Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

This is the theoretically ideal organizational chart of a startup. There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray. This is the org chart of the typical startup. Is this so bad? That won’t work.

Startup 264

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 264

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 23, 2020

The situations that portend failure are varied and unfortunately common – no product-market fit, no cash, bad product, burnout, to name just a few of the most obvious. Just look at subscription analytics startup ChartMogul whose brand and product are now a household name in the SaaS community. Poor marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 183

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Payments Payment Services 183

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

While that doesn’t sound very bad, according to Corey Quinn, the world’s most notorious Cloud Economist, it goes against best practices or “sensible defaults” and is “ the worst practice to be avoided by default.” Day one of your startup is probably not the time to be learning Kubernetes.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2021

Announcer: Up today, the secrets of market timing, how to develop the right idea at the right time with Allen Gannett, author of The Creative Curve. Think about startups, right? It could be a hit among a small group of startup CEOs. Those are bad answers, and while you do that, I’m going to have a sip of water.

Underperforming Technical Team 214

Underperforming Technical Team Development Marketing Trends 214

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

The Journey of Selling Your Startup Harry was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which raised a seed round before finding customers, yet didn’t run out of money before becoming an overnight success 3-4 years later. It’s about the $50-$500M bread-and-butter, classic startup exit. How do these exits happen? Who does the acquiring?

Underperforming Technical Team 164

Underperforming Technical Team Data Development Team Review Technical Review 164

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

While many startups aspire toward unicorn status, only a few achieve it. To achieve this level of success, startups need a combination of strong financial performance, innovative products or services, and a favorable market environment. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Lesson 6: Pivoting isn’t a bad thing.

Scale 216

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 216

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

Founders are responsible for ensuring a startup always has enough money, setting the vision for the company, and driving things forward. Lesson #1: If You Aren’t Making Mistakes, You Aren’t In A Startup If you do things that always work and maintain the status quo, you’re likely at a major company like Microsoft. And it was true.

Sales Recruiting 251

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 251

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams. They’re not bad people, they’re just different from you, especially if you're an introverted geek like me. The math won’t work.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Others are very hands-on advisors, spending many hours per month at startups other than the one they work at. If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? Once you had something, once you had scale, then go help one other startup. That was the rough rule.

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 283

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

My top suggestions: Hire those “Bay Area VPs” now while they’ll (still) work with startups HQ’d anywhere. Do a lot more Business Development and Partnerships. Underperformers found it harder to hide after Covid, and many have already left or moved on. This one is perhaps the most actionable.

Underperforming Technical Team 323

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 323

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. 1/ Want the best startup VP Sales candidates in the world? Only money.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 286

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup. The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team. For Erica, the bad days are when they’re not executing or achieving growth the way they want. Each of these CROs describes what their worst day is.

Scale 243

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 243

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

In the early days, it was about setting expectations that startups are hard and you must work hard to succeed. We are a tech startup, and in order to be successful, we expect you to put in a lot of hard work. The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 202

User Pilot

APRIL 30, 2024

In many ways, he has shaped how successful products are built and how teams can be organized to work toward excellence. In this role, he drove the development of products that took eBay’s global e-commerce platform to new levels of success. Marty Cagan is a popular name in the product management world. Who is Marty Cagan?

Management 92

Management Underperforming Technical Team Innovation Generative AI 92

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers. About 70% of commercial Office subscribers use Teams. Yesterday, Microsoft announced earnings.

Azure 246

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 246

TurnKey Labs

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

Key takeaways: Why startups fail? It’s typically due to one or more key factors, such as a lack of preparation and planning, poor understanding of the target customer’s needs, and/or not developing a product or service that adequately solves customer pain points (which is more commonly known as not achieving “product-market fit”).

Startup 52

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Software Review 52

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

Scott’s newsletter makes a great point: as buying teams get bigger and bigger, our sales teams need to grow with them. In other words, the partners balance out each other’s strengths and weaknesses. First, identify your team member’s strengths and weaknesses. Business case development and IT/tech strategy.

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Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 121

User Pilot

MAY 1, 2024

Before starting his own venture, Lenny worked in the product and engineering teams of companies like Airbnb and Neustar. Renowned for his tenure on Airbnb’s product team, Lenny’s professional journey truly began in 2010 when he served as the CEO of a budding startup named “Localmind.”

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Underperforming Technical Team New CTO Interviewing CTO 76

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Bernard , Suranga , Alice , Rob ) as well as my other European startup colleagues (e.g., The US poses numerous, often unique, challenges for a European technology startup. So is developing a geographic strategy. This series was both a lot of work and a lot of fun. I was able to leverage many of my Balderton colleages (e.g.,

Startup 117

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 117

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2022

Product teams often fall into the trap of spending most of their time on the core functionality of the products they’re building. Without an accessible onboarding process , customers may never reach the stage where they can use the game-changing features your team has worked so hard to build, making outcomes difficult to achieve.

Onboarding 194

Onboarding Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Technical Review 194

Trint

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

I’d never been exposed to software developers and the mysterious world of coding. I was introduced to a team of software engineers who’d been working on tech that aligned audio and text so that you could follow it like karaoke. I remember saying to the team, “We just invented the future.” I ran one of my interviews through it.

Branding 130

Branding Advertising Underperforming Technical Team VP of Engineering 130

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 255

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

Two important notes: There is an optional fourth part, sales development , i.e., managing the team of sales development reps (SDRs) who convert MQLs into stage-1 oppties. Whether this team should report into sales or marketing is a separate debate. The lines between these parts are not black and white.

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Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

The session that I’m talking about is basically about the board dynamic and about how to survive this valley of death and bring not just yourself and your team but your extended team, including your board, across that until you cross the $1 million mark, and then the $10 million mark and keep going beyond. There we go.

Underperforming Technical Team 244

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 244

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. These leaders act as partners and build out a strong team. Not every leader is created equally.

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 199

Tom Tunguz

MAY 25, 2017

The more interesting of the two for startups is the company level. In order to be successful, startups have to be good at many things. The startup often inherits this exceptional characteristic from one or more of the founders. Determining how to compete is a critical part of developing a startup idea.

Startup 100

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Strategy Azure 100

Chart Mogul

MAY 30, 2019

Ingmar, our VP of Customer Success, and our support team cracked the code on first response time and measuring NPS. As we grow, we’re able to spend more time developing the proactive tiers of the pyramid without de-prioritizing a strong foundation of fast, helpful ticket replies and features that delight.

Underperforming Technical Team 78

Underperforming Technical Team Development Strategy Management 78

The SaaS Garage

MARCH 12, 2020

And no, this gatherng was not triggered by the current crisis but, needless to mention, we did spend some time mingling about the “bad old tmes” of the post Sept. take such words with caution “Don’t panic, stay calm and watch the development.” 11 and Neuer Markt aera. Dos and pot. Don’ts.

Underperforming Technical Team 94

Underperforming Technical Team Payment Solutions Payment Methods Venture Capital 94

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

In my recent essay about second products , I talked about how the goal of building a second product is not the traditional concept of product/market fit we’ve all been raised on regarding startups. By general standards, the team found product/market fit, but will never be able to inflect growth of the combined company.

Underperforming Technical Team 63

Underperforming Technical Team Scale GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 63

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice , the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, “on his top ten list.” ” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times.

Sales Hiring 139

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 139

Scytale

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the compliance requirements of running a startup? As a startup founder trying to build your new organization from the ground up there’s a ton to do – And one of the commitments is keeping security compliance regulations and industry standards, and all that red tape! You’re not alone.

compliance 59

compliance Systems Review Development Team Review Startup 59

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

One of the most popular sessions at SaaStr Annual, Busting the Myths About Startup Success with BlackLine CEO and Founder Therese Tucker is up at the top of our must-watch list. My marketing team wanted me to do the world’s most boring video. Don’t be that guy with your startup. The reality is most startups fail.

Startup 272

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 272

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 11, 2019

To move quickly towards a mission, the core attributes of product teams –strategy, design and engineering – need to be well aligned. I gave a talk at Building Intercom on alignment as a key quality of a great product team. Startups, they’re a bit crazy, right? Startups, they’re a bit crazy, right?

Underperforming Technical Team 160

Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Startup AWS 160

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 14, 2020

Customer Success teams arise out of the need to provide high-touch guidance to your most valuable customers – without disrupting your Sales and Support teams. What we and our customers needed was a dedicated team – one that could jump on calls, assist with implementation, and spend time on complex problems. Can you help?”

Customer Success 244

Customer Success Underperforming Technical Team Scale Part-Time VPE 244

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

We recently hosted the Point Nine Founders Summit, featuring several panels and presentations from founders, CFOs, COOs, and sales execs on building early sales teams and hiring your first successful sales leaders. At Point Nine, we aspire to continuously share what we learn with our community and the extended startup ecosystem.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams. They’re not bad people, they’re just different from you, especially if you're an introverted geek like me. The math won’t work.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 52

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. It’s become apparent that for hypergrowth SaaS startups today, there are two distinct phases.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162