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From Startup to $500M CARR: How Braze Scaled a Growth and CS Team

SaaStr

Building Braze from $2M to $20M ARR It was 2011 in NYC, and Spencer became the second employee at Braze. 2011 focused on the mobile ecosystem, as the iPhone had been released four years prior and the app store two years after that. Every incremental hire with a small team matters, so it’s worth being clear on what you want.

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Building a Global SaaS Empire: 5 Bets That Paid Off with Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham

SaaStr

Big Bet #2: Find Tomorrow’s Great Anglers — Hire Talent With A Learning Mindset In 2010 and 2011, San Francisco was the place for SaaS talent. So, if he wanted to hire customer support, it could be a biomechanical engineer. They didn’t hire a single person who knew Ruby on Rails because they could learn it after being hired.

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Finding Opportunities in Every Challenge: From Humble Beginnings to 30 Million Users with Miro Founder and CEO Andrey Khusid, and ICONIQ Growth General Partner Matthew Jacobson (Pod 580 + Video)

SaaStr

Miro was founded in 2011 and has iterated on its product and expanded its audience widely over the years. Currently, Miro is one of the fastest-growing companies at scale, but it didn’t take off immediately at the same velocity in 2011. The company needed to hire more leadership roles and middle management to keep up.

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5 Very Good Days, and 5 Pretty Bad Days, as a SaaS CEO

SaaStr

A Good Day: Hiring My Real VP of Sales. Trust me, until you’ve hired someone great, you don’t know. A Good Day: Dec 31, 2009; Dec 31, 2010; Dec 31, 2011; Dec 31, 2012. But since It Was Clearly Hopeless (see point #2), I was pretty deeply bummed to have this option pulled out from under me.

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$100 Million ARR Pivot: From Platform Product to Vertical Apps With Treasure Data CEO Kazuki Ohta (Podcast #506 and Video)

SaaStr

When it launched in 2011, Treasure Data’s positioning was a Hadoop-based big data warehouse in the cloud. The Treasure Data platform instantly analyzed large amounts of data, which meant that companies didn’t need to hire lots of computer scientists or put up a considerable upfront investment for data projects. .

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What The Downturn Will Probably Look Like in SaaS

SaaStr

Yes, when hiring stopped, so did the automatic seat upgrades that come with hiring But silos still expanded a bit, and business process change did not end. Since leads still came in, and the internet still grew, and SaaS still had true ROI, everyone was sort of unprepared for when the economy got even a little better in 2011.

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CEOs of Zapier, Walkme and Dialpad: How to Build Your First Management Team (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.