The SaaS Garage

MARCH 12, 2020

A few days ago I had lunch with some friends, all of them softare and Venture Capital veterans, who I all know from the early days of the 21st century. And no, this gatherng was not triggered by the current crisis but, needless to mention, we did spend some time mingling about the “bad old tmes” of the post Sept.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Payment Solutions Payment Methods Venture Capital 52

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 11, 2022

Many Series B companies are taking the necessary steps to pursue aggressive growth goals because it’s at this stage that a startup often has proven market viability and is poised to scale. For example, 1,200 unique startups raised funding at Series B in 2021—about a third more than in each prior year since 2017. billion in 2021.

Scale 97

Scale Scaling Technical Review Venture Capital 97

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

Jason Lemkin: So you have like a great profile irrespective of what your startup’s doing. You would take three to four years to deploy it for new investments, not follow-ons but new investments. And so that might mean I’m deploying capital at a third the rate that I was last year, a third the rate.

Scale 185

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 185

Baremetrics

APRIL 16, 2021

Sweat equity and credit cards, personal lines of credit, direct cash investment into the business in the form of an equity stake or a related-party loan to the company, deferring cash-pay compensation. Future capital providers love to see that you’ve invested more than your time into your endeavor. Types of Capital.

Venture Capital 66

Venture Capital Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SaaS 66

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

Now, I just invest in SasS companies. If you look at any SaaS startup, in the first couple reps, they always find one guy or gal that’s just amazing, just killing it. You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team.

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Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 251

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.

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Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 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 253

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 253

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2020

When the future is predictable, people like to invest. To give it to you as a startup for example, let’s say that the markets were paying 10 times trailing multiples for revenues. We were warning startups to expect a degree of uncertainty in the year ahead anyway. It’s very difficult to get financed.

Technical Review 192

Technical Review Payment Services Payment Methods Development Team Review 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2020

I’ve held a bunch of technology leadership roles in startups, in rocket ships and turnarounds, including about 10 years at Google, and just over three years leading efforts at Evernote. ” And then we debated like how across the leadership team to say, “Hey, can we afford this or not?” What’s the base case?”

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Leadership 244

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

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Source 16 Startup Metrics by Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, and Preethi Kasireddy, a16z We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

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 202

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 202

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Do you gun straight for the glamour (and pressure) of venture capital investment? What about a venture capitalist who might be sympathetic to your mission? Going into the pursuit of funding without a plan can lead you nowhere—or, even worse, leave you saddled with a funding plan that’s bad for you and your business.

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Venture Capital Scale SaaS Benchmarks 56

Kellblog

AUGUST 13, 2019

This is a sister post to my recent one, Career Decisions: What to Look For in a Software Startup. That piece is all about what to look for when considering taking a job at a software startup. This piece is kind of the opposite: what to look out for when considering an executive job at a software startup. moving both feet).

Software Review 76

Software Review Startup Sales Hiring Software 76

Neil Patel

MARCH 21, 2023

We all have a great team and support network behind us. If you don’t respect your partner(s), your team won’t last long. Fill your team with people who have great character and you’re well on your way to success. Plan Your Finances Startups and entrepreneurial businesses need money. It’s just a part of the lifestyle.

Entrepreneurship 92

Entrepreneurship Underperforming Technical Team Entertainment Company Culture 92

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

But boy, I can tell you from all the companies I have invested and worked with that have a hardware/software component, it really actually gets brutal as you scale. Enough venture capital can certainly bridge that gap. And we’re about to add basically a team collaboration tier on top of the product.

Scale 207

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 207

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

How does David think about scaling sales teams? David Skok: So I graduated with a computer science degree in the early days of that craft and few months after leaving college, I found a problem and I wrote some code to solve it and accidentally without even thinking what I was doing, I ended up creating a startup.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 189

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. Ophelia Brown | Founder, Partner @ Blossom Capital. Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 146

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 4, 2019

An existing SaaS customer spends more, on average, than a new customer, and are more than seven times more likely to churn (leave your business) to go to a competitor because of poor customer service than they are for a better product. Venture capitalists and angel investors are not the only routes to growing your business.

Business Model 54

Business Model SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payments 54

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 166

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Recruiting 166

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2019

237: Parker Conrad is the Founder & CEO @ Rippling, the startup that gives you back your time from payroll to employee computers, Rippling makes it unbelievably easy to manage your company’s HR and IT – in one system. How can one prevent their customer support team from being a wall of protection for the product and eng team?

VP of Engineering 132

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review 132

The Angel VC

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 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

297: Bob Moore is the Founder & CEO @ Crossbeam, the startup that helps companies find overlapping prospects and customers while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018. Loving our podcast content?

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 131

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.

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Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 14, 2022

It was the first time Harry came across venture capital, and, he tells us, he was instantly hooked. Not long after starting the podcast, Harry got into investing himself, and in 2020, he leveraged the success of his show to launch his own venture capital fund, 20VC fund. There’s no right way to do venture.

Venture Capital 129

Venture Capital Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 129

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2019

In this session, the audience will learn about Adyen’s journey from a Dutch payments startup, to a global public company with more than 15 offices around the world working with large global companies like Facebook, Spotify, Uber and Microsoft. So there’s a lot of kind of, I don’t know, dogma in venture capital.

Payment Methods 137

Payment Methods Merchant Services Payments Payment Services 137

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? I’ve heard so many good things from Kobie, now at Upfront, and then also the team at Openview. So taking us off, how did you make your way into the world of startups and how did you come to be CEO in UserTesting today? How does Andy think about discounting?

Sales Hiring 190

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 190

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

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

Watch our latest webinar to hear from Bigfoot Capital Founder Brian Parks, SaaSOptics CEO Tim McCormick and Techstars Partner Ari Newman as they share best practices on raising seed capital and getting to a series A round. We discuss: How seed and Series A investment criteria differ. Tim McCormick: 00:06:56 .

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

Watch our latest webinar to hear from Bigfoot Capital Founder Brian Parks, SaaSOptics CEO Tim McCormick and Techstars Partner Ari Newman as they share best practices on raising seed capital and getting to a series A round. We discuss: How seed and Series A investment criteria differ. Tim McCormick: 00:06:56 .

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

Watch our latest webinar to hear from Bigfoot Capital Founder Brian Parks, SaaSOptics CEO Tim McCormick and Techstars Partner Ari Newman as they share best practices on raising seed capital and getting to a series A round. We discuss: How seed and Series A investment criteria differ. Tim McCormick: 00:06:56. Excellent, great.

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

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 158

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 158

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. This was anyone from a marketing analyst at a small startup, to a junior analyst at my firm, to a cloud CEO like him. But I’m Anna Khan, as you guys heard.

Scale 132

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 132

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

And we had a variety of software offerings, everything from WordPress themes and plugins, a local development tool called Local and then had very SaaS like elements to our offering there. EJ Brown 06:10 I think there’s a common idea that startup culture in particular. I think that was surprising for me.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

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

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. I don’t think we thought we were going to do a startup. It’s worth every ounce of investment. You mean overwhelmed by too much capital?

Acquisition 127

Acquisition Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 127

Neil Patel

JANUARY 11, 2021

You can then use it to arrange for the required capital to launch your product or service. Follow this up by building your team and finding a location if you’re opening a physical store. After all, your customers would prefer more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. Solve a problem you identify.

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Underperforming Technical Team Business Sales Hiring Scale 128