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Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders?

SaaStr

In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. She can be your CTO forever.

Scale 260
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The Chat GPT Growth Story: How AI is Changing the Way We Work with OpenAI’s Head of Sales, Aliisa Rosenthal

SaaStr

OpenAI’s Head of Sales, Aliisa Rosenthal, joined OpenAI a year and a half ago — before ChatGPT launched. After that, they released instruction following models, which were the first Enterprise-ready models. A friend joined Jasper as president and asked her to run the sales team. AI is rapidly changing the way we work.

ChatGPT 253
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Building a Product-Led Growth Machine: Office Hours with GC Lionetti

Tom Tunguz

On Wednesday, December 16th at 9:00 AM PT, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti , the CMO of Confluent, which was founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka® and pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. How do you think about hiring? Interested in attending?

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What’s The #1 Challenge After $1m-$2m ARR?

SaaStr

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Finding, hiring and retaining these VPs is challenge #1 for scaling up. She can be your CTO forever.

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11 application security questions that show if your SaaS is enterprise-ready

Audacix

Without doing both, you will lose high paying and reliable enterprise customers to competitors who use their cloud software security standards as a differentiating factor to grow sales. But they are considering all of them after your sales meetings have ended. How do keep my data safe from your internal teams?

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Gong’s Linda Lin on customer success strategies for moving upmarket

Intercom, Inc.

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. So how do you create a strong, enterprise-ready team? Your first SaaS customer success hire.

Scale 177
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Managing a Thin Balance Sheet: 4 Lessons Learned From Laika’s $2 Billion Acquisition with Laika Co-Founder & COO Eva Pittas and CFO Dicken Chaplin (Video)

SaaStr

Founded in 2019, Laika (an enterprise-ready compliance platform) closed a $50MM Series C by the summer of 2022. Hiring a CFO. First: Why hire a CFO, anyway? . In Laika’s case, they decided to hire a CFO when they decided that looking only one quarter into the future was no longer sufficient. Marketing Lead Gen.