SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Alison brings the perspective of all sides of a startup, from investing to SaaS to Cloud. For Google Workspace, they invested in expanding and building Google Meet and the rest of the workspace during 2020. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS.

Cloud 309

Cloud Scale AWS AI 309

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably has less predictive value concerning a company’s ability to get to true scale than most people think – or at least thought some years ago. Being a seed investor I’m trying to find SaaS companies that can scale before they have scaled.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

As SaaStr Europa 2022 drew to a close, attendees took one more opportunity to ask Jason questions about topics like how to navigate the current market, the future of work, playing in a crowded space, and hiring your first VP of Sales. It was funny for Henry to say he segmented his sales team at 80 million in ARR. Transcript.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. It won’t work.

AWS 279

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 279

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Fred Viet serves as the Chief Sales Officer at Aircall, overseeing global sales and playing a key role in scaling the company’s reach over the last four years. The first one, I know my sales cycle.

Outsourcing Services 117

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 117

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale).

Scale 293

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW, is a cloud spend optimization solution that guarantees to cut down your AWS bills by 5-15%. With CloudKeeper, we have helped 200+ of our customers optimize their AWS spend with a guaranteed reduction in their AWS bills. No lock-ins. Savings from Day 1. RI pricing for On-demand usage.

Cloud spend optimization 260

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 260

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2024

Overall Cloud spending has bounced back off lows for sure: AWS at a $105B run rate growing 19% Quarterly YoY growth trends below. VCs are minting AI unicorns at a strong clip, and investing in AI at as fast a clip as they can. Sapphire Ventures, a leading growth-stage VC fund, has some good data. # Not overall. 200m for Clio. #

AWS 235

AWS Scale Social Media AI 235

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

It could be a 6-month, 12-month, or multi-year venture, so you want the cash to invest in an upmarket strategy properly. One way is by talking to your customers and prospects. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after. You’ll also need to look at your sales process.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 300

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

Or of my investments, ones like Algolia and Salesloft, that yes, in theory, were playing in larger markets, but in practice, their entry points were quite narrow. How can that scale over time? How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Worth investing 7+ years of your life in.

Scale 279

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 279

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). As a public company with significant scale, it’s hard to grow quickly if you have to rely solely on new customers for that growth. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. Four, people in the sale? Kristen Habacht: Well, there’s none in sales.

Merchant Services 259

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

Some things to think about as you craft your offer are: Does it align with your sales motion? You don’t want conflict with the sales team. 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. Do they have a CRO in place?

Startup 262

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 262

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

But these days, there are so many innovative and impactful tools that can massively streamline your workflows and help to set you up for success as you scale. This is especially important for small teams, where you need to operate at a scale far beyond your headcount (without burning out your team by working around the clock).

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Of course, not at scale.

Scale 169

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 169

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. It requires shifts in go-to-market strategy, sales compensation, financial planning, billing, and much more. Ready to scale to $100+ million ARR?

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur.

Sales Hiring 302

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 302

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. Basic marketing and selling at a global scale is becoming easy too. The second army are your main competitors. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

I thought it might be helpful to assemble a checklist of 22 reasons I almost immediately pass on investing in start-ups that are still interesting. You’re in sales. CEO Doesn’t like Sales — and The Hunt. The converse is, a bad arse hacker/engineer that has also learned to love sales. And/or Late.

Sales Recruiting 341

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 341

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

How sales worked, how pricing worked, how billboards work, and more. At the end of the day, Twilio still sells communications, AWS still sells servers, but the way we’re selling it is different than how it was done in yesteryear. You’d have an enterprise sales force, a song and dance and maybe some steak.

Scale 301

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 301

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

If we look at that and step back, you can think of this, again, from the leading perspective of the public’s first, which is this evolution over time. We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. Even at spectacular scale, they’re still growing at 30%. They had to reinvent themselves.

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 232

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

Tables have turned because I first met Mikkel when just after I was working for previous fund index, he had just invested. Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader. Goes on to what extent does this login us in, to what extent is it easy to get developers to work on it, to what extent is it easy to scale it?

Cloud 242

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 242

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And then I spent a year at Salesforce working on Marc Benioff’s extended leadership team, and really had a chance to learn how important trust can be, and also really learn from Salesforce, from Mark, how do you really build a global SaaS leader at scale? And in this time of COVID, we’re also pleased we are able to give back.

Software Review 254

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 254

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. The key here is knowing what your sales model is. And there are basically two sales models out there. Kind of extreme sales models out there for SaaS businesses.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud. The hyperscalers benefit from massive scale, distribution, trust and depth of customer relationships in ways no other software companies do. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cost optimization & reporting 167

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 167

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

When you first get started, effectively any hosting setup will do the trick: your application is small, you have relatively few customers, and perhaps (depending on your sales process) expectations around performance and reliability are a bit lower during the beta phase. Are you growing and want to scale? Over time all of that changes.

AWS 115

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

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 9, 2021

Ten years ago, we built the initial Intercom infrastructure in AWS’ us-east-1 data center in North Virginia, USA. As a first step, we’re delighted to announce that we now offer European data hosting – allowing your most important data to remain entirely in Europe, stored in the AWS-eu-west-1 region. What’s next?

Data 181

Data AWS Scale Engineering 181

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The scale is extraordinary. It will take some time to discern just how fundamentally our political and social discourse will be changed by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but just as with every revolution, it will lead to both positive and negative outcomes, to both delight and disillusionment. There are about 3.2

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 2, 2024

Cloud Giants Report Q2 We also got the Q2 quarters from AWS / Azure / GCP this week! Our expectation, obviously again, is that we are going to significantly increase our investments in AI infrastructure next year, and we'll give further guidance as appropriate.” Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 157

Cloud Azure GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS 157

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q3 ‘23 Not a great signal for software this week from the Cloud Giants (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)…After Q2 (3 months ago), the tone from the Cloud Giants around optimizations was largely: optimizations have started to ease, and net new workloads have picked up. Staggering scale already.

Cost optimization & reporting 157

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 157

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And so, she can, and Anthony just finished up basically going from the first sales hire at Gainsight at almost 100 million in revenue and has just retired. Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. And notice that I said investments, not cost or spend.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 244

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

This is why the consumption players (Snowflake, Mongo, Confluent, Azure, AWS, etc) so more variability in the macro slowdown. This brings me to AI (everything leads to AI these days…). But this is changing - many categories are becoming commoditized leading to massive pricing pressure. Do you have ARR or ERR?

AI 190

AI Cloud Revenue Technical Advisors 190

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

Automation in infrastructure can lead to pretty serious blunders. “I almost think of this as one of those videos of the universe that goes from zooming all the way to the earth as a dot in a galaxy and all the way through the human scale and the micro scale” Jamie Osler: You have really narrowed that down as well.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Women in sales often have a polarizing experience. In the Sales Hacker video series Aha Moments , I asked 10 women: “What is one ‘aha moment’ you’ve had in your sales career?”. The conversations that followed were so authentic and encouraging that we decided to expand this conversation to other badass women in the sales world.

Scale 137

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 137

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

It’s a brutal, awful slog in the start. I would say, it’s always good to call out just how awful it is to be a founder, to be an entrepreneur, because that is a unique perspective that you bring to the board room that no one else shares. The angel investors are people who invest their own money. David : Here we go.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. So, OpenView worked out for me.

Investment 113

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 113