Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

This post is an adaptation of a talk I recently gave at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) community day event in Dublin about the technical strategies I’ve experienced that don’t work and the ones that have helped us to grow and scale at Intercom. Multi-cloud architectures. The top ten technical strategies to avoid. But for the rest of us?

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

Q1 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., These charts clearly show the ZIRP pull forward, the ensuing cloud cost optimizations, and then the recovery.

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Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2022

Last week, David Heinemeier Hansson explained why his company, Basecamp, is leaving the cloud. They will manage their own servers to reduce the $3m annual AWS bill by 60%. For a hypothetical startup, a 60% reduction in infrastructure costs boosts sales efficiency by 11% & net income margin by at least 12%.

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Sales Hiring Cloud AWS Sales 266

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

Jessica Alexander, Senior Director Cloud Technology & OEM Partnerships, Crowdstrike. So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. Rico Mallozzi, Sr.

Scale 259

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 259

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 6, 2023

There are 4 questions a startup should ask themselves about building a startup that uses generative AI. There are 4 questions startups should ask themselves about building with generative AI. Startups have negative time to launch in many markets with Adobe, Microsoft, & Salesforce launching Gen AI enabled software in weeks.

Generative AI 228

Generative AI AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 228

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

ARR, Zendesk today gets 14% of new business from startups. On top of that, if you look at their top accounts globally, 33 of the top 50 customers by ARR are startups. This is where they started, but startups weren’t adopting the product as much with a discount, and there was a lot of conflict with the sales team. A free term.

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Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 262

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2021

A lot of our SaaS older times don’t quite know what to make with a lot of B2B startups these days, let alone some public SaaS companies. So many startups these days are claiming they have “ARR” from revenue that … doesn’t recur. Doesn’t ARR stand for Annual Recurring Revenue? Well of course it does.

Merchant Services 360

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 360

SaaStr

JANUARY 20, 2023

We’ll have dozens and dozens of workshops, braindates, and much more! It will be the #1 place to talk SaaS, learn SaaS, and share SaaS learnings in APAC in 2023!

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AWS Cloud Trends Startup 293

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 28, 2020

Typically, the data resides in the customer’s cloud account. This cloud account has many names but no real moniker yet. Some call it a VPC for virtual private cloud. Others call it cloud prem, a contraction of cloud and on-prem(ises). Today, many of those data centers are in the cloud, hence cloud prem.

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VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Cloud Enterprise Data 223

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Welcome to the latest installment of our “ What’s New ” series where SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin sits down with some of the top leaders and founders in SaaS and Cloud to discuss What’s New and what should be top of mind for fellow founders. AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. Otherwise, it falls apart.

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AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 279

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

Many SaaS and Cloud leaders are down more than 50% from their all-time highs. But Covid did create a lot of artificial demand for Cloud products, especially the lockdown phase. Update on cloud software multiples, charted alongside the 10Y and 5 year pre-covid NTM rev multiple average. So the public markets are in tumult.

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SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 348

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

So Okta is one of our favorite SaaS and Cloud leaders. Much, Much, Much More Efficient Than 12-24 Months Ago The story of almost every Cloud leader. But like many SaaS and Cloud leaders today, the bigger ones are still growing faster. AWS alone generated $175m of contract value for Okta, growing 130%.

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Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 282

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 25, 2023

Clouds are picking teams in one of the most important dislocations in software. Cloud LLM Infrastructure Microsoft OpenAI Snowflake Nvidia Databricks Mosaic Google Anthropic Oracle Cohere Amazon HuggingFace Microsoft has invested over $10b, plus significant development efforts to work with OpenAI.

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Artificial Intelligence AI AWS Cloud 240

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2022

We refer to each wave by its architecture advance: internet, mobile, cloud, data lake, single-page apps, containers, serverless. At some point, startups tinker enough with the new technology to discover the applications customers value most. Why isn’t time kind to these types of proclamations?

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AWS Government Innovation Cloud 244

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

By building a strong business tech stack for your startup – covering everything from incorporation to growing long-lasting customer relationships – you can not only win back time and establish best practices, but create a solid foundation for your business to grow. Ready to take your startup to the next level?

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Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2022

And inflation is awful. And startups that had planned on a big up round this year are in many cases, really struggling. And even SaaS and Cloud leaders that come up a tiny bit short of Wall Street’s lofty expectations are in many cases still doing incredibly well. So are we in a downturn in SaaS? Certainly, segments are.

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Venture Capital AWS Cloud Scale 326

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Improved terms from the cloud service providers have contributed to margin expansion.” " Here’s another insight : Google’s cloud is more expensive for customers than others : " One of the reasons why GCP is not as big as just so much more expensive for our customers to operate in GCP than it is in AWS and Azure.

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GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure Data Startup 187

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 28, 2023

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud (Google) all reported this week. Then AWS appeared to add fuel to that hope before giving us a huge rug pull. All eyes shifted to the AWS report on Thursday. They grew 16%!!

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Cloud Azure AWS AI Search 130

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 25, 2022

We work exclusively with AWS as our cloud services provider and currently provide data hosting offerings in three different global regions – US, EU, and Australia – each architected across multiple availability zones for high availability. Our tooling allows for high availability.

Scaling 252

Scaling AWS Software Review Technical Review 252

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2021

As a startup, you’re doing a million things at once: building a product, answering customer tickets, developing a sales playbook, trying out different marketing hacks, and keeping the lights on. Unfortunately, the process is long and can feel like a blackbox for startups starting from scratch. 5 – Configure Your Infrastructure.

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Enterprise Software Review Azure GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 278

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

TJ Nahigian, co-founder and Managing Partner of Base10 Partners, and Luci Fonseca, Partner, deep dive into the current GenAI landscape, incumbents vs. startups, and the six questions founders should ask themselves to drive value from GenAI. Startup platforms are OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Cohere. How are they doing this?

Generative AI 293

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 293

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

Q4 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., We then dipped below the trendline as we hit the period of “cloud optimizations,” and things have started to rebound.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. The arrival of cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS etc. Cloud computing is dominant. Understand the potential consequences of outsourcing to young startups. Best in class Late-stage Startups (e.g. Best in class Late-stage Startups (e.g.

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Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2023

Google Cloud Next: Google Cloud Next (now known as Google Cloud Next ’21) is an event organized by Google Cloud to showcase their latest advancements, product announcements, and customer success stories, impacting the SaaS industry.

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ChatGPT AWS SaaS CTO 189

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

From AWS to Vimeo: this year’s speaker lineup is packed with incredible speakers and content. The Secrets to YC’s Essential Startup Advice with Y Combinator’s Partner and CEO of YC’s Startup Accelerator, Michael Seibel. Check out the full detailed agenda here.

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Scale AWS B2C SaaS 201

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

We’d rent a car, get on the road, and go to all kinds of startups and give talks on Apache Spark to build up a community around it. We’re currently in the age of the public cloud. Databricks started out in the Cloud; we never provided an on-prem offering, only a SaaS Cloud offering. It was difficult, but it was worth it.

Enterprise 246

Enterprise AI SaaS AWS 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo , Henry Schuck. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

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New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 312

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

If it is a small startup, it may just be a single GPU, or it’s bigger with a cluster of GPUs where you need infrastructure management. Historically, Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure help with the sporadic needs of renting a GPU for a few hours for training vs. long-term use, which would cost thousands of dollars.

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AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 287

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

However, with the introduction of Events-Based Billing by Chargify, this event-based billing model is now available to small and medium-sized businesses, giving them the ability to offer the same pricing models and bill customers just as precisely as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or the popular voice and messaging platform Twilio.

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AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

That includes all of our cloud strategy, cloud operations, backend engineering, IT and security. I started at Amazon before they had Amazon Web Services (AWS) so I was lucky enough to see AWS born out of the guts of all of the great operations work done for the amazon.com retail website. Who do we outsource to?

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Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. They were also more constructive on cloud optimizations bottoming. Subscribe now Share Clouded Judgement Leave a comment Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Consumption Trends We’re now through earning season.

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. And his answer, like many answers in startups, is it depends. Building A Cloud Service vs. Open Source “Building is easiest when you have a tight focus,” shares Kimball.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Software startups are rising to meet the need. The Pendulum Swings to Small Data : Modern Mac laptops have the same computational power as the AWS servers Snowflake used to launch the company. Instrumentation and Governance Enable Many New Use Cases : Today’s data leaders are struggling.

Artificial Intelligence 228

Artificial Intelligence Trends Data Software Review 228

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. Startups and younger companies don’t have this luxury. Subscribe now Share Clouded Judgement Leave a comment

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 28, 2021

Startups are designed to grow quickly, but high growth rates can generate huge costs as new infrastructure is introduced and scaled to meet demand. Cloud costs can be awkward and are constantly evolving, as proven by the growing world of cloud financial management (FinOps). Centralize governance. Empower your engineering teams.

Management 211

Management Government Cost optimization & reporting Engineering 211

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Bessemer Venture Partners’ Alex Ferrara takes a look at trends and predictions for the cloud industry in 2019. One of the most popular sessions from SaaStr Annual, this presentation will provides an in-depth look at the cloud computing industry across Europe and globally. Want to see more content like this?

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Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 113

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 28, 2022

A few months ago, we retired our last pieces of infrastructure on DigitalOcean, marking our migration to AWS as complete. Our journey was not your regular AWS migration as it involved moving our infrastructure from classic VMs to containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Lack of modern cloud features and managed services.

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K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 52