Point Nine Land

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

It’s not entirely clear to what extent this impressive result is based on an extraordinary ability to pick future winners, help make winners, or invest in companies that are already very successful when Tiger invests in them. Here are a few learnings (and some fun anecdotes) from Factorial’s journey. How times have changed!

Venture Capital 52

Venture Capital New CTO Scale CTO 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. The Solution: Invest in a revamped data infrastructure. Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. What is Buffer. Click To Tweet.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

Why does Yousuf believe now more than ever, the buyer experience is more important than the price? How does Yousuf advise CIOs to approach pricing strategy when pitching CIOs? What must startups remember about how CIOs think about price? What can they do to enforce a sense of urgency when signing new clients?

CTO Hire 133

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 133

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 5, 2021

Previously, she was the VP of Growth at Acorns, a consumer app for micro investing. . This is in part because, depending on the nature of the product and the pricing structure, the number of users may or may not have that much influence on the overall bottom line. . Since 2019, she’s been the Director of Growth at GitLab.

B2C 65

B2C B2B New CTO Acquisition 65

Crafty CTO

MARCH 17, 2023

But nearly every day, there’s been something new that’s at least important and sometimes game-changing. Order of magnitude cheaper OpenAI kicked things off on March 1st, when they announced new ChatGPT and Whisper APIs , along with tenfold less expensive pricing. HOLD MY BEER!”

Artificial Intelligence 98

Artificial Intelligence AI Search AI ChatGPT 98

Audacix

MAY 23, 2018

Below are the top four key quality assurance areas that every CIO & CTO (and equivalents) are concentrating on over the short to medium term: 1. Invest in risk-based software testing Why spend millions of dollars doing the very things that have achieved sub-optimal results time after time?

New CTO 40

New CTO CTO Software Investment 40

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Which is why you should sign up for the 2 for 1 Insider Sale and get two people for the price of one. Don’t overextend your resources when testing new SaaS growth ideas. Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. The Solution: Invest in a revamped data infrastructure. Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. What is Buffer. Tweet this quote.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

In the last two years there have been so many new services around security, around machine learning that literally did not exist. Eyal Manor : But there is a lot of investment in that direction. Eyal Manor : So we spoke about security, but one of the biggest trend we alluded to was the emergence of new AI services.

Cloud 172

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 172

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

Having invested in 9 B2B marketplaces and gathered data from 20+ different investors, here are our findings on what it takes to raise money in 2021 for B2B marketplaces. A technical co-founder or CTO is always a great-to-have at this stage and becomes a must-have as the business scales beyond seed. Market Characteristics ??

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Chargify

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Looking back at their own experiences, Sonnenberg has this advice for new subscription-based startups: “Start with Stripe + Chargify. Common issues of the billing bottleneck include: Not having correct billing in place when new products launch. The process to change price points can’t happen in real-time.

Merchant Services 51

Merchant Services Subscription Payment Features SaaS Payments 51

Unbounce

SEPTEMBER 24, 2018

Twenty-two marketing experts took the stage to give new solutions to old challenges and actionable solutions to new ones—not to mention the food, people, games, swag and after-parties that made it the best CTAConf yet. Get two tickets now for the price of one. It’s tougher than ever and what used to work, doesn’t anymore.

AI Search 73

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Content Marketing 73

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 229

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 229

Crafty CTO

JULY 21, 2023

Another innovation explosion appears to be underway; already Llama 2 derived models are near the top of the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard , and new Llama stories are still on the first page of Hacker News. This time, I suppose Meta learned the lesson and preempted the leak. I have no reason to suspect they won’t do the same here.

Artificial Intelligence 40

Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Generative AI AI 40

Crafty CTO

OCTOBER 17, 2023

In fact, according to Paul Collins’ 2008 New York Times article The Oddball Know-It-All , Herter’s catalog printer Brown Printing, also located in Waseca, MN, grew with Herter’s to become “one of the country’s largest commercial printers.” Oh, wait, that’s an Unsplash image. Not confidence-inspiring.

Scale 52

Scale Compensation Startup Mobile 52

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

One of the top SaaS influencers is Dharmesh Shah , co-founder, and CTO of HubSpot. Hiten has a weekly SaaS newsletter that helps readers know new strategies, learn techniques, etc. Liz writes in publications like Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He led early-stage investments in Box and Yammer.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

Chart Mogul

JULY 14, 2017

In other words, Freemium leads to a big influx of new accounts, which leads to performance problems, impacting the whole platform (a great way to anger your loyal paying customers!). It requires some upfront investment but the cost of scaling documentation to thousands (or even millions) of customers is zero ! Technical.

Pricing 53

Pricing SaaS Scale New CTO 53

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Julien Lemoine | Co-founder and CTO @Algolia. So I’m Julien, Co-founder and CTO of Algolia. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 130

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 130

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Quick recap: Keep your pricing simple. And then, invest your energy and time into the product. And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. You know, earlier today we talked about creating a new category. Have your user conference around $10M ARR or earlier.

Sales Hiring 139

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 139

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

They’ve invested in all of these other businesses. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR. So number six, thinking you’re getting away with under investing in management, up scaling in HR. We all under invest.

Sales Hiring 242

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 242

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

If you're generating something that's brand new, like a brand new category, nobody understands about it. You need to invest at least a year or even two years. The pricing for SaaS is much more complicated. Because that (abandonment) wouldn’t be a solid foundation to acquire more new users. That will never work.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

Interesting for a couple reasons, but Sunil’s been investing in cloud internet since before almost anybody. So, not that many people have started so early in the career, so long in the space, and great investments that we know like Datadog and Fastly, and good at it. GP and founder of Amplify Partners. Jason Lemkin: Crazy.

Sales Recruiting 176

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 176

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

About My First 16 Our new video podcast series My First 16 features interviews with founders and CEOs of fintech companies about how they acquired their initial customers and the hard lessons they learned along the way. And we felt that we couldn’t fail them and fail these new customers coming in at the same time.

Merchant Services 80

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 80

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

362: The Future of the Customer with Bernadette Nixon, CEO @ Algolia, Jay Snyder, Chief Customer Officer @ New Relic, and Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight. Nick Mehta: On a boat in Rhode Island and then our second guest Jay Snyder, who just recently took over as Chief Customer Officer of New Relic, publicly traded SaaS company.

Payment Methods 203

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 203

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital with over 20 years of operational experience. Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital, but has over 20 years of operational experience. We invest in technology companies typically at the earliest stages.

Payment Methods 55

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 55

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

This made it hard to chart a clear course: Jebbit’s message to the market was a bit too broad, causing Sales to bring in customers across a range of personas, prompting CS to invest extra resources to keep a wide variety of customers engaged.”. Drive new levers of growth. Through this work, it can drive new revenue opportunities.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2019

And by business technology function I want to define that because sometimes there’s a overlap with the CTO from an engineering side. Is that a new innovation in org structures and the remit of the role? What would you advise in terms of that trade off of discount for testimonial versus no, we’re holding far more price?

Technical Advisors 157

Technical Advisors Scale Technical Review Payment Solutions 157

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

I would say that’s number one for me personally, which means I may never work full time again, but finding a founder that you want to go invest four to five years of your life with and for because it really is. New category. So he’s the CTO? A founder that you truly like and truly respect is critical.

Sales Hiring 158

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 158

Hull

JANUARY 22, 2019

Over the past few years, we've seen a new role emerging at within scaling startups - the growth engineer. These roles are filled by engineers that roll up to the CMO/COO (not CTO) as part of a growth team. This is not new. They might have focused on different areas, but applying the scientific method to marketing is not new.

SaaS Payments 77

SaaS Payments Technical Advisors Engineering Payment Solutions 77

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2020

We’ve got two sponsors, including a new one called Sapper Consulting. That means we need new pricing models, we need to figure out new delivery mechanisms for our data, so on and so forth. So I found myself in London, a one of one employee introducing this new brand to advertising agencies in Europe.

Subscription 107

Subscription Payment Features Scale Underperforming Technical Team 107

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

I remember when I was in business school the internet was brand new and back then the hero was Jerry Yang. And so once I had the idea I convinced my father to invest and become a customer. He was investing in internet companies. This was in 1997, and I spent two years. He and I went to MIT together.

Sales Recruiting 175

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 175

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

And many CEOs simply fail to understand the nuances of the role and the future building benefits of marketing investments made in areas like “brand” where the return on investment is not immediately recognizable on the balance sheet. This is empowering and allows me to execute at a dramatically fast pace than I otherwise could.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2018

At our inaugural SaaStr Europa last June, podcast host-with-the-most Harry Stebbings sat down with MuleSoft Founder and CTO Ross Mason to discuss the organization’s sales strategy, building a strong company culture, how to think about international expansion, and much more. In a new one, it was tough to keep up. Ross : Yeah.

Technical Advisors 163

Technical Advisors Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 163

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

This is a relationship worth investing in. Have they created something new before? Have they ever created a new program, created a new event themselves, and how do they talk about what they care about? Somebody may have a title, they may have a CTO, CEO, co-founder, or whatever. I’ve never heard of them.

Enterprise 69

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 69

Hacking Revenue

AUGUST 4, 2016

We can put together a WordPress website and we have some fancy badges in CodeAcademy, but no CTO in his right mind will let either of us touch their production environment and/or keyboard. Prospecting tool for generating new leads. Nothing is new here. But we do know how online businesses work. Was a great ride.

Software 75

Software CTO Hire Scale New CTO 75

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

The real goal here is to push up the effective price by having the VCs “pay” for an increase to the pool after the financing closes. Don’t force VCs to find out in due diligence that only 2 percent of the pool, not the customary 15 percent or so, is available for new hires. Half of a VC investment is in the CEO.

Finance 290

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 290

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

He co-founded and served as CTO of Safend, an endpoint security solution acquired by Wave Systems. Usually they are ready to make a big investment again in the six and sometimes seven digit commitment. I’m really curious to learn about new technologies that allow us to move faster. We just allow them to start on-demand.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Coach Cloud New CTO 43