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Co-founder and CTO Karim Atiyah came to SaaStr Annual to share how they got this rocketship … off the ground. ” This framework can be applied across every aspect of building and scaling a company: 1. “These individuals scale with the company and can grow into 10x performers.”
Dear SaaStr: From 0 to $10m ARR, At What Point Do We Start Hiring and Whom? From 0 t o $ 10M ARR, the hiring roadmap is critical because every hire has a disproportionate impact on your trajectory. But one small rule: once you even have 2 big customers, hire someone full-time to make them successful.
I felt part of your core job as CEO was to assemble a management team, not complain about how you couldn’t get it all done. Or couldn’t stand your CTO. I still believe a CEO should “do it all” in terms of building a decent management team first before hiring a COO. Hiring a strong COO between Management Team 1.0
AI and Cybersecurity: How Rubrik’s Co-Founder Built a $1B+ ARR Platform While Joining the AI Revolution Lessons from Arvind Nithrakashyap, Co-Founder and CTO of Rubrik, on scaling cyber resilience platforms, building multiple product curves, and implementing AI across both products and operations.
The Billion-Dollar AI Unicorn Factory The scale of AI startup funding isn’t just impressive — it’s existential for SaaS: The AI Billion-Dollar Club: OpenAI : $8.4 billion valuation after 175M round Scale AI : $29 billion valuation / “sale” with Meta’s $14.3 billion in funding xAI : $6.4
Our 10th Annual Meet-a-VC program to opt-in ahead of time, to set up VC-Founder matchmaking, Note: the above programs are only for Cloud / SaaS / AI founders and executives. Speakers share their playbooks on everything from achieving product-market fit to optimizing CAC:LTV ratios and scaling go-to-market strategies.
The CTO who said “we don’t need AI people, our engineers can figure it out “ is now 12 months behind companies that hired AI-native talent in early 2024. Meanwhile, their competitors hired AI-native talent and shipped three product iterations. Hire for AI-first thinking, not AI expertise.
If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. If you’re facing challenges winning the best candidates for your roles, or if you have a small number of roles and every hire really matters, then don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. to working for smaller brands.
Streamlining the Sales Process: Ever been knee-deep in contract negotiations when the client suddenly asks, “Are you SOC 2 certified?” Yaron Lavi CTO at Deel Book a Demo Unlocking Business Opportunities with SOC 2 Certification Now that you’ve put in the hard work to become SOC 2 certified, it’s time to reap the rewards.
Quick Comparison Tool Key Features Pricing Ideal For Middleware Real-time alerts, root cause analysis Free tier; $0.30/GB ” – Akshat Gupta, Trademarkia Scalability and analytics Beyond real-time alerts and tool integration, Middleware enhances API performance through its scalable analytics capabilities.
China Is Playing a Different Game Entirely The Models Youve Barely Heard Of: DeepSeek R1: 93% performance of OpenAI’s o3-mini at fraction of training cost Alibaba Qwen 2.5-Max: As Andrew Bosworth (Meta CTO) noted: “This is our space race…there’s very few secrets. 80% cheaper than predecessor, costs 0.2%
” His real-world example is that when he gets a contract to review as the CBO of Perplexity in a buying role, he doesn’t immediately send it straight to legal anymore. Now scale that across your sales team. #2. And they’re moving faster because of it. Spend 30 minutes with AI getting to 80% proficiency.
Every time I see a CRO that doesn't sell themselves, they fail. Every time I see a CTO that doesn't code themselves, they fail. Every time I see a CMO that doesn't market themselves, they fail. We’ve spend the most time on hiring a great first VP of Sales, but all the VPs are super important.
Penetration Testing Explained Imagine you hire someone to try to break into your business – not physically, but digitally. Automated Penetration Testing : Uses tools to quickly simulate attacks at scale, ideal for identifying known vulnerabilities before a more thorough manual test. What are Compliance Audits?
No hiring developers. Just pure, unfiltered AI-assisted development at industrial scale. Without hiring a dev, coding myself, etc.? I just DM’d with a CTO that’s trying to do a similar project, he spend $4k in 2 weeks on Replit in max/max mode too. “Just a quick prototype,” you tell yourself.
Still, if you’re a business leader and your developers haven’t asked you these questions, look for a FractionalCTO to help navigate the critical early stage of development. How quickly will we need to scale the application? The innovator/developer relationship needs to be a conversation. Six months from now?
Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. At SaaStr, we’re obsessed with knowing how the best SaaS companies scale from zero to IPO and beyond.
Discussed in this Episode: When to hire your first account executives Key traits to look for in early sales hires Structuring compensation for first sales reps Should you ‘hire the buyer’ to be your sales rep? 31:55 Hiring for grit, curiosity & determination. What does Joe look like at that time?
IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m He asked which to hire first. If you have a few nickels in the bank, and you somehow find a great VP a half stage or even full stage early, just hire her. Hiring is so hard as it is. Make the hire now. ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m More here: [link].
Dear SaaStr: What Makes a Bad CTO? While there is no legal definition for CTO or bright line between CTO and VPE, I’d suggest a start-up CTO really only has to do a few things — which are very hard: Assemble a small team (3–9) of very good engineers. That often were never anticipated and aren’t part of the job spec.
Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. You can smother customers with love alone in the early days, but as you scale, you need a seasoned customer success team and VP that has done this before. She can be your CTO forever.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Be Careful Hiring “Dualies” — Folks That Are a VP of More Than One Thing. SaaStr 565: Classic Episode: The Importance of Company Values, a Great Hiring Process, and Ownership Culture with Gusto Co-Founder & CEO Josh Reeves.
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?
Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. You can smother customers with love alone in the early days, but as you scale, you need a seasoned customer success team and VP that has done this before. She can be your CTO forever.
Many companies believe excellent product design comes from hiring the best engineers and signing up for the latest software instead of building from the users’ perspectives. Stripe’s CTO, David Singleton, shares how they use a system of feedback, iteration, and fast shipping to create products that meet users’ expectations.
To convert an idea into a successful venture, startups need to be equipped to scale. 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. . Build an irreplaceable team .
Miguel Carranza, CTO at RevenueCat, shares ten learnings from firsthand experience in architecting an API & SDK that is currently on 5,000+ apps and has seen 3x growth Year-over-Year. . But at scale, people will use your API in crazy ways that you might not imagine, so some margin of the unexpected is unavoidable.
He joined StubHub as CTO, but didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because he “wasn’t committed enough.” If your customers love your product now, hire reps. ” Times of crisis are actually great times to find hard problems to solve.
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. I just see this time and time again.
The first 2 scaled reps you hire that hit plan (some may churn before then) get special training. They get CTO training. Without training, reps 3-10 scale more slowly, if at all. And they see the CEO sort of judging them for not scaling quickly. Simplify to a 1 page contract. They get CEO training.
Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. Register for SaaStr Annual and join 12,500 Cloud and SaaS Founders, VCs, and Execs at SaaStr Annual for three full days of workshops, sessions, and networking — all to help you scale faster.
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. At that point, VPEs need them to scale. Why join a start-up? Not for start-ups.
Do you anticipate scale issues presently or in the future? While the appearance matters, remember you are hiring the development firm primarily for its development skills, not its graphic design skills. cto , product , saas Do you have the basics already defined and merely need them fleshed out? Either way, we can help!"]
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. It starts at the beginning when someone interacts with your brand.” – Kim Walsh Hiring and collaboration for growth The product marketing team is the first function to hire for.
Some leaders like Slack have seen the same, but most Cloud leaders at scale with high NRR end up getting more and more of their revenue from their existing base, not new customers. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. They’re growing even faster at scale. More on that here.
You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? David considers product to be its own department that should also report directly to the CEO, instead of falling under the CTO. CTO (40 Employees).
In fact, right after that we hired a roundtrip employee as our CTO in my first start-up and it was amazing. It was magical to have an A+ team member also be almost 100% scaled up his first day. Especially in tougher times, folks may be knocking on your door again. Roundtrip hires can work. Life changes.
in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. My CTO and dev team is building all the features we need.
The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. And if you are, you are going to naturally start off hiring up-and-comers to your first leadership team. That CTO that doesn’t quite have the traditional background. Then, they can scale almost infinitely. And that’s great.
They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. He was literally the only person on the planet with the specific scaling experience we needed. It did work — we got the scaling done. You see this all the time. Everyone hated him.
These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. 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. Get on a jet, at least twice a quarter.
The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Top Podcasts This Week: SaaStr 568: Mind the Gap: Balancing Growth and Efficiency in Tougher Times with Point Nine Managing Partner Christoph Janz. Balancing Growth and Efficiency in Tougher Times | Point Nine Managing Partner Christoph Janz. Top Videos This Week: 1.
Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit Dear SaaStr: Should You Hire Someone That Seems Good … But Always Job Hops? SaaStr 638: Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+ with Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt 2. SaaStr 639: Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma VP of Sales Scott Pugh 3.
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. But I’ve almost failed every time.”
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