SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2021

Lately I’ve been working with 5+ SaaS companies all hiring their first VP of Product. And critically, most have a really strong CEO-CTO partnership. A few general learnings: A VP of Product that Reports to CTO / Engineering Rarely Meets With That Many Customers. Even if the CTO is doing the heavy lifting.

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SaaStr

JULY 23, 2021

Brian Peterson, CTO @ Dialpad. Nicole Culver, Director of Product Marketing, SaaS @Bandwidth. Dave Walters, CTO, Hired. Christa Diaz, Senior Director, Customer Success, Hired. Amy Pisano, CRO, Hired. Jenn Knight, Co-Founder, CTO, AgentSync. Zach Kitschke, CMO, Canva. Tom Clayton, CRO @ Bill.com.

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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.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2020

Anyhow the one thing I learned, beyond getting help screening and hiring for these positions from domain experts, is to look for Flags. For signs the prospective hire just won’t work out, no matter how strong they might look on paper. Why join a start-up? Well reason #1 is personal and career advancement. Not for start-ups.

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SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2023

Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit Dear SaaStr: Should You Hire Someone That Seems Good … But Always Job Hops? SaaStr 639: Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma VP of Sales Scott Pugh   3. SaaStr 636: Extreme Product Design: Building Things People Actually Use with Stripe CTO David Singleton  5.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Hiring a reliable team is an all-encompassing issue where startups dive in head-first but fail to optimize it for success. . Hiring an expert produces 1000x better results than someone with interests elsewhere. . “A Hiring in a streamlined manner with a rigorous selection process initially builds momentum for long-term goals.

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SaaStr

JULY 3, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Zendesk and Anaplan: A Tale of Two Very Similar, And Very Different, $10B SaaS Acquisitions. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. with Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone.

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SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. SaaS products get too complex to hack a product roadmap too long. She can be your CTO forever. That’s a different, and critical, job than CTO. Finding, hiring and retaining these VPs is challenge #1 for scaling up.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

This post will walk you through what SaaS companies need to know about sales tax compliance, how to know when and from which customers you should collect sales tax, and best of all, how to automate sales tax so you can check “Do something about sales tax” off your to-do list once and for all. Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies?

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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. Not being responsive to every key concern.

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SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).

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SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. But, as founders, at least as we cross $1-$1.5m

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SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2021

The top SaaS companies grow faster than ever these days. The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Veterans of the SaaS journey. And if you are, you are going to naturally start off hiring up-and-comers to your first leadership team. Even though they already did that before.

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SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

But even if you’ve hired the world’s best VP of Sales … you can’t opt out of sales entirely. You can’t just exit “marketing” because you hired a VP of Demand Gen. Instead, Hire a VP Product, Pick 2 or 3 Initiatives a Year to Spearhead — and Get Out of the Way On the Rest.

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Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

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SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. 2/ Hiring a full-time head of biz dev once I had a few key partners. And hire against it.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. But I forced us to hire him, over my CTO’s strong objection and my VPE’s grudging acknowledgment we had no choice. It was a hire I wasn’t really in favor of, but it was an experiment.

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SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

As a global technology provider powering thousands of SaaS companies, Google is at the forefront of driving exciting and innovative technologies to market. You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Who’s here on a CEO or more on a business hat SaaS?

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The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. What comes next?

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SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

And I’ve been building SaaS Companies now for 20 years, so that’s a long time. But they were doing it earlier than Java and trying to do it in a way where it gets deployed on the internet, which is something we would call SaaS today. And as a hobby we have just launched another SaaS company called ThreeKit.

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OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

A Couple SaaS Generations Ago… Traditional software companies managed sales, product development, finance and HR in siloed organizations by function. In the early SaaS days, management structure was essentially the same. The SaaS operating model requires execution across functional activities.

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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 do have a slight preference with respect to the team size as well, but it's light because I've seen and worked with very successful SaaS startups with different team sizes.

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Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 18, 2019

Here’s my list in SaaS: Being reluctant to go up-market. A bit more here: Why There Is a 50/50 Chance You’ll Tilt Upmarket in SaaS | SaaStr. A bit more here: Why There Is a 50/50 Chance You’ll Tilt Upmarket in SaaS | SaaStr. Not hiring a good enough CTO. SaaS is so competitive these days.

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SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

SaaStr has now passed 10,000+ pieces of content, and we’ve somewhat gone on a journey from the early days of a SaaS company, through the growth phases, to the Unstoppable phase, and now has time has gone on, even to the Decacorn phase ?? Sometimes when you start a company it’s 100% obvious who the CEO should be.

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OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Heading into the 2020 planning season, SaaS FP&A teams are working to finalize 2020 budgets and planning. Over the past decade benchmarking software and SaaS companies , I’ve had the chance at OPEXEngine to work with hundreds of amazing Finance execs who work incredibly hard at getting the right data to support their company’s goals.

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SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In my first start-up as a founder, I had a great CTO and VPE and a pretty darn good VP Ops from the very beginning. Second, hire the best management team you can as early as you can. SaaS is so cross-functional. But don’t wait a moment after that to hire the best senior help you can. That made all the difference.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on. ” — Echeyde Cubillo, Co-founder and CTO, Acme Ticketing. Get the team together, revamp the product roadmap so it doesn’t happen again, hire a great VP of CS if you don’t have one. Are we sure?

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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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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. Wade Foster is Co-founder and CEO of Zapier, a SaaS company that allows users to integrate web applications they use. “The Cadence: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup into an Army.”

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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 Hacker

OCTOBER 8, 2018

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Chris Degnan , Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake Computing, one of the fastest growing SaaS platforms in the world. Follow the Demand and Hire Accordingly [16:07]. Chris was actually the first sales hire at Snowflake. Follow the Demand and Hire Accordingly.

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Hull

JANUARY 22, 2019

The explosion of SaaS tools (and with it, data silos) together creates a need for a cross-functional, operations role to support go-to-market teams. These roles are filled by engineers that roll up to the CMO/COO (not CTO) as part of a growth team. But first, we need to set some context (albeit from the perspective of B2B SaaS).

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

And it really makes no sense because I’ve asked so many of the best SaaS CEOs that are public how to go multi-product. And the best one of all, if you didn’t see it, we did it at one of our digital events this year was Spencer Skates, CEO of Amplitude, one of my favorite SaaS CEOs. We have a 60% chance that we can do it.

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SaaStr

APRIL 22, 2019

Hear why he thinks that the next call should not have been to a competitor. “Hiring, Firing and Stretching: How to Build Your First Management Teams” ScaleX Founder and Managing Partner Dilek Dayinlarli and Insider Co-Founder and CEO Hande Cilingir and Atlassian Head of OpsGenie Berkay Mollamustafaoglu. His next call?

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Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

By Geoff Roberts Last year Clement Vouillon of Point Nine Capital wrote an article entitled The Rise of the Non “VC compatible” SaaS Companies. And it expressed a growing sentiment in the world of SaaS start-ups; for the majority of SaaS founders the traditional VC model is a clusterfuck that makes very little sense.

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SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

With 3 full days of sessions, featuring over 300 speakers from the best SaaS companies around the world, SaaStr Annual will be filled with actionable thought leadership to help grow your business. Get your tickets to the SaaS show everyone will be talking about! I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO.

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