Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 13, 2021

For this reason, we chose to run exclusively on AWS and wherever possible, we make use of battle-tested AWS services, be it RDS Aurora for our relational databases, the Simple Queue Service (SQS) for our async workers or ElastiCache for our caching layer. This post is a version of a talk I gave at Elastic Community Conference recently.

AWS 249

AWS Cloud Software Review Systems Review 249

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

But that doesnt make your life scaling your start-up any easier. This is probably too conservative, and may sound awfully abstract to founders at earlier stages but if I was a founder at a hot start-up growing quickly today, I wouldnt raise at > a $300m valuation until I was 100% sure I was on the IPO track for real.

AWS 208

AWS Scaling SaaS Data 208

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

This post is an adaptation of a talk I recently gave at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) community day event in Dublin about the technical strategies I’ve experienced that don’t work and the ones that have helped us to grow and scale at Intercom. At Intercom, we’ve found success running Lambda as glue code between AWS services.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

How does a team scale and measure a devrel team? Head of developer relations at Temporal , Shawn has worked on React and serverless JavaScript at Two Sigma, Netlify and AWS. Many products enter an organization bottoms-up, and months or years later, become so important to the company, they buy a contract.

Outsourced Development 275

Outsourced Development Development Scaling AWS 275

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2023

SaaStr 644: Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks with Databricks SVP and GM Ed Lenta  2. Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks 2. When You Fall Out of Product-Market Fit Is Cold Calling Dead?

AWS 243

AWS Scale Sales Hiring SMB 243

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

With so many incredible sessions to choose from, we thought we’d highlight a few for you here: Building & Scaling Global Product Teams. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

Tom Tunguz

JULY 8, 2020

The cloud data lake architecture enables companies to achieve scale, flexibility, and accessibility. The conference features talks from practitioners and open-source leaders from the ecosystem from Netflix, Microsoft, Expedia, AWS, and Preset. A vital part of a cloud data lake is the open format of data.

Data Analysis 257

Data Analysis Cloud Data Scaling 257

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

Examples include AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market. And remember to scale. Says Caimi: “Phase two for a software company is once you’ve got that product-market fit, it’s all about scale.

Outsourcing Services 290

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 290

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies With Ed Lenta, SVP and GM of Databricks Back in the early 2000s, people didn’t entirely accept that a virtual machine could be as good as a physical one. Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

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. You must build a lean, impactful team to help your business scale. 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

MARCH 31, 2022

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. 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.

Scale 262

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 262

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Instead of requiring a scale-out database in the sky, most analyses are faster with an optimized database on your computer that can leverage the cloud when needed. For the last ten years, the data ecosystem has focused on big data - the bigger the data set, the more exciting. But most workloads aren’t massive. Motherduck raised a $12.5M

Cloud 356

Cloud AWS Data Analysis Benchmarks 356

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2021

It really is almost everyone at SaaS that is at scale and has a winning brand. AWS accelerated to 37% YoY growth , up from 32% last quarter. Many of whom really are more proxies for the web overall (Zendesk, everyone needs support) and SMBs using the web to run and scale their businesses (HubSpot). Now is your time, folks.

AWS 340

AWS SaaS Cloud Scaling 340

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

AWS, Twilio, Heroku, etc. Often, a straight UBP pricing model doesn’t scale into the enterprise. The platform fee establishes a stable relationship and the usage pricing enables the customer to scale up or down as a function of their traffic which might vary throughout the year. How about a 50 person SaaS company?

SaaS Payments 279

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 279

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2022

At the same time, the leaders in Cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) are growing a stunning 40%. Growing at a pace and scale like we’ve never seen before: That’s got to be the most visceral juxtaposition in my time in SaaS. This puts a lot of pressure on all the private unicorns out there: We did a deeper dive on decacorns here.

Cloud 338

Cloud Azure AWS Marketing 338

Tom Tunguz

JULY 24, 2024

Most large-scale AI products have yet to be built. AWS & others have stopped charging to move data. AWS cut prices more than 100 times in its first five years. Google is on a trajectory to invest $50 billion this year. Amazon & Microsoft are also deploying similar tens of billions for the same purpose.

AI 300

AI Artificial Intelligence AWS Innovation 300

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. If they stumble, we’re in for a rough patch. They are the Cloud.

Cloud 299

Cloud Azure AWS Engineering 299

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. And how the CEOs of Monday, HubSpot, Rippling and more scale. One Thing is Clear: AI Makes a Lot of Business Software Look Awfully Expensive Today. Is Deflation Coming? #5. Don’t Let Costs Be an Excuse.

AI 144

AI Trends SaaS AWS 144

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. Scaling to Rails.

Scale 216

Scale Technical Review Technology Scaling 216

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2021

But as Shopify scaled, its revenue as a percent of commerce on its sites — “Merchant Solutions” — began to eclipse its recurring SaaS revenues. First, Snowflake rolls its large customers into fixed comittments (as does AWS and many others), and bills them in advance. And yes, it’s a software company.

Merchant Services 360

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 360

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

So we’ve had a lot of fun in our 5 Interesting Learnings profiling the top SaaS and Cloud companies at scale, from Slack to Zoom, from Shopify to Datadog, from Box to DropBox. But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud is one of the greatest case studies of all time.

Cloud 297

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 297

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Many have used Digital Ocean at the cheaper, simpler version of AWS-Azure-Digital Ocean to get going fast and quickly. But at scale, even the slightly less long version of the tail is where the money is. And if so, maybe that’s Digital Ocean. If you haven’t heard of Digital Ocean, ask your developer. Or at least.

Scale 297

Scale AWS Azure Cloud 297

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

So many of the Best of the Best are growing at crazy rates at scale, from Canva to Databricks and Wiz and more. : So at those growth rates, sky high valuations at the growth stage are arguably merited, at least in theory. Databricks is Growing 60%+ at $2.4 Billion in ARR. And Accelerating. IMHO, it’s justified for a Wiz or two, for sure.

Venture Capital 303

Venture Capital AWS Cloud Scaling 303

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 30, 2020

Prior to HashiCorp Adam was the Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS and held senior positions at Pivotal, VMware, and SpringSource. With two decades of experience, Adam is well-versed in developer evangelism. My partner Astasia Myers will be leading the discussion. She writes often on topics like these on our blog Memory Leak.

Development 313

Development Scale AWS Scaling 313

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2023

They typically give them just enough to see if it will work, and the startup grows and scales to the next stage. Shopify , Datadog, Crowdstrike , Google Cloud-Azure-AWS, Snowflake , etc. VC finance is designed to fund 18-24 months of runway. That’s how it works. VCs don’t give startups 10 years of capital.

Startup 357

Startup Venture Capital Azure AWS 357

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 263

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 263

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 312

AWS B2C Scaling AI 312

SaaStr

JANUARY 20, 2023

Get ready for 50+ speakers for the very first SaaStr APAC event in Singapore, including: APAC Update: State of the Cloud with Bessemer Venture Partners , Anant Vidur Puri, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners Lessons Learned in Scaling to $1B ARR: From VMware, AWS and Databricks with Databrick’s SVP and GM Ed Lenta The Secrets to Building (..)

AWS 298

AWS Cloud Trends Startup 298

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

The fastest grower scales to more than 600 people in 30 months. I’ve normalized the years for when all the businesses were roughly at the same headcount - fewer than 50 people. This is a proxy for when the business established product market fit. There is quite a bit of variance in the growth rates of each of these companies.

Headcount 187

Headcount Scaling Software Business 187

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2022

Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. A related post here: 6 Things in SaaS That Are Only Obvious At Scale. 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.

SaaS 351

SaaS Headcount AWS Churn 351

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, is in a very different set that also competes with Microsoft, but AWS is considered their biggest competitor in the market. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS. Right now, 70% of the GenAI startups are using Google Cloud.

Cloud 313

Cloud Scale AWS AI 313

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2023

While the data ends here, here’s what I can tell you I am seeing in growth rounds today: Very few growth rounds are happening at all When the do happen, they are for capital efficient startups growing > 50% at scale And … the peak valuation is about 15x. Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. For the best ones.

Venture Capital 67

Venture Capital AWS SaaS Startup 67

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

SaaStr 644: Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks with Databricks SVP and GM Ed Lenta  4. Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks 5. SaaStr 643: What’s Holding Up Buyers?:

Scale 246

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 246

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. Yes, AI has fueled Nvidia and Google Cloud and Microsoft and AWS to massive growth, and growth that has accelerated the past few quarters. OneStream had an epic SaaS IPO at $500m ARR, growing 34%.

AWS 238

AWS Scale Social Media SaaS 238

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). Dear SaaStr: What is The Average Ratio of Support Staff to Customer Count in SaaS?

Azure 278

Azure AWS SaaS Customer Success 278