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.

AWS 321

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 321

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 285

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 285

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2024

YCombinator is having a renaissance, with 4 batches of 100s of top tier startups being hatched in Dogpatch in SF. But SOMA and much of the financial district are still awful. All VCs will invest anywhere now. It’s clearly the center of the AI Boom, even if many are based outside of it, in Paris and elsewhere. Most will stay.

AWS 299

AWS B2B AI Startup 299

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?

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 25, 2023

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. Google has invested hundreds of millions into Anthropic , complementing its efforts with Google Brain.

Artificial Intelligence 240

Artificial Intelligence AI AWS Cloud 240

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 11, 2024

This behavior can create a surge in purchasing activity, as organizations look to make strategic investments without losing their allocated funds. Coming out of that, every company from the largest enterprise to the smallest startup started thinking very critically about cost optimizations. So why was it stronger than normal last year?

Cloud 167

Cloud Cost optimization & reporting GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Review 167

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2022

Pop any venture firm’s website into the wayback machine , peruse the bios from the late 90s, and you’ll see statements like “I invest in Internet companies.” At some point, startups tinker enough with the new technology to discover the applications customers value most. ” Or Web2.0 But not anymore.

AWS 244

AWS Government Innovation Cloud 244

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

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. And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Jabari Norton. Crowdstrike.

Scale 262

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 262

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. Understand the potential consequences of outsourcing to young startups. Young startups go out of business regularly and their security and reliability is often worse than more mature companies. Best in class Late-stage Startups (e.g. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS. Invest in next-gen finance tooling. Encourage bias towards action.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. To “soften the beach,” you need to expend as little energy and investment as possible while learning as much as possible. Invest in and put that into the market to start softening the beach.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

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. They’ll need GPUs.

AI Search 293

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 293

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 298

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 298

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Don’t wait to invest in customer success and account management. I’m doing a lot of this financial planning now. Some are barely burning any cash. So is SaaS cursed? But break away. Get better.

Scale 299

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 299

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 It changes over time,” Jason shares. The marketers all want a team today. You spend even more money.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

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. 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.

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. I’m starting to see that archiecture more and more, but with a twist.

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 223

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Cloud Enterprise Data 223

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

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. You can think of them beginning from very base infrastructural technologies, and in our case we’re betting exclusively on AWS as a cloud vendor.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

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. Invest in the process. The more you invest in your team’s cost management process, the less it will restrict developers – and the more you’ll maximize returns. .

Management 211

Management Government Cost optimization & reporting Engineering 211

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 3, 2014

Startups benefit from a booming public market for three reasons. As a consequence of higher stock prices, stock increases in value and cash becomes easier to raise and relatively less expensive, both of which entice tech publics to acquire startups, extending the current vibrant M&A market.

Startup 100

Startup Trends AWS Marketing 100

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR. Whether starting an Internet startup has really become 10x cheaper depends on how exactly you phrase the question and is debatable. Let me rephrase that. Every founder who accomplishes this deserves a huge amount of respect.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., 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. Is Software Rebounding?

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 28, 2023

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. After all, they had a lot of AI tailwinds, and benefited tremendously from consolidation (without a headwind of a larger base of smaller startups, like AWS).

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS AI Search 130

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

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. I say investment strategy, but really it’s like how do you build a company that’s focused on product-led growth? .”

Investment 113

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 113

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

You can see the growth on the platform side with Azure, Google, and AWS and how much it’s accelerating in AI. How does a startup benefit from this? VCs Want To Invest, But There’s Stress In The System As a community, we over-talk about venture capital, but it’s important if you’re fundraising and to understand the pulse of the system.

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2024

Previously, Amit led marketing efforts at startups like Tact AI (1st AI Assistant for Sales backed by AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce), HP Inc (next-gen computing) and Spire AI (Human Capital SaaS). 35:57) Advice for startups entering a market with established incumbents. (43:00)

AWS 112

AWS AI Advertising Finance 112

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

Your default operating cadence should be to run – it’s important startups don’t compromise on speed. If you are a regular listener, you’ll know that we interview makers and doers from the worlds of product management, design, startups, and marketing. This time, some automation that was owned by AWS.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 1, 2019

. “Michael is the rare CFO who also leads up marketing, which makes him the perfect person to talk us through the company’s trajectory” As the head of Intercom’s Early Stage program for Startups, the fast-growing fintech startup is one company I’ve been keeping my eye on. From Wall Street to startup.

Strategy 36

Strategy Payment Methods Payment Services Startup 36

Baremetrics

FEBRUARY 19, 2018

After all, as a startup founder, you want to have a solid idea of what your true gross margins are and what it actually costs to acquire a customer! Most startups I’ve seen often get at least some of this wrong, particularly if they are doing around $100k in MRR or less. that will fit the use case of most small to medium SaaS startups.

Startup 81

Startup DevOps as a Service Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 81

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

It has a portion of its revenue that’s very sensitive to the economy and a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? We’re seeing pockets of strength and then we’re seeing pockets of startups that overnight not only are struggling but might even want to immediately stop their spend, right?

Merchant Services 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

Mike has been in and around startups for the better part of three decades: as a consultant, as a co-founder and now as the Managing Director of Salesforce Incubator, which propels new startups into the marketplace. He joined me for a chat that ranged from the role of AI to how they choose startups to incubate. Short on time?

Scale 151

Scale Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Technical Review 151

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

They did call out sequential growth in Confluent Cloud every quarter this year which was a big positive Still seeing elongated deal cycles and less expansion revenue The Bad AWS: Headwinds Getting Worse Their quarter ended in March, but on the earnings call they called out weakening growth in April.

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 16, 2022

To achieve our mission of making internet business personal and scaling to support larger and larger customers, we have been continually, thoughtfully, and carefully investing in our people, systems, and processes to maintain Intercom’s high standards of availability. Without rock solid availability, nothing else matters.

Software Review 118

Software Review Technical Review Management Systems Review 118

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 Donut charts – while often frowned upon – are handy for quickly introducing your company’s expense breakdown. Use area charts for more detail.

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

One is, lots of folks that have been through the startup cycle, you have this extrapolation from a single data point problem, which is, “OK, we have this story. Another piece of very, very good startup advice that I’ve given myself a hundred times is the “Do one thing exceptionally well.” This is what we did.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Retail was mentioned twice, that’s it, and AWS was mentioned 78 times, so it’s probably not surprising that they’re doing this. I think it’s a really staggering stat.

Cloud 113

Cloud Scale AWS Artificial Intelligence 113