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Day 1: Who Should Be CEO? A Checklist.

SaaStr

I’ve been reminded of this question in several meetings lately where founders are doing pretty well, getting to and past Initial Traction, but with hindsight it’s interesting that the founder that took the CEO gig perhaps was better suited to a different role, say CTO or SVP of Sales or President or COO or SVP Product.

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10 Things That Would Have Helped Me Go From $1m to $10m Faster with Less Stress

SaaStr

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. And hire against it. More here.

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Stop Following These 10 Terrible Pieces of SaaS Advice with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin (SaaStr Podcast 682)

SaaStr

You have to understand how venture capital works. No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. Hiring someone too junior. Yes, you do.

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Transparent Optimism

Casey Accidental

I was able to hire a strong team, and we got to work, 100xing the size of our customer base over four years. As part of this process, a lot of what I tried to do was reduce distractions for the team. When I started managing teams at Grubhub over a decade ago, I was pretty obsessed with high performance.

CTO Hire 124
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AMA at SaaStr Annual 2022 with SaaStr Founder & CEO Jason Lemkin – Part 1 (Pod 607 + Video)

SaaStr

Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. Where am I going to wire out half of my 8 million a venture capital? And the best CTO I know in the world is the CEO. Then I was the CTO at another YC company, Standard Treasury, acquired by Silicon Valley Bank.

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SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with Crossbeam and Podium – January 10, 2020

SaaStr

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? Let’s hire an amazing VP of product who’s going to answer this question for us and kind of have the frameworks to do it.

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The Three Un’s of Successful Founders

Kellblog

The CEO said to the CTO as we were leaving, “spend the $9M anyway.” They apologize for missed quarters or bad hires. After much wrangling, the board agreed that we should spend $8M. The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter. The VCs left first and I was walking out of the room with only the founders. Unapologetic.