Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 19, 2023

The patois of data teams has become a dialect of modern engineering teams because the commonalities in the stack. Data teams receive tickets from their internal customers & develop data products that serve both internal & external users, much like a classic product management & engineering team.

Software Engineering 210

Software Engineering Engineering AI Data 210

SaaStr

APRIL 19, 2024

How do you reverse-engineer your first million as a SaaS startup founder? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin chats with Sam Parr on the popular YouTube channel and podcast My First Million about what’s required to make it on the map for a $100M exit and then reverse engineers the steps to get there. 50 or $1.

Engineering 300

Engineering Business Model Pricing Scaling 300

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2024

But we all know enterprise software. Well that must have gone well as Salesforce is now hiring 2,000 (!) in sales to sell AI. Per The Information , Benioff has also instructed his sales team to go all-in and put AI and Agentforce into every deal possible. It’s a bit counterintuitive at first — isn’t AI replacing people?

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring AI Headcount Sales 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

This gets more challenging when you have stakeholders who aren’t the ones buying the software. There was no software yet. With a trillion in payment volume coming through BILL in the last five years, managing the payment and compliance engine has required an ongoing effort of a sizable team. It was on the customer’s account.

SMB 307

SMB Payment Services Payments Payment Methods 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2024

He summarized the M&A (acquisitions) of The Top 10 Software Acquirers. The Top 10 Software acquirors’ M&A activity is down -90% or more from 2021. Now, to some extent, the issues here have been masked by several factors: The VC engine continues, more or less, and has been re-energized by AI. A record low.

SaaS 312

SaaS Acquisition Cloud AI 312

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2024

AI in B2B SaaS: The Incumbent Advantage On the AI revolution in B2B software, it’s the age-old ‘startups are innovating and racing to get distribution, and the bigger companies have distribution and are racing to innovate.’ “We had the best board meeting we’ve ever had,” according to Brian.

AI 284

AI Marketing SaaS Interviewing 284

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Why Are So Many CEOs Former Engineers, or At Least Have Technical Backgrounds? I’ve come to almost exclusively invest in founder-CEOs that are engineers. You need to recruit a great engineering team. You don’t need to be an engineer to do this, but most “salespeople” CEOs can’t pull this off.

Outsourcing Services 293

Outsourcing Services Engineering CTO Scale 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

Activant Capital brought together at SaaStr Annua l a group of break-out next-generation AI enhanced vertical software leaders: the CEOs from Owner.com, Alloy Automation, and DoNotPay. At SaaStr Annual they shared their experiences and insights on implementing AI in vertical software companies.

AI 222

AI Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Systems Review 222

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Starting and scaling a software company was really hard. If you, as a software company, got to a certain scale and brand awareness, it was really hard for others to catch you. Follow along to stay up to date! So what was the implication?

Cloud 299

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 299

Payrix

JANUARY 28, 2025

In this episode of PayFAQ: The Embedded Payments Podcast, host Ian Hillis welcomes Matt Downs, President of Worldpay for Platforms, to discuss software-led payments predictions for 2025 and beyond. remains the largest interchange and software market, Matt predicts a loosening of regulatory constraints.

Payments 130

Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 130

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

As the co-founder and CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow), Guy brings a unique perspective from his journey through iconic companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter, as well as his background in aerospace engineering. It includes a breakdown of the Sales AI landscape, adoption of GenAI and Sales software across buyer groups.

Scale 101

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 101

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Many mid-market software companies price with the goal of revenue maximization, negotiating for the highest possible price in each sale. There are exceptions: Oracle’s database, Tanium’s security product, Workday’s human capital management software. Application software companies typically sell seats.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 16, 2025

Engineering teams within AI application startups are much smaller than a classic software company - maybe half the size or less. Let’s run an experiment : let’s assume every public software company benefits immediately to the same extent & cuts R&D spending by half.

AI 183

AI Venture Capital Enterprise Engineering 183

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

Think of Net Promoter Score (NPS) software as a tool to measure your customers’ feelings about your product, and categorize them based on their level of loyalty (promoters, neutrals, and detractors). Also, the ability to publish testimonials from survey responses makes it a good engine for collecting social proof for your business.

Software Review 105

Software Review Technical Review Software B2C 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

GitHub, founded in 2008, is a leading platform for software development and version control that has made waves since 2018 with its AI Copilot. Historically, the burden of customer feedback fell on the solutions engineers and CS architects. Be disciplined about prioritizing that feedback and communication.

Scale 261

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 261

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

The average churn rate for the software industry as a whole is 14%. As a SaaS business leader, reducing software user churn is an important part of maintaining your customer base and increasing revenue. TL;DR The average software industry churn rate is 14%, but SaaS companies should aim for under 2%. Looking to measure churn?

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

For high-consideration purchases, “long copy sells” – Despite our short attention span world, buyers of enterprise software will read your 12-page white paper and attend hour-long demos if they provide valuable information. The “five-five” CMO who excels at everything is a unicorn. It’s messy.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 202

TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

In the sphere of software engineering , AI is pivotal for corporate IT by automating coding, optimizing algorithms, and enhancing security to boost efficiency and minimize downtime. By automating routine and complex tasks alike, AI allows engineers to focus on innovation and strategic tasks.

Generative AI 443

Generative AI CTO Hire AI Sales Recruiting 443

Tom Tunguz

JULY 30, 2020

There is a mega-trend underpinning the changes in data design philosophy and tooling: the rise of the data engineer. Data engineers are the people who move, shape, and transform data from the source to the tools that extract insight. We believe data engineers are the change agents in a decade-long process that will revolutionize data.

Trends 361

Trends Data Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 361

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2025

60B+ in Payments Processed Annually: FinTech as a Revenue Driver ServiceTitan processes over $60B in payments annually, and while software remains their primary revenue driver, payments are a critical growth vector. But remember, this requires significant investment in product depth and breadth.

Payments 144

Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 144

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Models built by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have billions of dollars to invest in training these models, so you have more powerful engines under the hood at no cost to you. Software will move from helping humans be more productive to doing things for them entirely. There are multiple, so you have a choice and can choose between them.

AI 261

AI Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Mobile 261

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

So while AI for coding and software engineering has seen some of the most explosive start-ups, from Codeium to Loveable to Poolside to Claude and OpenAi’s own releases here and more, just as big if quieter has been the change to contact center and support.

Customer Support 202

Customer Support AI Software Engineering Engineering 202

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2025

If your digital sales engineer joins the Zoom and gets product questions 95%+ right … that’s better than 95% of AEs and SDRs 5. The Software Layer Around It Probably Is, However. Look at Assistant UI and other frameworks – your engineers can implement this in a week. This will utterly change how we do sales.

AI 214

AI B2B ChatGPT Scale 214

USIO

MAY 9, 2025

APIs allow software systems to talk to each other. Automated decision engines assess risk for loans, merchant approvals, or insurance in real timeno manual reviews needed. Risk Scoring Engine Translation: Your financial sixth sense. SDK (Software Development Kit) Translation: The IKEA kit for building finance features.

Payments 130

Payments Merchant Services Payment Services Finance 130

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Customer Expectations Are Skyrocketing : AI has raised the bar for what customers expect from software. Pricing Pressure : AI is driving down the cost of certain types of software, especially those that rely heavily on manual processes or human intervention. They want everything to be faster, smarter, and more automated.

AI 162

AI B2B Startup Innovation 162

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 1, 2023

Sales development, content marketing, & software engineering strike me as the workstreams that will benefit immediately. Engineering 25% 40% 10% Overall - - 13% See assumptions here 1 This thought experiment highlights a few ideas to validate : AI initiatives focused on cost-reduction should start with engineering.

AI 322

AI Startup Scale Headcount 322

TechEmpower SaaS

AUGUST 21, 2023

Many CEOs of software-enabled businesses call us with a similar concern: Are we getting the right results from our software team? We hear them explain that their current software development is expensive, deliveries are rarely on time, and random bugs appear. It’s written for a business leader, not an engineer.

Technical Review 390

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Systems Review 390

SaaStr

MAY 9, 2025

It was terrible software and too expensive. If you’re bleeding customers and fighting for retention, here’s how you can engineer your own resurrection. Support tickets disappeared into the void. Even worse, social media changed and the product barely worked now. Then they raised prices.

Social Media 175

Social Media Outsourced Development Interviewing Retention 175

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

The median startup with between 1-5M in ARR will have 12 engineers, 6 in sales and 3 in marketing. As the company grows and reaches 50-100M in ARR, the ratio of engineers to salespeople asymptotes to 1:1, down from 2:1. In the earliest days, leads head all of these teams.

Scale 363

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 363

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

By breaking down large codebases into smaller pieces, microservices empower engineers to ship code faster. Continuous integration, the process of constantly folding new code into production (live on the website or service), further accelerates the software velocity. There’s a cost to this speed: coordination.

Innovation 329

Innovation Engineering Cloud Development 329

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 17, 2021

Quality Assurance is truly about the automation of certain parts of software testing. The automation of QA is a secular trend that perhaps accelerated with more software engineers working from home. Life insurance and emergency medicine certainly fit the COVID-19 narrative.

Startup 362

Startup Software Engineering Finance Engineering 362

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2020

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. A bad CTO is an OK engineer him or herself but can’t get 3 other great engineers to join him/her. To ship truly enterprise-grade software.

Part-Time VPE 361

Part-Time VPE CTO Engineering Scaling 361

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

Software engineering teams have been early adopters of AI coding assistants precisely because they provide an immediate, measurable lift. This is exactly backward. The winning approach: Start with employee-facing tools that deliver measurable productivity gains.

Technical Review 189

Technical Review Artificial Intelligence AI Marketplace as a Service 189