on cost of goods sold (COGS), most growth-stage leaders can optimize seat-based spend or renegotiate consumption-based contracts in a quarter or 2. Focus on performance management of your product and engineering teams as early indicators for what R&D investments are working, and which aren’t.

Underperforming Technical Team 120

Underperforming Technical Team Benchmarks CTO Hire New CTO 120

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

What other elements of the contract should startups really spend a lot of time focusing on? 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. This episode is sponsored by Brex.

CTO Hire 170

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 170

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2019

And by business technology function I want to define that because sometimes there’s a overlap with the CTO from an engineering side. Harry Stebbings: So given the centrality of that role there and the ever increasing prominence of it, I guess my next question is for operators listening, when is the right time to hire that first CIO?

Technical Advisors 228

Technical Advisors Scale Technical Review Payment Solutions 228

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2020

So I spent some time talking to our CEO, our CTO, and some of the board members about ways that we can go to market in a different way that might allow us to kind of break that next kind of barrier to growth. I think the next thing that was really critical was, you cannot discount the need to actually hire locally as well.

Payment Features 114

Payment Features Subscription Scale Underperforming Technical Team 114

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2018

At our inaugural SaaStr Europa last June, podcast host-with-the-most Harry Stebbings sat down with MuleSoft Founder and CTO Ross Mason to discuss the organization’s sales strategy, building a strong company culture, how to think about international expansion, and much more. There’s investment arms all over the UK.

Technical Advisors 226

Technical Advisors Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 226

Kellblog

JANUARY 29, 2020

Why are you and your team the best people to invest in? Some startups have relatively complete teams while others have only a CEO and CTO and a few functional directors. That takes a lot of hiring and on-boarding risk off the table. Ditto for most hiring across the company. Completeness. Prior exactly-relevant experience.

Startup 100

Startup Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 100

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

Don’t force VCs to find out in due diligence that only 2 percent of the pool, not the customary 15 percent or so, is available for new hires. VCs will ask you for customer references to call. And if they are seed investing in the round (surprisingly common) — disclose it! Half of a VC investment is in the CEO.

Finance 301

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 301

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2024

At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. So, for those of you thinking, “Hey, I’m going wait on the ROI of our culture, or I’m going to wait to invest in our employee experience,” wait no longer.

Part-Time CTO 284

Part-Time CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach CTO 284

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2019

Previously, Peter was also the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive where he brought CBS into the cloud. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Liberty identity consortium that designed SAML 2. Why is it no longer to come into large enterprises with a small contract and expand? How has Peter found the transition from CTO to CEO this time?

VP of Engineering 154

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 154

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. For example, I recently talked with the CEO of a biotech investment fund. So Welcome To S1E4.

Artificial Intelligence 8

Artificial Intelligence CTO Hire ChatGPT AI Search 8

Sales Hacker

MARCH 11, 2025

Cassie’s time in tech dates back to 2006, when she joined TheLadders.com as an early employee and managed marketing and analytics for the company’s subscription business. She began her career as a tech and media analyst at Citigroup Global Corporate & Investment Bank. Roadmap is one part of the problem, right?

Scale 79

Scale Technical Advisors Sales Hiring Technical Review 79

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Martin Roth: [2:50] Friends and family, very small investment. I’m not going to claim to be the founder of Levelset, but that founding team, CTO, VP of customer experience, chief legal, our CFO, who kind of came later, but like that group, everyone stayed with the organization in executive roles the whole time.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling CTO Coach 113