SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Now, I’m a venture capital investor. Many of these are names that you know, and this is actually the largest we’ve seen in history. How long can this last?

Cloud 101

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 101

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2019

How can one prevent their customer support team from being a wall of protection for the product and eng team? Stripe recently announced their 5th office would be… “remote”, so how does Parker feel about the building of remote teams? What are the most important things when establishing your first remote team?

VP of Engineering 132

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review 132

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 14, 2022

What the soon-to-be podcast host and venture capitalist calls to mind is a somewhat forgettable scene where Peter Thiel becomes Facebook’s first major investor. It was the first time Harry came across venture capital, and, he tells us, he was instantly hooked. There’s no right way to do venture. Delighted to have you.

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Venture Capital Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 129

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

I’ve been in software since the ’90s and for over 20 years, nearly that entire time, we’ve been talking about digital transformation, developing strategies, architecting new technologies, and moving beyond digitization to rethinking our businesses, our products, and our services in a way that’s optimized for a digital world.

Scale 159

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 159

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 267

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 267

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 1, 2020

If you missed episode 137, check it out here: Team Selling: A Comeback Story for 2021 with Trish Bertuzzi. Learn how modern sales teams win deals now at 6sense.com/saleshacker. It’s a bad look, it’s a bad way to end your relationship. And a lot of that early founding team came from ExactTarget lineage.

VP of Engineering 63

VP of Engineering Branding Scale Marketing 63

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder and Partner Aileen Lee. Aileen Lee | Founder @ Cowboy Ventures. I think it gives us a perspective that maybe we don’t get in some other places, in addition to many great investments over the years.

Investment 160

Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 160

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

You would take three to four years to deploy it for new investments, not follow-ons but new investments. And they’ve probably cut the amount they want to invest in the next 12 months by half to 66% because of the math. They’ve cut the amount they want to invest. So you’d raise $100 million fund.

Scale 202

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 202

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. We recently sat down with Maggie to chat about all things sales – from laying down a solid foundation to hiring the right people and, finally, scaling the team into hyper-growth. Look for the team players.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The SaaStock team will be landing in São Paulo to run the region’s first Pan-Latin American SaaS conference, SaaStock LatAm. Meet Our Speakers… Patrick Arippol, Managing Director of Early Stage Investments, DGF Investimentos. He is leading DGF Investimentos’ specialized early-stage investment group – DGF Inova.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And also on the side, doing a strategy of pure, just changing our ICP and fully picking it and making it super narrow and super focused, and having 25% of the team doing that. And 75% of the team continuing business as usual. No one has an engineering team with the time to build anything. Is that a good investment to make?

Scale 219

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 219

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

With 3 full days of sessions, featuring over 300 speakers from the best SaaS companies around the world, SaaStr Annual will be filled with actionable thought leadership to help grow your business. My marketing team wanted me to do the world’s most boring video. Frankly, we got some bad advice from VCs in the early days.

Startup 272

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 272

Outseta

MAY 8, 2020

What I’m hoping this post provides is an objective look at the world of technology start-ups—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Before I lived it, I thought of the tech world as being very business oriented—a place owned by analytical types and developers writing rigid blocks of code that looked like gibberish to me.

Part-Time VPE 102

Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 102

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2019

I grew up in the Netherlands, people in Germany, people are being taught when they’re young to stay away from credit, it’s a bad thing, you want to avoid it. So there’s a lot of kind of, I don’t know, dogma in venture capital. It’s very inspiring for me. I also want to break a lot of the stigma.

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Payment Methods Merchant Services Payments Payment Services 137

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

And the team deck doesn’t say who the CEO is? We called ourselves a team of four, actually, who operate and make decisions, and it’s just how we rolled. You have a face transition, you have a mini brand, and then you have a brand, and then once you have a brand investing in it, it actually is more important than we realize.

Acquisition 128

Acquisition Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 128

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

I’m a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners, which is a venture capital firm, which was very lucky to be a part of SendGrid’s journey. We collectively as a company were fortunate in doing all those things and, boy, was it a heck of a team effort, and it was a lot of fun. I won’t lie.

Scale 132

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 132

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2020

So we’re really proud of that and our whole team is really proud of that. And one thing that’s been really cool starting the company 10 years ago in an economic downturn to today, about six months ago Matthew and I and our team took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange. Which ones are we bad at?

Sales Hiring 174

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Recruiting 174

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2020

Portag3 Ventures Partner Chris O’Neill discusses leadership and teamwork lessons he’s picked up in his career through a hobby and a metaphor of sailing. Chris O’Neill | Partner @ Portag3 Ventures. So over the course of those 20 or so odd years in technology leadership roles. What’s the base case?”

Scale 260

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Leadership 260