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Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. Things got heated in 2018-2019 and then overheated in 2021.
This led to our first meet-ups in 2013 and 2014, the first SaaStr Annual in 2015 , the industry’s leading podcast in 2016, the first SaaS founder coworking space in 2017, and SaaStr Pro , the first learning management system for SaaS founders in 2018. 2018 The Fourth SaaStr Annual: Learn and Scale Together.
I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. We decided at that point to bite the bullet and say everything we’re going to do, whether it’s how we architect the software, how we go to market, how we actually contract everything is SaaS from here on out. Your big money is going to go into hiring your employees.
This episode is an excerpt from Therese’s session at SaaStr Annual 2018. I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. It is much more painful to have to fire people and contract as a company than it is to grow. You can see the full video here , and read the podcast transcript below. Turned out it became who I am.
Rachel now leads the marketing team at Notion, but back then, in 2018, Rachel was head of growth marketing at Slack. Adam Risman , a former host of the podcast, asked Rachel what made that point when Rachel joined Slack in 2016 the right time to invest in growth marketing? That was the question posed to Rachel Hepworth.
Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Congress in early 2018. In the short written remarks that he submitted beforehand, he used the word “tool” 11 times. His actual testimony was absolutely peppered with mentions of “these tools,” “those tools,” “any tool,” “technical tools,” and – 13 times – “A.I.
Trusted by top blockchain projects, QuikNode has launched over 3,000 nodes and has been helping advance the blockchain ecosystem since 2018. Background In 2017 and 2018, many new blockchain projects started offering their tokens for sale. When business picked up later that year, the team decided to go full-time and raise money.
That question has been on Will Larson ‘s mind for a long time. For those who don’t know him, Will has over 10 years of experience in the likes of Yahoo, Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and he’s currently the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app that helps millions of people to lower their stress levels and sleep better. Solving the puzzle.
Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. 6] Like it or not, it’s not a bad three-part formula for climbing the corporate ladder.
Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.
This could be explained by the fact that it was women, more often than men, who had to step down and work part-time to take care of stay-at-home children during the pandemic. Also – a study by Paychex from December 2018 found that 33% of women in technology have considered changing careers because of male colleagues.
He had to quickly determine which team members displayed a potential for leadership and teach them the fundamentals of management so they could make new hires and scale – without ruining the culture. Building trust can be tough when you’re a new hire in a leadership position. Balancing internal growth with hiring.
The company grew their total spend from $390k/mo to $750k/mo during 2018. You’ll probably want to include Contract Labor – R&D for any product-related contractors you work with. If you are a smaller team, I recommend not to categorize your CTO or the Sales Leader in G&A until they have at least a few people in their teams.
Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support. 5 Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO at dofollow.io (B2B PR SaaS) says: “ Our community is primarily on Facebook and Linkedin and it has been live for over a year. . #11 But mostly our members help each other, and it works like a charm.
These roles are filled by engineers that roll up to the CMO/COO (not CTO) as part of a growth team. Their goals and KPIs are unlikely to be related to metrics concerning a CTO (like application performance), but more likely related to those of a COO or CMO (like the number of qualified leads).
So Gartner says 2018, the SaaS market is over $73 billion dollar, it’s growing very, very quickly. Megan Leuders: And when you were talking to CEOs and CTOs today, what do you believe is the biggest technology challenge that they are facing as a SaaS company? Eyal Manor: So we have a lot to talk about. what are your thoughts?
The company had for a few years prior followed a growth-first path, hiring aggressively and prioritizing projects designed to make an immediate impact on their growth rate. After the Series A, Buffer fell into a similar trap to Wistia - they hired too quickly, specifically to accelerate product development. The company even took $2.5M
So I spent some time talking to our CEO, our CTO, and some of the board members about ways that we can go to market in a different way that might allow us to kind of break that next kind of barrier to growth. And then from 2018 to 2019, another 45% growth and broke the $100 million top line sales figure.
Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.
We were part of the office of the CTO. At that time, Marc Andreessen, the founder was the CTO of the company and there were only three of us in the group. It was pretty easy being an SDR for Marc Andreessen because he’d been on the cover of Time magazine. SMB Sales & SDRs at (Smaller) Scale [18:20].
Hear why he thinks that the next call should not have been to a competitor. “Hiring, Firing and Stretching: How to Build Your First Management Teams” ScaleX Founder and Managing Partner Dilek Dayinlarli and Insider Co-Founder and CEO Hande Cilingir and Atlassian Head of OpsGenie Berkay Mollamustafaoglu. His next call?
Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018. How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves?
At our inaugural SaaStr Europa last June, podcast host-with-the-most Harry Stebbings sat down with MuleSoft Founder and CTO Ross Mason to discuss the organization’s sales strategy, building a strong company culture, how to think about international expansion, and much more. We’ve had to hire really smart, driven, intellectually?curious
At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. We hire remarkable people, and we give them a lot of freedom for how they’re going to get their work done. Who actually knows stuff and does things?”
I’m not going to claim to be the founder of Levelset, but that founding team, CTO, VP of customer experience, chief legal, our CFO, who kind of came later, but like that group, everyone stayed with the organization in executive roles the whole time. Let’s go hire somebody. I’ll hire the person.
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