SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2019

I remember my CTO once arguing with a Fortune 500 company on a “security” concern they had which really made no sense. More here: I Never Lost a Customer I Actually Visited | SaaStr Not hiring a full-time RFP person. Not hiring a full-time Chief Security & Compliance Offer. Didn’t matter. They were concerned.

Sales Hiring 170

Sales Hiring Enterprise CTO Hire CTO 170

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 125

Underperforming Technical Team Benchmarks CTO Hire New CTO 125

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. 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. I want to invest in her.”

Outsourcing Services 193

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 193

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?

Payment Services 100

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 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. Jason Cohen breaks down the question in his Quora post.

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.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

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. How did you get your PE colleagues to invest in the customer experience? We hire a third-party firm. Find the hardest problems to solve and you will succeed.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

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 134

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 134

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? Does it have to be tied to a number related to revenue? We were hired into the same role, same start date, competed head to head. Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook.

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 174

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

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.

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

That’s the advice, Petri Hollmén picked up on the more technical side of things from the opening session on Day 2 with Cal Henderson, CTO of Slack. You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense. Hire Game Changers to Propel Growth. People were already looking for it.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. On this episode of Scale by Intercom, we spoke with Farhan to learn more about where the future of customer support is heading, and how understanding customer behavior can help to drive revenue in the future. Janeen Uzzell , COO for Wikimedia Foundation.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

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 248

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 248

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

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?

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 136

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 31, 2019

When you filter the same group of companies but adding revenue growth over 50%, the median number of Finance execs rises over 70% to 12 in Finance. We’ve also seen a portion of SaaS FP&A executives coming out of investment banking or investor groups. Finance skill sets. Skills & Experience.

Finance 40

Finance CTO Hire Headcount SaaS 40

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Investment funds like Indie.VC 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. Buffer was so hot at the time - revenues were growing 150% per year - that the terms they got for their Series A were insanely good.

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

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? If we succeed, the benefits go beyond retaining revenue: successful customers spread positive word of mouth which makes it easier to attract more customers. How many CSMs should you hire? What is their ROI?

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? Jason Warner , who was CTO of GitHub before and during my time as COO there (and a former partner at Redpoint!) What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? We are currently investing out of our 9th Early Stage fund, a $650M vehicle.

Management 229

Management CTO Hire New CTO AI 229

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.

Sales Recruiting 40

Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 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 157

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 157

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

Eyal Manor : But there is a lot of investment in that direction. Megan Leuders: And when you were talking to CEOs and CTOs today, what do you believe is the biggest technology challenge that they are facing as a SaaS company? So deep integration from day one of the data pipelines in real time is super critical.

Cloud 168

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 168

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.

Social Media 16

Social Media CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO 16

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. His answers didn’t disappoint. They wanted a one-call close.

CTO Hire 186

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 186

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. Strategy: To get started, identify playbooks that yield the highest revenue. The next hiring focus should be growth marketing. Once this is in place, start investing in paid channels.

Scale 196

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 196

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.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 244

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. ” We didn’t do any annual contracts.

Part-Time VPE 227

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 227

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. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. Our Chief Revenue officer, another one of our senior leadership lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

CTO Hire 157

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 157

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.

Marketplace as a Service 94

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Data 94

SmartKarrot

AUGUST 16, 2022

These annual executive business meetings are a wonderful time to discuss contracts. The idea is to provide customers with value to keep them invested with the company. If customers were to attend QBRs, they need to put in time for every application or tool in their tech stack. Discuss terms of renewal.

Technical Review 10

Technical Review Systems Review Business CTO Hire 10

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. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Erica made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic. Welcome to Episode 214!

Scale 173

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 173

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. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit.

Startup 52

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?

Sales Hiring 218

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 218

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Join this panel of investors from Connect Ventures, Blossom Capital, Dawn Capital, The Family, and Indico Partners as they provide an overview of the current investment landscape, and discuss whether the seed stage is emerging as the new Series A. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

New CTO 147

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 147

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

One of the top SaaS influencers is Dharmesh Shah , co-founder, and CTO of HubSpot. He led early-stage investments in Box and Yammer. He also featured in The New York Times and CB Insights. He tweets on product design , investments, venture capitalism, and technology. Dharmesh Shah. Marc Benioff. Neil Patel. Steli Efti.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And then, invest your energy and time into the product. 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. You’ve got to learn about sales, about marketing and, otherwise, you need to hire a lot of other people around you to help.

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Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 131