Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Segmentation strategies are critical. So is developing a geographic strategy. Just as sports teams have an advantage when competing in their home stadium, European startups often have a (sometimes unacknowledged) home country advantage when competing in their home market. The market is vast. Lack of home field advantage.

Startup 116

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 116

Kellblog

DECEMBER 27, 2021

My point was that this is normal and healthy: you can long Miami and Austin without shorting Palo Alto which, by the way, would have been a bad idea in 2020. Is web3 going to change everything because, as Chris Dixon argues, the best entrepreneurs and developers have learned not to build atop centralized platforms? Web3 hype peaks.

Blockchain 142

Blockchain Technical Review Venture Capital Sales Hiring 142

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Source From Mice to Whales – 5 Ways to Build a $100 Million SaaS Company by Christoph Janz, Point Nine Capital Your Guide to SaaS Product Metrics by Kyle Poyar, OpenView Partners How do you compare? What’s your TikTok strategy? We trust leaders to make decisions on what tools they need to get the most out of their teams.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

Mark’s a seasoned startup executive, he’s go-to-market oriented, and he has some large-company chops that he developed earlier in his career. DK: a lot of CEOs and boards wait too long in denial on a bad VP of Sales hire. Hiring the wrong VP Sales due to incomplete vetting and then giving them too much runway to perform.

Sales Hiring 139

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 139

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2020

” And invest your team’s time and energy to say, “Hey, if this than that, how can we prepare for a variety of scenarios so that we can nimbly respond to whatever comes our way and adapt in accordingly to the situation? And what’s the best case? What’s the base case?” And really, that’s essential.

Scale 251

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Leadership 251

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. In 2016, he co-founded Meetime, an Inside Sales Strategies company and now serves as its CMO, building a powerful branding and content creation operation. Talk: Sales is a Team Sport.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

But it sounds like the bad news is you’ve got a limited runway. It’s not the investor’s problem if you have an expensive team. I believe you, it’s true, but venture capital is a weird niche thing that… Frankly, venture capital at any stage only wants to invest in folks that are already off to the races.

Scale 192

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

Michiel Rauws: And there’s two strategies we’re going after, one strategy is what we did before, so focus on insurance, which is very slow, and then the health systems that are faster, and then EAPs that are faster. But I’m trying to figure out how much capital allocation should we do between continuing that strategy.

Scale 209

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 209

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2019

And we had been talking about that and I also run corporate strategy. And the very first thing that I did, like any neurotic person is I Googled corporate venture capital. We have one company in our portfolio that this is the third time the founding team has been together. That’s how much I knew about it.

Development Team Review 131

Development Team Review Scale Technical Review Software Review 131

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.

Venture Capital 56

Venture Capital Scale SaaS Benchmarks 56

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2020

That happens in venture capital, and that’s happening right now. Every venture capitalist is stress testing his or her own portfolio. They don’t want to p**s off management teams that face dilution from down rounds. When uncertainty passes, VC funds have plenty of dry capital to put to work.

Technical Review 193

Technical Review Payment Services Payment Methods Development Team Review 193

Baremetrics

MAY 7, 2019

Choosing the right combination of funding for your business is just as fundamental as choosing the right co-founders (or not), the right market, the right product, and the right team. million – about half of all the cash they had on hand – to buy out their main venture capital investors after eight years since founding.

Finance 111

Finance Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 111

ProfitWell

JANUARY 6, 2020

If you don’t have product-market fit, you could be advertising to the wrong buyer personas and attracting the wrong buyers, leading to higher churn and poor retention. A high churn rate might be indicative of poor product-market fit. He said by 2017, the team had reached 14 people. Marketing messaging. Churn rates. Customer LTV.

Product Marketing 52

Product Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Advertising 52

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

I was one of the first 10 or so employees at the company, and over the next five years I was given a remarkable amount of freedom to try new growth strategies, to succeed, and to fail. I was managing a team of 15 and the company had grown to about 140 employees. We mostly succeeded. I’m proud of all that.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

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. Do I have a strong monetization strategy in hand for when I do decide to seek some form of investment?

Business Model 54

Business Model SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payments 54

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 4, 2020

Years later, he’s got a thriving business that is not venture capital backed. Years later, he’s got a thriving business but one that is not venture capital backed. Sam Jacobs: Have you developed a process to answer that question of should you hire, should you fire? How do you evaluate talent?

Scale 106

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 106

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

How does David think about scaling sales teams? Number two, you have a team of people that you’ve worked with before and some of whom will come along with you. Do you need business development reps? How should founders think about budget and resource allocation in this search for PMF? Do you need field salespeople?

Scale 190

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 190

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. Ophelia Brown | Founder, Partner @ Blossom Capital. Emilie Maret | Fellowship Team @ The Family. Evgenia Plotnikova | Principal @ Dawn Capital. Christina Fonseca | Venture Partner @ Indico Partners (moderator). I’m the founder of Blossom Capital.

New CTO 147

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 147

Point Nine Land

JUNE 22, 2023

I can already hear Christoph and the rest of our software-loving P9 team telling me that they would have preferred to invest in SaaS if it had existed, and he’s probably right. Some pure hardware businesses have capex requirements that would break a typical venture fund’s model. Still, it’s clear that things are different today.

Outsourcing Services 59

Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development AI 59

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Enough venture capital can certainly bridge that gap. And we’re about to add basically a team collaboration tier on top of the product. The second question is more about, given that we’re basically users would be self qualifying into team management offering like a project management, et cetera.

Scale 214

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 214

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

To date Bob has raised over $15m with Crossbeam from friends of the show including Andy @ Uncork, Matt @ Firstmark, Bill @ First Round and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures, to name a few. Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018. Is that not?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2019

Do I have the right team? And just because someone was a right member of the team last year doesn’t mean they’re a right member of the team next year. And just because someone was a right member of the team last year doesn’t mean they’re a right member of the team next year.

Sales Hiring 117

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scale Startup 117

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

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

It’s an important question, as your target growth rate determines your hiring plan, budget, and fundraising strategy. What makes things tricky is, first, the uncertainty of how your CACs will develop at increasing scale and of how your churn rate will develop over time.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

Kellblog

AUGUST 13, 2019

If you’re immediately dispatched to Sand Hill Road in search of capital, you’ll be out pitching the company poorly instead of learning the business and making plans to improve it. Let’s remember that pivots mean strategic failure and the virtual write-down of any VC that went into funding the failed strategy.

Software Review 76

Software Review Startup Sales Hiring Software 76

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

394: Where is Venture Capital today? Sunil Dhaliwal: I was at one of the biggest firms around and I think we had a $200 million fund and people were like, I can’t believe we’re running $200 million in venture capital. ” So, depends on the strategy. And how do you hack it? Jason Lemkin: Crazy.

Sales Recruiting 167

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 167

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

MARCH 8, 2019

We were both in business school, and my aha was I was spending some time at a local venture capital firm helping with them just thinking about how do we grow these companies, saying, “What’s the plan? Increasingly organizations talk about B2D marketing, to developers. Some developer’s tinkering with something.

Scale 107

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 107

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. Andy MacMillan: I started my career in tech actually as a developer. How does one instil volume based pricing without disincentivizing usage? Andy MacMillan: Excellent.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Technical Review 195

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

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. Falling in love with venture capital.

Venture Capital 129

Venture Capital Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 129

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

I interviewed him for insights into how to build a global growth strategy, especially when it comes to localization. I recently spoke to David about global marketing strategies. This is where the strategy starts, as people start to think about it, I can get into this particulars, but that’s just to set the stage.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

He’s seen acquisition of JouleX, when it was bought by Cisco in 2013 for 107 million and he was a member of the founding management team and Vice President of Marketing for Internet Security Systems, where he grew the company from 5 million to over 400 million. They may or may not be a fit for institutional venture capital yet.

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

He’s seen acquisition of JouleX, when it was bought by Cisco in 2013 for 107 million and he was a member of the founding management team and Vice President of Marketing for Internet Security Systems, where he grew the company from 5 million to over 400 million. They may or may not be a fit for institutional venture capital yet.

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

He’s seen acquisition of JouleX, when it was bought by Cisco in 2013 for 107 million and he was a member of the founding management team and Vice President of Marketing for Internet Security Systems, where he grew the company from 5 million to over 400 million. They may or may not be a fit for institutional venture capital yet.

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

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 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

It’s an important question, as your target growth rate determines your hiring plan, budget, and fundraising strategy. What makes things tricky is, first, the uncertainty of how your CACs will develop at increasing scale and of how your churn rate will develop over time.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61