BetterCloud

MARCH 3, 2021

Upon joining BetterCloud as its new CTO, Jamie Tischart was taken aback when he reviewed his professional biography with a colleague. The first line was, ‘With almost three decades in technology,’” he told me. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’d like to tackle as the company’s new CTO?

Part-Time CTO 52

Part-Time CTO CTO Technical Review New CTO 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2023

You really need a great CTO, not just a good business team. A mediocre tech team, a part-time CTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there. Every month, the Net New Revenue dial goes back to $0. This isn’t B2C and virality won’t accelerate the process enough in the early days. You do get better.

Part-Time VPE 207

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 207

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 8 Signs a New VP Won’t Work Out. An updated classic SaaStr guide on how to know if that new VP you worked so hard to find, recruit and get on board … is really going to make it. And 3 Things Not to Worry So Much About.

New CTO 233

New CTO CTO SMB Venture Capital 233

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2023

A great CTO usually can solve this problem just in time to save the customers, but without one, revenue stalls. Sometimes, in a new or emerging category you can be slow at first. The best CEOs and founders are just fast. Fast to iterate, fast to learn, fast to fix. But you usually at least have to speed up after that.

Startup 191

Startup New CTO CTO Investment 191

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

Combining Strong Growth With A New Level of Efficiency. Revenue Up 30%, but Employee Count Only up 10%, to 7,055. At the end of the day, in SaaS, efficiency really comes from growing revenue faster than headcount. But maintaining 100%+ NRR allows them to grow meaningful faster in revenue than in customer count, even from SMBs.

Scale 240

Scale SMB Headcount New CTO 240

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2020

He joined StubHub as CTO, but didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because he “wasn’t committed enough.” They had revenue their first month after launch. You can’t build a whole new product, but you can tweak what you have. He learned paper millions can go to zero ??.

CTO Hire 335

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Airlines 335

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2023

Ok we’ve now got the final speaker list locked down for 2023 SaaStr Europa in LONDON on 6-7 June: CEOs, CROs and CXOS : Edith Harbaugh, Executive Chair & Co-founder @ LaunchDarkly Nowi Kallen, Managing Director @ Salesforce Ventures Spencer Kimball, CEO @ Cockroach Labs Joe Thomas, Co-founder and CEO @ Loom Sterling Snow, Former CRO @ Divvy (..)

VP of Engineering 201

VP of Engineering CTO Coach New CTO CTO 201

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2021

There’s so much incredible new content on the SaaStr YouTube Channel and podcast — check it all out here ! And with 20+ sessions from the recent SaaStr Enterprise to dig into alone, as well as an incredible new session with the CEO of Klaviyo. OK — now on to The Top 10. The 10 most watched videos of the week.

New CTO 169

New CTO CTO Cloud Enterprise 169

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

While startups have ups and downs, if you tell the VCs you’re going to hit $250,000 in revenue this month … make 100 percent sure you hit that projection. 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. Too many founder vesting issues.

Finance 271

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 271

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2020

Some of my best investments had zero revenue the first 2 years or even longer. Great CEO But Mediocre CTO. Sometimes, you can grow quickly at $1m-$2m+ ARR growing quickly even with a mediocre CTO. A mediocre CTO can’t keep up. That they need to burn too much for each new $1 they bring in. Cofounder conflict.

Technical Cofounder 222

Technical Cofounder Investment New CTO CTO 222

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Customer count growing as fast as revenue — a good sign for the future. 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. CEO Spencer Skates owns 8.5%, CTO Curtis Liu 8.0%. This is rare.

Scale 253

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 253

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales. So, as leaders, you have to start from scratch and hire new people who weren’t trained in horrible ways or hire people who have been around long enough to know that sales are hard and deals can take six months to close. UiPath took ten years to get to $1M in revenue.

CTO Hire 174

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 174

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

1,000 SaaS CEOs, Founders, Revenue Leaders, and VCs will join us for 1.5 The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships, and exchange strategies. days of tactical content, networking, and epic evening events when the Cloud comes to Singapore.

VP of Engineering 228

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 228

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

But what’s new this year? Let me make a list: New!! Women in Revenue Sessions. We’re super excited to have partnered with Women in Revenue to bring a mini event-within-an-event for women leaders in SaaS and Cloud. We’ll have a lot of options, but dead center of Annual is our new Cantina.

New CTO 256

New CTO Sales Recruiting CTO Coach Scale 256

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2023

What public (and private) SaaS companies are valued at as a multiple of revenue. Don’t count deals that haven’t closed as revenue. Another month of progress, another set of new customers, etc. Share up front why your first CTO left. And really worst of all is multiples. And low multiples make fundraising hard.

New CTO 237

New CTO CTO Banking Cloud 237

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2024

“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. Jason Warner , who was CTO of GitHub before and during my time as COO there (and a former partner at Redpoint!) Check that out here. What’s your most recent disclosed investment?

Management 212

Management CTO Hire New CTO AI 212

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

Revenue leaders were able to network once again. Fast forward to today, and there is an amazing amount of B2B-centric content out there, and many others have put together amazing events around the hard-learned lessons of scaling revenue and scaling SaaS companies. VCs were able to meet with Founders. Now a staple!)

Scale 267

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 267

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

The average public SaaS company is marching toward $400k in revenue per employee. Is the CTO involved in these decisions? If you’re at $100M or $200M of revenue and your growth is facing a decline into the single digits, pricing stuff is super important. Two things are fueling this change in CS with AI. You’re not.

AI 223

AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 223

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

We did it by focusing on second-order revenue to generate low-cost leads, and by taking in 110%+ of our MRR each month in cash. 5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. This is pretty well understood today, but was fairly new to me. And a high close rate, and more revenue per lead. Less and you under-invest.

Part-Time VPE 254

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 254

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2021

They know how to take an established brand and grow it faster, and build or expand a new core offering around it. But Slack is past $1B in annual revenues with a dominant brand and very high net revenue retention (120%+). Salesforce may not be great at creating brand new things anymore.

VP of Engineering 147

VP of Engineering New CTO CTO Acquisition 147

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

A new edition, new services, an outbound sales team, an account management / upsell team. Something new to boost your ACV and TCV. Double your pricing for new customer, on the largest deals. And you must have someone with recurring revenue experience. At least by the time you are hiring 1 new employee per month.

Part-Time VPE 269

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 269

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer. That you can’t have a majority of y our revenue dependent on one customer. ” — Echeyde Cubillo, Co-founder and CTO, Acme Ticketing. ” — Siva Narayanan, Co-founder/CTO, FyleHQ.

CTO Hire 264

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 264

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. Q: What are the Odds of Success for a Startup to Hit $100M in Revenue? Some of these had a little revenue, and others had none. Get a good CTO and commit to understanding your market and staying in the game. Product marketing is neither marketing nor product.

Scale 230

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 230

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

States are consistently looking for ways to generate more tax revenue, and a fast-growing company (or industry) can provide excellent opportunities. Our first introduction to sales tax was dealing with it as a liability,” CTO and Co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson says. “We It’s part of doing business!

Payment Services 254

Payment Services compliance SaaS Payments Scale 254

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. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote. And the best CTO I know in the world is the CEO.

Outsourcing Services 180

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 180

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

The siloed management structure paralleled the key components of Operating Expense, making it easy to report backward-looking Income Statement expenses and recognized revenues, but not cross-functional customer and product lifecycle metrics, critical to managing a SaaS company. Chief Customer Officer or Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

We identified some “ known unknowns” too; problems we needed to solve, but didn’t know how just yet – like integrating the new region into our billing system. And so our former CTO and co-founder Ciaran Lee decided we were just going to start. We introduced virtually no new software, services, or approaches into our Europe buildout.

Scale 234

Scale New CTO Engineering CTO 234

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2022

. $500k+ deals make up half their revenue, and $1m deals 37%. $500k+ deals made up 41% of Braze’s revenue in 2021 and 2020, and $1m+ deals grew to 37% of their revenue, up from 25%. Still, Braze isn’t overly concentrated, with no customer being over 5% of their revenue. 40% of Revenue from Outside U.S.

New CTO 59

New CTO CTO Software Review B2B 59

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Revenue growth rate : This measures the rate at which the company’s revenue is growing over a specific period. A higher revenue growth rate generally indicates positive business performance.

Sales Hiring 88

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 88

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2019

Chief Customer Officers from Egnyte and New Relic will be leading sessions on scaling happy customers and winning the long-game in SaaS. Is Seed the New Series A? Founder’s Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy…and What Breaks with Algolia Co-Founder and CTO Julien Lemoine.

VP of Engineering 148

VP of Engineering Scale New CTO CTO 148

Valuize Consulting

OCTOBER 7, 2021

With global equations used to calculate investment-to-Revenue in traditional functions like Sales or Engineering , it’s often very straightforward to showcase the value and convince CFOs to invest in these organizations. NDR Efficiency: The New Customer Success Economics. Projected Revenue Growth.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success New CTO Scale Headcount 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

New CTO 142

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 142

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Benefits of using Expense Categories in SaaS The main expense categories for any SaaS company are: Cost of Revenue Research & Development Sales & Marketing General & Admin These four categories are the standard for describing costs and expenses of any SaaS company from Salesforce to Zoom to your startup. New Gross Margins?

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

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. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 209

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 209

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 16, 2023

The insight behind how implementing buying committee playbooks increased revenue 270%, doubled win rates, and shrank forecasted misses at Stytch. Examples: VP of Engineering, Director of Marketing, or Head of Revenue. Examples: CTO, COO, CFO. Lastly, our forecasted revenue shrank from a > 20% miss to within 5% of target.

Part-Time VPE 88

Part-Time VPE Technical Review Forecasting Software Review 88

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

So for us it’s users, which drives our data and then employers, which ultimately will drive our revenue. And by the time the song comes out, you’re not even going to really appreciate it because you’ve written 20 new songs, and those are the ones that you can’t wait to hear.

Marketplace as a Service 96

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 96

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

When the company was first founded, two of its co-founders, Wade and CTO Bryan were freelancing on web projects and soon noticed a pattern around their clients who were asking for more and more integrations built from one app to another This is where the idea for Zapier was born. Delores Brown is LaunchDarkly’s Chief of Staff.

Payment Services 100

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 100