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Dear SaaStr: From 0 to $10m ARR, At What Point Do We Start Hiring and Whom? From 0 t o $ 10M ARR, the hiring roadmap is critical because every hire has a disproportionate impact on your trajectory. Heres how Id break it down: 0 t o $ 1M ARR: Founder-Led Everything Sales : Founders should leadsales.
IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR VPCS: $2m ARR VPP: $3m-$4m ARR VPE: $5m-$6m ARR CFO: $10m ARR COO: $20m ARR. He’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product. He asked which to hire first.
Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. Talk to them.
Key hires like a VP of Engineering or VP of Product might get 1%-2% each. Senior engineers or designers might get 0.5%-1%. Another way to think of this stage; the first 10 or so should probably get at least twice the equity of others for joining early, if they are mission-critical hires. Executives : 0.3%-1%
Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? 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 will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap.
The advice and thinking that leads you to make important mistakes there really is no need to make: “Ask VCs for Advice When You Want Money, Money When You Want Advice” I don’t know who started this, but they must be smarter and more perceptive than me. Especially the money part. In one sales cycle, or less.
I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more timerecruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough timerecruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself.
That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. And a Rockstar VP is really what you need in every position. So I’d hire earlier here rather than wait. To me the first question is — do you have leads?
Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? 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. You can’t hack it forever.
A VP of Sales and Success A VP of Sales and Marketing A VP of Sales and Anything Else. Is usually not really a VP of Sales. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. You get the picture.
You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? That when you make a mis-hire, you'll always look back and say you should have made a change 3-4 month earlier? A lot of classic SaaStr advice has been how to spot the best potential VPs. When to hire them.
The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. The director that wants a shot at VP.
Pick a few that work for you: Get That Key VPHire Done in Q1. Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Drop other stuff to get this hire done. But anyhow — in January, find a way.
Ok now that some time has gone by I can reflect a bit more thoughtfully here. My top mistakes as a SaaS founder/CEO: Not convincing the very, very, very best VPE I knew to join as our VPE. I had a great CTO, but I also needed a truly great VPE to scale past $10m ARR and deal with all those issues.
An organization that has come together voluntarily to take on a mission, at least in part. They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. The three times it happened to me: A very senior engineer that we just HAD to have. Something organic.
Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. Product-led outperformers generate ten percentage points higher in ARR and 50% higher in valuations than sales-led growth outperformers.
On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. But you have to see progress in one sales cycle.
And that’s really good when you’re scalingpart of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome.
Just go find the VP you need. Go find the VP you really need. I got the VPs of Sales, Product and Marketing I needed. I got the VPs of Sales, Product and Marketing I needed. But I should have taken a pause and just found our true VP of Engineering. But you aren’t public.
Founder CEO Todd McKinnon was VP of Engineering at Salesforce and left to start Okta in the depths of the last downturn. Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2.
Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, for the first time joined us at a SaaStr event, SaaStr Scale 2020. Customers believed in the early days — but many investors and potential hires often didn’t. But VCs and many potential hires thought the space was too small and simple in the early days. You scale with your brand.
And that’s really good when you’re scalingpart of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome.
SaaStr favorite Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures was gracious enough to sit down with Nick Caldwell, former CPO of Looker and current VP of Engineering at Twitter. Nick has vast experience when it comes to B2B and B2C, which is why we asked them to share their best tips for growing product and engineering orgs from 0 to IPO.
We do that with a combination of industry-leading content and community connections. Check out the line-up… “How to scale your engineering team” with Scality VP of Engineering Pierre Derome. How to give feedback to your teammates ” with Back Market Senior Engineering Manager Nicolas Tricot.
But with it comes immense benefits and competitive advantages such as the diversification of ideas, speedier product development, and representation in important regions and time zones. We got a chance to celebrate our initial public offering on the New York stock exchange back in September, which was a really exciting time for me.
WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Developer Success Manager Betsy Calender, and VP of Developer Experience Zeno Rocha share how to price your product for developers, how to market it to developers, how to how to support them as they scale and use the products. Anyone who says the developer market is not strong is behind the times.
As part of the run up to 2021 SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay Area Sep 27-29 , we’re taking a look back at some of our favorite classic sessions. (And This is the revenue growth for HubSpot leading up to the IPO. You’ll find out tomorrow. And grab the best deal ever on 2021 Annual tickets here ). It’s been fine.
You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Eyal Manor – VP, Engineering @ Google Cloud. They wanted real-time results. And the same customer challenges that we were being presented, which was: How do you scale? FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.
” In this episode of the SaaStr podcast, Aileen and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin take a deep dive on how Aileen finds deals, her tips for a winning pitch, and the state of VC in 2020. 347: Ready to hire your first VPSales? You can see the full video here , and read the podcast transcript below. Aileen Lee: Yeah.
We’ll have some time. It sounds minor or technical, but if you want to due diligence on a human being, I get to do it a few 100 times a year. I used it in kind of my breakfast pre warm-up, the crazy times we’re in. From Satya from Homebrew, we just heard that seed’s at an all time high.
It’s a great time to be a founder. Let’s qualify that statement: It’s a great time to be a founder of a revenue-generating, venture-funded company. These are optimistic times. Scaling a founder remains the biggest challenge of all. This is how the company has grown big enough to hire people.
Every time I see a CRO that doesn't sell themselves, they fail. Every time I see a CTO that doesn't code themselves, they fail. Every time I see a CMO that doesn't market themselves, they fail. We’ve spend the most time on hiring a great first VP of Sales, but all the VPs are super important.
Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. I’ve had roles in almost every function from sales to product to customer success.
This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Kim Rose , VP of Customer Success at Buildium. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Finding Opportunity Through Humility and Curiosity [07:50]. Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. She’s the VP of Customer Success and Support at Buildium.
Acquisition gets all the glory while Customer Success gets relegated the part of the unsung hero.”. Anna’s Customer Success experience runs the gamut – from her early roles as an individual contributor to leading and scaling teams of her own. You can work up the ladder over time. OK, ready for some tough love?
Being a part of those journeys is the number one driver for why I stay in management. Leading with honest, real-life conversation and perspective has served me so well over the years. It’sone of the reasons people enjoy working with me;that they know I’m going to give them a good, honest conversation at all times.
A deep dive with three leading AI investors who collectively manage billions in venture capital and have backed some of the most innovative companies in artificial intelligence. Previously a Director of Engineering at Facebook and VP of Engineering at VMware, she brings deep technical expertise to evaluating early-stage AI companies.
As part of that, we wanted to look back at some of our most iconic content and sessions. One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). I don’t know anything about sales. SaaStr is Turning 10!
The hardest phase of SaaS, at least for the founders, is the phase from Initial Traction ($1-$2m in ARR + 80%-100% YoY growth) to the next phase — Initial Scale. Once you hit this point, you have a brand, you have a fully baked team, you have a robust product, and you have a self-generating stream of new leads and new business.
In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. And if your team knows how to spend it, correctly — find a way to get them the capital they need to grow even faster than plan. the prospects). And see where that takes you. Add a layer.
So Rory from Scale, Harry from 20VC and me were back this week on another deep dive on just what’s happening in B2B today: The latest mega raise from Thoma Bravo If OpenAI is eating B2B The MCP threat to SaaS When to Hold and When to Fold as a VC and much more! Skip that part if you want. But the parts after were good.
At least at some small scale. I wrote a piece some time ago here, a person favorite, about Our Year of Hell. When a bad hire at a key time, and some confusion on strategy, led us to our worst year ever on a Year-over-Year growth rate basis. At least some times. If you have product-market fit. More on that here.
When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. 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.
356: Pete Kazanjy is the Co-Founder @ Atrium, the startup providing proactive, always-on insights for sales operations, managers, and leaders. Alongside Atrium, Pete is also the Founder of Modern Sales Pros, a community of 15,000 focused on sales operations and sales management. How do the best onboard their sales reps?
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