Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

From premature optimization to over-engineering solutions for your product, it’s easy to get caught up in making technology decisions that slow you down instead of speeding you up. At Intercom, we’ve found success running Lambda as glue code between AWS services. The top ten technical strategies to avoid. Multi-cloud architectures.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

Tom Tunguz

JULY 24, 2024

So AI products aren’t electric motors with one or two moving pieces, but more like the gas powered engines with many moving parts. AWS & others have stopped charging to move data. AWS cut prices more than 100 times in its first five years. Plus, data movement is less expensive than in the previous era.

AI 300

AI Artificial Intelligence AWS Innovation 300

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Some of the brightest minds in data founded MotherDuck including BigQuery founding engineer Jordan Tigani & a broader team from Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Meta, Elastic & Firebolt, among others. Motherduck raised a $12.5M Seed led by Redpoint and a $35M Series A led by a16z.

Cloud 356

Cloud AWS Data Analysis Benchmarks 356

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2022

So follow AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Let’s look a whole level up to the real canaries-in-the-coalmine: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. And AWS grew 37% at a $74B run-rate , down a bit from 39% the prior quarter but still adding an insane amount of new revenue. That’s the engine we’re all building on.

Cloud 299

Cloud Azure AWS Engineering 299

Tom Tunguz

JULY 19, 2022

We swapped the transaction database from PostGres to a blockchain like Ethereum or Sui , and the file storage from AWS S3 to a decentralized storage provider, perhaps Filecoin or ArWeave. That’s enough to confer the benefits of decentralization to users, while giving engineers the tools to build a functional app.

Blockchain 331

Blockchain AWS Engineering Startup 331

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

For context,Ron has an MBA and a master’s in engineering from Stanford. Because thats how their customerswho were used to AWS, Azure, and GCP pricingexpected to buy. His view is your sales team teaches your customers how to get value out of your product. You gotta know the product cold.)

Scale 182

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 182

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 28, 2022

That’s much more work than the automatic credit card payment with AWS. Can you imagine a site reliability engineer managing 15 to 20 tokens, coordinating with finance teams to ensure proper treasury management, while ensuring high uptime? Third, software engineers decentralize only a subset of the app.

Payment Solutions 268

Payment Solutions GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup Payment Features 268

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

We are all becoming prompt engineers now. If your product doesnt leverage AI to improve efficiency or reduce costs, you might find yourself underpricing pressure. One Thing is Clear: AI Makes a Lot of Business Software Look Awfully Expensive Today. Is Deflation Coming? #5. Gross Margins Will Improve for AI-Driven SaaS. And front and center.

AI 144

AI Trends SaaS AWS 144

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

AWS, Twilio, Heroku, etc. Makes capacity planning harder : With less visibility into maximum usage requirements, engineering teams may struggle to provision infrastructure appropriately. So does Expensify, which decreases the time to file expenses. Cost-based pricing is when startups mark up the product they sell by some margin.

SaaS Payments 279

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 279

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2022

Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. And each month, you barely add enough new revenue to hire just one of those great engineers you need. But it is so slow. You have 2,000 customers now. But at $10/mo, that’s still just $20,000 a month.

SaaS 351

SaaS Headcount AWS Churn 351

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. When partnering with big folks like Drata does with AWS, you have to bring business to them. Drata was one of three companies mentioned on stage by AWS’ Head of Partnerships because they did the most transactions on the marketplace than any other company. That’s a high value for AWS.

AWS 285

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 285

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

But VPs are still sitting on their computers, struggling to hit their plans, manage their teams, hire the next great engineer, deploy their software releases, and hit their number. Emails get blocked, spam filtered. No one even has voice mail anymore. 50 calls a day feels awfully dated. Everyone gets 10,000 drip email campaigns sent to them.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 356

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. It’s to scale a tiny engine into something bigger. But, sometimes a founder is >so< terrible at sales, so awful at it, that literally, it’s hopeless.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 279

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. In this battle, I’ve found a secret weapon hidden within one of our core engineering strategies, an idea called Run Less Software. When I say “execute”, I don’t simply mean the engineering challenges of building something. The same is true in software.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2022

Focusing on smaller developers, in some ways it’s been a bit overshadowed by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. DigitialOcean doesn’t want to take AWS, Azure and Google on in the enterprise and doesn’t really try. So DigitalOcean is the quiet Cloud platform that keeps on growing. Wow what a story!!

Azure 277

Azure AWS SMB Cloud 277

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

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. If someone doesn’t want to switch from AWS because AWS has partnerships with OpenAI, they have tradeoffs.

AI Search 293

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 293

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Founder CEO Todd McKinnon was VP of Engineering at Salesforce and left to start Okta in the depths of the last downturn. Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2.

Fractional VPE 287

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 287

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

In engineering, you want to move fast, ship often and solve real customer problems. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich: Today I’m the Senior Director for Foundations Engineering at Intercom.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

Tom Tunguz

JULY 8, 2020

Various roles in your organization, like data scientists, data engineers, application developers, and business analysts, can access data with their choice of analytic tools and frameworks. The conference features talks from practitioners and open-source leaders from the ecosystem from Netflix, Microsoft, Expedia, AWS, and Preset.

Data Analysis 257

Data Analysis Cloud Data Scaling 257

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2019

We all know this from AWS and Twilio on down, but Fastly is a visceral reminder. Just 58 sales professionals (vs 151 in R&D/engineering). 34% of engineering team in SF. It’s also a great one to learn from, at $200m+ ARR ($45.5m 5+ learnings for founders: Developers control a lot of spend today.

Outsourced Development 259

Outsourced Development AWS Retention Enterprise 259

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2023

Ari Lee Bayme, Managing Director @ Sandfox Advisors See You There!! Ari Lee Bayme, Managing Director @ Sandfox Advisors See You There!! Ari Lee Bayme, Managing Director @ Sandfox Advisors See You There!!

VP of Engineering 246

VP of Engineering AWS Engineering AI 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2022

DuploCloud offers an end-to-end DevOps software platform for dev teams that don’t have dedicated DevOps engineers and augments those that do. The platform automates the provisioning of your application to the cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure), integrating cloud ops, DevOps, and security/compliance with 24×7 monitoring and support.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 246

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS Enterprise readiness 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. He or she doesn’t have to jump start the engine. It’s true.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 290

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. And each month, you barely add enough new revenue to hire just one of those great engineers you need. But it is so slow. You have 2,000 customers now. But at $10/mo, that’s still just $20,000 a month. And finally hiring a real management team.

Headcount 246

Headcount AWS SaaS Churn 246

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2021

You’re now pulling engineers to answer security questionnaires, and you’ve just learned that getting a SOC 2 report will take 6-8 months to prepare for the audit, plus another 6-12 months to complete the audit itself. That is, until you’ve got a major enterprise deal close to the finish line. 5 – Configure Your Infrastructure.

Enterprise 284

Enterprise Software Review Azure GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 284

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud. Every piece of marketing collateral had to be rewritten, and the needed AE background shifted from an engineering focus to a marketing and business focus. No matter what VP of Sales they hired, sales consistently failed to meet their quota. Competition in the market rose sharply.

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 312

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

If you go back 10-15 years, when people ask about build vs. buy for the long-term, people would consider building their own data center if they were spending $100k/month on AWS. Today, companies spend over $10M/month on AWS — companies like Lyft, Pinterest, and Stripe.

Enterprise readiness 289

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 289

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

As it turns out, he’s also quite the writer – since the last time we spoke , he has published not one but two books on engineering. After writing An Elegant Puzzle about the challenges of engineering management in high-growth organizations, his focus shifted to a career path that’s much less understood – the technical leadership track.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2021

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Global Vice President for AWS Storage will deliver one of the keynotes. Data engines query the data rapidly, inexpensively. If you’re curious to learn more about cloud data lakes and engines, come to Subsurface. This time, the conference will build on the foundation from last year’s event.

VP of Engineering 203

VP of Engineering Cloud Data AWS 203

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

For example, Google and AWS are already ZoomInfo customers, but only certain sub-segments within those businesses – not the entire org. they t hen build out this decision-making engine to help you decide which companies you should engage with today, based on a predicted propensity to buy, and also how to interact with those buyers.

New CTO 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 316

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

From my experience, the three options are usually: I don’t want my engineers to even be able to pronounce Kubernetes I want my engineers to understand how to manipulate pipelines and automation I want my engineers to understand the whole stack and use DevOps as a way to deliver features.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

Backed by an army of developers, data engineers, and finance professionals, this events-based billing model allowed these large companies to directly link the value that their services provided with the cost presented on a customer’s invoice. How AWS Does It. What Amazon Web Services and Twilio Get Right.

AWS 98

AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 6, 2023

In the cloud, AWS, Azure, & GCP have created about as much market cap as all the top 100 B2B & B2C publics built on cloud (Netflix, ServiceNow, AirBnb, etc). Startups can integrate with a plug-in, build a prompt-tuning engine (a little model on top of a bigger model), or develop & train their own models.

Generative AI 224

Generative AI AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 224

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 15, 2019

It required our engineers to dig into logs and combine all the relevant information of what happened to a user object at any given moment in time. AWS Lamdba takes care of everything required to run and scale code with high availability. Grepping logs is not scalable and involves a lot of manual work, which is prone to mistakes.

AWS 171

AWS Technology Engineering Customer Support 171

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Most sophisticated data teams run like software engineering teams with product requirement documents, ticketing systems, & sprints. Semantic understanding of code and ephemeral developer environments enables data engineers to reduce costs and work more fluidly together (SQLMesh).

Artificial Intelligence 225

Artificial Intelligence Trends Data Software Review 225

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? What will your ACV really be? How can that scale over time? What evidence is there that you can charge what you think you’ll be able to? What will it really, truly cost? How will your conversion funnel work? How will you fund it?

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 284