SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers. Get on jets?

Part-Time VPE 337

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 337

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 135

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 135

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

He references Dan Steinman from Gainsight , who says, “the natural tendency for customers is towards churn.”. How many CSMs should you hire? But after years of research and thinking about this problem at typeform.com and Notion , David decided to write a blog post explaining why this question is so hard to answer. What is their ROI?

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

Kellblog

JANUARY 29, 2020

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. For example, say once we have 3 sales reps hitting their numbers we will go out and hire two more. Ditto for most hiring across the company.

Startup 99

Startup Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 99

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 141

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

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

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

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. It indicates that once a user interacts on the platform once, they continue to interact on a regular basis and increase their spend (or earnings if referring to a supplier) each time.

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 11, 2020

Intercom has responded by hiring a diversity and inclusion consultant, updating our recruitment strategy and hiring practices to reduce bias, scheduling allyship training for all employees, and amplifying Black voices in our podcast and blog. Master” and “slave” also refer to the gruesome practice of slavery.

Technical Review 289

Technical Review Software Review Systems Review CTO Hire 289

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. They talked to all the customers, they did reference calls and turns out they said really, really good things about us and lo and behold it led to our series A.

CTO Hire 161

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 161

CloudGeometry

JULY 8, 2021

When you treat your cloud provider as a fractional colo. The key insight is that one attends to managing technical leverage continuously over time. If it “adds to the time it takes for me to understand how to make a change, and also increases the chance that I’ll make a mistake” it’s cruft.

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework Payment Methods CTO Hire Payment Solutions 130

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 184

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

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. You would approach it by hiring more people.

Enterprise 69

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 69

Valerian Tech

JULY 18, 2023

Understanding Cloud Computing and Recent Trends Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing resources, including storage, processing power, and software applications, over the internet. Embracing cloud computing with a well-thought-out strategy can enable organizations to thrive in the digital era and stay ahead of the competition.

multi-cloud Kubernetes 52

multi-cloud Kubernetes K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Cloud CTO Hire 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

“The biggest thing I can do for Slack is to hire people who know a lot more than I do and give them free rein to do their best work” Adam Risman: You mentioned the team started with performance marketing. And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. Andrew Chen: Exactly.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

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. I do my own reference calls. Excited to be back emceeing.

CTO Coach 126

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 126

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

And I thank a lot of that to actually Met Gourniak, who I hired at that time. And the wave we’re riding at G2, the wave we’re all riding here at Saster is this fourth industrial revolution which really means everything in business is being automated and companies rather than hiring people they are now automating everything.

Sales Recruiting 179

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 179

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 167

Technical Advisors Scale Technical Review Payment Solutions 167

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. We’ve had to hire really smart, driven, intellectually?curious

Technical Advisors 165

Technical Advisors Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 165

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? So once we had Sequoia and Khosla in, we had these references people could call them, so that was fine. Jonathan : Did you have to do any sort of big steps hiring wise? That’s like who you’re hiring too.

Scale 153

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 153

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

From contract signature to launch. 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. Did you take the steps to do the SOC 2 that you reference to? I have a one year contract.

Payment Methods 216

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 216

Upscope

JANUARY 5, 2020

Wikipedia Definition : " Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors. If you position around "time saved" you lose money Jason Cohen has built and sold several companies and is the Founder and CTO of WP Engine.

Strategy 128

Strategy Marketing Sales Hiring Engineering 128

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

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

We were part of the office of the CTO. At that time, Marc Andreessen, the founder was the CTO of the company and there were only three of us in the group. It was pretty easy being an SDR for Marc Andreessen because he’d been on the cover of Time magazine. We initially went to market as a consumer business.

Payment Methods 55

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 55

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

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.

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

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.

Subscription 106

Subscription Payment Features Scale Underperforming Technical Team 106

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

We tend to believe that the technical aspects of our product are the most important differentiator because that’s what our CTO says. And most of the time, the unseen features will provide a better product positioning or marketing message against competitors. As people or members of the same team, we’re biased.

Interviewing 76

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 76

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

We tend to believe that the technical aspects of our product are the most important differentiator because that’s what our CTO says. And most of the time, the unseen features will provide a better product positioning or marketing message against competitors. As people or members of the same team, we’re biased.

Interviewing 52

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

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. A charismatic CEO is able to get investor excited, but the CTO, and/or the rest of the team is just weak. Too many founder vesting issues.

Finance 292

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 292

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. We hire remarkable people, and we give them a lot of freedom for how they’re going to get their work done. Who actually knows stuff and does things?”

Part-Time CTO 273

Part-Time CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach CTO 273

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 137

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 137