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. You know they’ll demand your products, so it’s time to show up with the right leadership, support, services, training, and whatever else you decide you’ll need for your business.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 But also it’s allowed us to get much closer to our provider, I mean, we host and run 100% on AWS, but pull data from everywhere. It was pretty easy to drive that from our side.

Scale 262

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 262

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In many ways, your Quality of Life will simply be awful. Your quality of life will simply be awful if your co-founders aren’t as committed as you, and if they aren’t at least close to as good as you. The pay is terrible. The risk isn’t worth it. You lose one critical employee, the world is over. Do not pass go.

Part-Time VPE 299

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 299

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 26, 2020

Our leadership team is fully engaged in the active management of our response during this challenging period. All of Intercom’s production infrastructure is provided as a service to Intercom by Amazon Web Services (AWS). All of our recovery and resilience mechanisms are tested regularly, and we update processes as required.

AWS 192

AWS Scale Business Cloud 192

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth. And I know you’ve had some great experience, particularly while you were at AWS, running different partner sales, channel sales.

Outsourcing Services 117

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 117

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Our engineers also write a lot of Ruby code, which knits together a lot of AWS, infrastructure, platform and SaaS technologies that form the core of Intercom’s backend infrastructure. We quickly discounted this as it didn’t fit with our three pillars of Run Less Software and decided to consolidate on MySQL, specifically on AWS MySQL.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

But, sometimes a founder is >so< terrible at sales, so awful at it, that literally, it’s hopeless. But not to figure out if you really have a repeatable sales process. This is the “best” process because it’s the fastest and most efficient. In that case, hire someone to do sales for you before you’ve even closed 10 customers yourself.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 279

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

It includes leadership development courses, and responsibilities of managing and hiring one or two reps to get experience. . Pothole #4 – Promoting Your Best Salesperson to Manager. It’s a common occurrence in SaaS –– the highest-performing sales rep gets promoted to manage a team.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 260

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2023

The IPO window is mostly closed now, but it won’t be forever: In general, maybe sell 20% now. You can give up some future gains to lock in some actually liquidity today. Taxes are important, and confusing. Paying a ton of taxes now to hold for the future can be awfully risky, especially if the taxes are very high.

Startup 278

Startup AWS Pricing Marketing 278

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS. In its early days, the company made many decisions that boosted user growth, but there wasn’t deep thought about the cost implications.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

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

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. Leadership injections as you scale are tricky. They’re also growing fast and are nicely profitable. Let’s dive into it. The more SMB you are, the faster the sales cycle and the quicker the team learns.

Sales Hiring 282

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 282

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

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

Headcount 246

Headcount AWS SaaS Churn 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

But they are often just awful managers. You probably haven’t done it before. Turns out, first-time CEOs are often the most successful. Because they don’t know it’s impossible. Or at least, far worse than they are the second time. This means more employee churn, friction, drama than you need.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 280

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? 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 ? So is SaaS cursed?

Scale 299

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 299

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

But not making the hire at all is pretty awful, too. A bad VP of Sales is a total disaster. The worst hire you can make (maybe a bad VP of Engineering is even worse, but we’ll put that aside for now). I think my net net advice is give on a lot, but there are two things you can’t give on.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 290

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

When you go upmarket, they’ll likely want you to integrate with some legacy technology, like MS Dynamics or AWS. You’ve built your product today, and maybe it integrates with Salesforce or Hubspot CRM for your downmarket customer. Finally, don’t forget about service partners.

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 305

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader. We are seeing platform shifts from how they traditionally run their infrastructure and services and business to seeing them run that stuff on AWS. Obviously that’s not really so relevant today. What kind of role do you think the rise of the public has paid?

Cloud 245

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 245

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

They had open cores and created enterprise features around it to protect the business model until it got torpedoed by AWS early on. You’ll notice an evolution in how you approach customers, board meetings, and leadership. That would have been counterproductive. What are the benefits of building open source?

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

Sales Hacker

MARCH 4, 2019

Dan talks about the key qualities of great sales leadership and how to be an effective executive in addition to being a great sales leader. Building a Repeatable Leadership System [19:04]. Dan’s got over 20 years of sales experience, and specifically has insights on sales and leadership. We’re on iTunes. And on Stitcher.

Leadership 71

Leadership Scale Sales Hiring Sales 71

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The wave of SaaS companies that built themselves on the likes of AWS and Azure have reinforced the pre-eminence of cloud computing. Apple survived the death of Steve Jobs in October 2011 under the thoughtful stewardship of Tim Cook, and continued to essentially be the iPhone company, while branching into wearables and services. .

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 15, 2015

There is no shortage of awful sales leaders. They cause confusion amongst team members, ignore important business decisions, and lack passion for the profession. When the team is underperforming, bad sales leaders blame everyone else but themselves.

AWS 52

AWS Sales Business Leadership 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

When new hires joined the APAC Alliance, they would fly to our San Francisco or Dublin offices for two weeks of onboarding, as it’s an awesome way to get immersed in our company culture, meeting Intercom leadership and new colleagues while experiencing our values first hand. Working on your own also makes you incredibly resourceful.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 6, 2023

Get your leadership team together, re-evaluate each juncture in your GTM process from customer discovery to upsell, and re-imagine a better way to engage your customers using these new advancements in AI. A few years ago, each of your teams would have run out to buy the latest AI point solution because of FOMO.

Artificial Intelligence 123

Artificial Intelligence AI Generative AI Blockchain 123

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 that company grew very quickly. They can make donations for those charities.

Software Review 259

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 259

Sales Hacker

JUNE 20, 2022

This is an awful place from which to make decisions. Present a united leadership front. In a recession, sellers will also look to the whole leadership group (HR, Product, IT etc.) They will notice any break in the leadership chain and this can lower their confidence, even if the sales leader is doing all the right things.

Sales Hiring 115

Sales Hiring Strategy Sales Leadership 115

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Products like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the rise of engineering talent globally have reduced the barrier of entry for software startups in recent years. Building a culture of transparency needs to start at the leadership level if you want it to cascade through every part of the organization.

Software Review 162

Software Review AWS Social Media Artificial Intelligence 162

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2019

And those of us and those of you who are involved in these companies, even the successful ones look an awful lot more like this. They pioneered things like content marketing, thought leadership. I think this is the misconception that many people have, that a successful company is a smooth up and to the right journey from the beginning.

SaaS 187

SaaS Sales Hiring Scale Innovation 187

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

We’ve done a ton of terrific sessions with the Twilio leadership over the years, including 4 different deep dives with Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder. 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.

Scale 306

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 306

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And I remember being at that Dreamforce in 2009, which was awful. ” I’m like, that sounds awful. ” So we want to own it and be able to work with sales and sort of a servant leadership perspective, put them in a position to prospect. And every vendor was just staring at each other like the world’s dead.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 246

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. To some extent, it’s not clear. Maybe endless price increases,” Jason says. A lot of it is moving to versions of AI. How does a startup benefit from this? Dell fell 15% last week.

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

ChurnZero

AUGUST 11, 2020

You and I both know how awful it feels to have someone disregard what we say and focus on their end goal instead. David Ellin, chief customer officer at Centric Leadership Strategies , recommends expanding relationships as much as possible: .

Retention 97

Retention Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Software Review 97

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 25, 2019

Or, your SKO can be a colossal waste of time and money that will leave your sales reps questioning your leadership. Meet with your leadership team ahead of time and determine what the primary purpose of your SKO will be. As a general rule, we humans are pretty awful at retaining information. Our downfall is in our memory.

Sales Hiring 74

Sales Hiring Sales AWS Leadership 74

FastSpring

DECEMBER 21, 2020

In about 2002, I got into more of a leadership position for satellite offices of larger companies. But I do enjoy running an awful lot. I’m going to date myself. My first job in tech was in 1998 as a software developer. I started with Java 0.9 and have been working in tech ever since.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Development Team Review Software Review AWS 78

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2019

” And, of course, I mean look at all the stuff they’ve done since: AWS, Mechanical Turk, the fulfillment model. But leadership is about doing the right things. .” I couldn’t believe it. Because I’m like, “These are the guys who started in books.” But they did it systematically. ” Right?

Sales Hiring 176

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Scale Startup 176

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

I think maybe once we saw the deck that they were using and it was pretty awful. When we first started doing this, we didn’t have a sales deck and so we just let them do their own thing. They gave a presentation to their boss. So now we give them a modified version of our deck so that they can use that to do that presentation.

Underperforming Technical Team 222

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SMB compliance 222

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

Our private membership connects you with a network of thousands of like-minded peers and resources, where you can tap into leadership opportunities, training, mentoring, and other services made for high-growth leaders like you. We work really closely, we have the sales leadership, Jed Smith is my peer. Amy: Totally.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 106