article thumbnail

10 Learnings From Jeff Lawson (CEO Twilio) + Byron Deeter (Bessemer Ventures): “Adapt, Plan, Deliver”

SaaStr

Their competitor bought them out in April 2000, couldn’t IPO, and was bankrupt by August. He joined StubHub as CTO, but didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because he “wasn’t committed enough.” You can’t build a whole new product, but you can tweak what you have.

CTO Hire 355
article thumbnail

5 Interesting Learnings from HubSpot at $2 Billion in ARR

SaaStr

Combining Strong Growth With A New Level of Efficiency. We did a deep dive here with CTO Dharmesh Shah a little while back: And a few other interesting learnings: #6. Their focus is customers with 2-2,000 employees, and “up market” is 200-2000. And a good natured-challenge to all of us to keep growing!

Scale 325
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Top Global SaaS Trends You Should Know with Google Cloud and Zenoss (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

In the last two years there have been so many new services around security, around machine learning that literally did not exist. Megan Leuders: So a great example of that is when we’re selling to a large financial institution and we do sell to kind of the Global 2000. At Zenoss, again, our target market is Global 2000.

Cloud 173
article thumbnail

SaaStr Podcast #394 with Sunil Dhaliwal and Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

What about, as someone who’s gone from your own solo GP fund in 2012 to a team, how does a founder think about a new partner? Because, on the one hand it’s exciting, and what I see a lot today is founders often bond with a new partner. If I get picked, do I want the more experienced partner, the new partner?

article thumbnail

Alarmed About AI?

Crafty CTO

John Gruber chimed in shortly after with a nice follow up, “ Bing, the Most Exciting Product in Tech ,” that calls out further commentary by New York Times columnist Kevin Roose.) Alarm over AI isn’t something new. Ray Kurweil ’s book, “ The Singularity is Near ,” was published in 2005.

article thumbnail

If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.

SaaStr

But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).

article thumbnail

“The “Dos & Don’ts” of Building Winning SaaS Companies with G2 Crowd (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

I remember when I was in business school the internet was brand new and back then the hero was Jerry Yang. Tim Handorf you can see there, joined me at BigMachines in 2000. And even if you haven’t started a company, I remember my CTO for my first company BigMachines was Vic Austin. This was in 1997, and I spent two years.