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.”

Underperforming Technical Team 78

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO Interviewing CTO 78

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

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.

Underperforming Technical Team 121

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 121

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

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

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. You're an engineer/designer/whatever. Don’t think VP of Sales — think “Revenue Engineer”. Don’t hire sales people too early.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 52

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

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

With capital scarce and expensive, with companies increasingly trapped in Schrödinger’s startup paradox , and with more startups than ever focused on positive cashflow and The Rule of 40 , it’s safe to say that Silicon Valley is still very much in a cost-cutting mood. Or product relative to engineering?

VP of Engineering 108

VP of Engineering Travel Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 108

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Duo Security is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based cyber-security startup. sales team. As everyone left to work for an investment bank in California or New York that summer of ’99, I went to work at a startup in Ann Arbor. Now, we did really cool stuff at this startup. Want to see more content like this? .”

Scale 237

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 237

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Lexi Reese, Gusto COO uses her 20+ years of experience to provide advice on building high performing teams using authenticity, empathy and logic. Lexi explains the importance of team trust, driver and passenger mindsets, and much more. So sort of going from older to more and more startup land. Who was the highest engaged teams?

Scale 193

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 193

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Since writing The AI Agency: A Novel GTM for Machine Learning Startups , I’ve been meeting many companies who operate this way. These startups use machine learning to disrupt an industry traditionally dominated by agencies: law, accounting, recruiting, translation, debt collection, marketing…the list is long.

AI 191

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 191

User Pilot

APRIL 6, 2023

Developing and releasing sophisticated products with all the bells and whistles imaginable might seem like a great idea. TL;DR An over-engineered product is more complex than it should be and it solves problems that don’t exist. Low feature adoption is one of the symptoms of over-engineering. Book the demo!

Underperforming Technical Team 90

Underperforming Technical Team Management Interviewing Scale 90

Frontegg

DECEMBER 2, 2021

In addition, we are excited to welcome our new partners – the visionary team from Insight Partners, led by Praveen Akkiraju, Daniel Aronovitz, and Jeff Horring. Additionally, our diversity-first team has grown to more than 30 top-notch talents (you are an incredible team of people, each and every one of you!)and

Underperforming Technical Team 93

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring DevOps as a Service Scale 93

Casey Accidental

MARCH 29, 2022

A common issue leaders in product management, design, or engineering face is justifying investment in the “non-sexy” stuff. Non-sexy things include general user experience improvements, performance, developer velocity, infrastructure, technical debt, and, fortunately less than it used to be, growth. User Experience.

Investment 139

Investment Underperforming Technical Team User Experience Scale 139

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects. They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams. What to do before building a team for your SaaS company You can’t just jump into hiring without some forethought, or you’ll make many mistakes. Average salary: $192,383/yr.

Sales Hiring 95

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 95

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 20, 2018

In the early stages of most SaaS startups’ lives, the CEO or founder often acts as the initial head of sales. It is important that these friendly connections represent the target persona market you have outlined, as otherwise, the feedback loop is likely to be weak. Iterate the product based on feedback.

Startup 178

Startup Sales SaaS Systems Review 178

Point Nine Land

MARCH 15, 2022

If you take a look at a 50 person sales team, you’ll likely find it to be very data-driven. They usually track low-level metrics about their app performance or errors, and agile teams have burn-down charts. Previous attempts failed or didn’t get a lot of adoption, usually because of some combination of these issues: Poor data quality.

Investment 52

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Four years ago, after launching and failing my first startup I realized I had a lot to learn. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. When I first joined the Gorgias team, there were two founders, two engineers, and myself as the first non-technical hire.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 277

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

Yesterday’s post on distribution partnerships for startups elicited a few comments and questions about other important elements startups should consider when contemplating partnerships. Ideally, a startup should collect data on the performance of a distribution channel before entering into a long-term agreement with a partner.

Startup 100

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Scale Payment Services 100

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

I still remember the very first time I met Dev back in 2011 and I was this engineer turn first-time founder, CEO running the business. Jyoti Bansal : So first thing Dev is, I know you started as an operator running a startup company, you took it public and then you became a VC and then you became an operator again.

Sales Recruiting 258

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 258

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 5, 2023

But along the way we found that the tool that we’d built was really interesting to a lot of other developers. So, myself and my co founder, we were kind of software developers, like kind of engineers by background. H ow did you guys think about the API that you wanted to launch with for other developers to build on?

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Banking Outsourced Development 100

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

ML teams tend to invest a fair share of resources in research that never ships. If you want to invest in ML, hire someone with experience on both the tech and the operational side so they can start working with the product team from day one. And you don’t need as much hand engineering of features.

Artificial Intelligence 249

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning AI Search AI 249

Casey Accidental

JANUARY 2, 2018

I receive a lot of questions about growth teams. Who does this team report to? When do I start a growth team for my business? If you’ve been around startups for a while, you might remember this tweet from Paul Graham. It talked about the fastest growing startup Y Combinator has ever funded. What is the goal of it?

Underperforming Technical Team 111

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Retention Engineering 111

FastSpring

DECEMBER 7, 2023

As the Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at WP Engine , Carl has worked on many acquisitions and partnerships, including brands like Flywheel, Perfect Dashboard, Block Lab, and recently, Delicious Brains. And, you know, Carl’s role at WP Engine focuses on this in a big part.

Software Review 136

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Branding 136

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

As an engineer by training, in pressure situations he tends to “lean to the quant.” It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. This has created large amounts of data for running teams. . And the teams now need a more defined structure.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

In engineering, you want to move fast, ship often and solve real customer problems. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich: Today I’m the Senior Director for Foundations Engineering at Intercom.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

There are enough stories of data breaches and cyber attacks to chill even the savviest security engineer to the core. An aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur, Adam learned early the best way to earn trust was proving you deserve it. And just continuing to push it higher with the team. Adam Markowitz: Thanks for having me.

Scale 211

Scale compliance Software Review Technical Review 211

Mucker Capital

MAY 28, 2020

Like a teenager with a million-dollar allowance and an identity crisis, a startup with too much capital and no product-market fit will become capable of making larger mistakes. As an investor, I root for startups. It pains me to see great teams and ideas collapse under the pressure that sometimes follows fundraising.

Outsourcing Services 52

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Startup Scale 52

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

Guided selling with Revenue Grid allows you to guide reps step-by-step through every deal, reducing guesswork and increasing consistency so your teams have the best odds with every opportunity in the pipeline. See how you can put your sales teams in the best position to win now at revenuegrid.com/saleshacker. Callie Moriarty: Hi Sam.

Underperforming Technical Team 68

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Systems Review 68

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

Getting executives out of the 1:1 interview process and into a whiteboard session can help you assess their core competencies and how they’ll work with your team. How can we help the team get calibrated on the role? Matt Oberhardt: So, we have metrics that kind of roll up as a team. Working sessions. Talent in 2024.

Sales Recruiting 96

Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 96

Valuize Consulting

JUNE 10, 2020

Perhaps it was fueled by all of the strategic expertise, funding and time required to develop a category-leading customer success strategy—one that transforms your company’s revenue retention and expansion metrics. Lean customer success provides a methodology to engineer these primary and secondary processes to be integrated end to end.

Customer Success 40

Customer Success Engineering Scale Technical Review 40

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 31, 2021

And while the concept has been around for years, for most of that time, tech debt was primarily the concern of product and engineering teams. They’re also increasingly holding their teams accountable to manage it appropriately. To be clear, every company accumulates a certain amount of tech debt over time. Measuring tech debt.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Scale 52

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 31, 2021

And while the concept has been around for years, for most of that time, tech debt was primarily the concern of product and engineering teams. They’re also increasingly holding their teams accountable to manage it appropriately. To be clear, every company accumulates a certain amount of tech debt over time. Measuring tech debt.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Scale 52

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

Vikas is a well-respected sales leader in NYC and comes from a sales engineering and product background, with more than 20 years experience. We hear what makes a great entry point for sales and sales engineering and why having deep authentic technical product knowledge actually works in sales. Vikas builds teams that follow this ethos.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Sales Recruiting 50

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2019

If an organization’s founders aren’t designers and don’t come from a background where well-designed products played a key role in their lives, it can often be the last discipline to be brought onboard the team. On a bad day, a lot more of it got thrown away. My responsibility was to build a design team in that new agile way of working.

Underperforming Technical Team 179

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Innovation Startup 179

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Most startups do fail.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 337