SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

This is a big deal for scaling companiesit means you can deliver more value at a lower cost, which is a competitive advantage. This means investing heavily in R&D and hiring top-tier talent to make your AI capabilities truly world-class. And how the CEOs of Monday, HubSpot, Rippling and more scale. Is Deflation Coming? #5.

AI 146

AI Trends SaaS AWS 146

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2021

It’s a familiar problem for all companies that scale fast – how do you keep your core technologies manageable for the increasing number of teams that depend on them? Instead, it would be an internal core technologies team that would take long-term views on how we build and scale Intercom. Our first challenge – Elasticsearch.

Scale 216

Scale Technical Review Technology Scaling 216

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2022

So follow AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. And it is stressful, especially if you invested at those peaks or as founders raised money at relatively high valuations and multiples. Let’s look a whole level up to the real canaries-in-the-coalmine: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. If they stumble, we’re in for a rough patch.

Cloud 290

Cloud Azure AWS Engineering 290

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 306

Cloud Scale AWS AI 306

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

They were $1.7B+ ARR in October , so let’s call it close to $2B at the end of the year, growing 40%+ at that scale –and profitable! (or 300 Employees Working on AI Not a surprise, but interesting to see the scale of investment here. #5. But we at least know enough to put together 5 Interesting Learnings!

AWS 303

AWS B2C Scaling AI 303

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. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr!

Cloud spend optimization 259

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 259

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

PE wants to invest in leaders, if not necessarily always #1 in a category. The startup I invested in that were acquired by PE in the 2020-2021 Boom were acquired for 8x in one case, 12x in another, and 15x in a third. Products that are as close to an annuity as possible, that are amenable to efficiency gains. is interesting to see.

AWS 315

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 315

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

Typically support consumes about perhaps 5%-7% of your revenue at scale (excluding customer success) in most SaaS models. Another 5%-7% go to core infrastructure costs (AWS, Azure, Snowflake, etc). It’s your top marketing and customer retention investment. It could be more or less, but that’s a rough way to think about it.

Azure 270

Azure AWS SaaS Customer Success 270

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. OneStream had an epic SaaS IPO at $500m ARR, growing 34%. That is clearly true in some aspect.

AWS 232

AWS Scale Social Media SaaS 232

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. Otherwise, it falls apart.

AWS 276

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 276

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

APRIL 26, 2024

What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on? 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. They’ll need GPUs. What about ROI? What do you do instead?

AI Search 284

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 284

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2022

ChurnZero lets your CS team manage and expand accounts at scale with proactive, personalized engagement that helps every customer succeed. Our best-in-class app tools, automation, dashboards and reporting help you drive strategic customer conversations, boost productivity and scale effectively.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 255

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS Enterprise readiness 255

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? Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective? Worth investing 7+ years of your life in.

Scale 276

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 276

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

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. Google, Microsoft, Apple).

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

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). Don’t wait to invest in customer success and account management. Churn burns a lot of cash at scale. So is SaaS cursed?

Scale 290

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 290

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). It’s likely startups start at plug-ins & then move down with scale that affords more usage & more capital to invest.

Generative AI 222

Generative AI AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 222

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

Next, they moved to credits, which are very popular, with AWS and Google Cloud being great examples of companies that are always giving credits out to startups. As you think about building out a partnership program, remember that you need to be able to operate at scale but prioritize your top partners. Do they have a CRO in place?

Startup 259

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 259

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

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Rich Archbold , Senior Director of Engineering, has been at the forefront of codifying and scaling this philosophy over the past few years. Our chat covers the origins of Run Less Software, how it has evolved at scale, and how it differs from the equally valid approaches of other engineering teams. What it means to Run Less Software.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

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. Once you do, invest and go hard after this market and grow the sales team to serve that upmarket customer. #3: Make sure you can make that investment from a product perspective. Look at your team.

Sales Hiring 297

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 297

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

Are you growing and want to scale? If you want to scale, you need to make the investment of time and money and make sure your infrastructure suits your size of business. A lot of our workload was getting moved to AWS, and wouldn’t you know it: they want you to move compute to them so they have migration services to match.

AWS 115

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

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

Databricks’ CEO, Ali Ghodsi, shares why Open Source is becoming a multi-billion investment, why it’s taking over multiple industries, and why it’s here to stay. The developers you engage with often become your first adopters, who then become product evangelists—and they’ll help you scale and solidify trust within enterprises, too.

Enterprise 246

Enterprise AI SaaS AWS 246

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 28, 2020

When we announced our investment in and partnership with Mattermost about a year ago , I wrote about a new architecture for SaaS. If you’ve used the AWS IAM (identity access management) console, you realize how complex access control has become. Assume this happens at some scale in the enterprise. The second is control.

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 223

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Cloud Enterprise Data 223

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

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. Assessing optimizations of wide-scale operations, e.g. choosing the right auto-scaling policies for your workloads. Invest in the process. Centralize governance.

Management 211

Management Government Cost optimization & reporting Engineering 211

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. And that’s exactly why we created a playbook to help companies scale to $100+ million ARR with this model. Ready to scale to $100+ million ARR?

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

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

Frontegg

JUNE 30, 2021

Another great benefit of investing in multi-tenant architectures is the possibility of maintaining the application’s agility and good performance. Finally, when the business has unlimited possibilities for expansion, all the costs involved become smaller in scale as you expand. How to Build a Multi-tenant SaaS Application on AWS?

AWS 88

AWS SaaS Payments Payment Methods Enterprise 88

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

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

For some context, Base10 is a research-driven investment firm focusing on companies automating the largest sectors of the real economy. New Startups: Infrastructure Layer The infrastructure layer is exciting and is tooling that enables you to tweak different models, integrate them, and scale them in cost-effective ways.

Generative AI 289

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 289

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

2: What Keeps Someone Motivated In The Startup World Jason has been successful, has had exits, has invested in great companies, and has built SaaStr into what it is, so what motivates him and other founders to keep going? “It At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. It changes over time,” Jason shares. But this is software.

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 299

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

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

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We should talk about that more and then we can scale that more? Want to see more content like this?

Scale 151

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 151

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

We also have two other podcasts – Intercom on Product , where Intercom co-founder Des Traynor and Intercom SVP of Product, Paul Adams, discuss their latest thoughts on how to build successful products at scale and Scale by Intercom – where we explore how businesses are driving growth through customer relationships.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178