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

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

“AWS’ AI business is a multibillion-dollar revenue run rate business that continues to grow at a triple-digit year-over-year percentage and is growing more than 3x faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew, and we felt like AWS grew pretty quickly.” GCP 23 35 52.2% Azure 26 33 26.9%

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 162

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS AI 162

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 220

Outsourced Development Development Scaling AWS 220

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 169

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 169

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 199

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 199

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 241

Data Analysis Cloud Data Scaling 241

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 246

AI Artificial Intelligence AWS Innovation 246

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 286

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 286

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 28, 2022

A few months ago, we retired our last pieces of infrastructure on DigitalOcean, marking our migration to AWS as complete. Our journey was not your regular AWS migration as it involved moving our infrastructure from classic VMs to containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Ultimately, we decided to go with AWS. Managed databases.

K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) 52

K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 52

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 193

AWS Scale Social Media AI 193

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 240

Venture Capital AWS Cloud Scaling 240

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

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

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 179

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 179

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 201

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 201

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 237

Scale AWS Azure Cloud 237

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 20, 2022

This principle is best illustrated by a few examples from over the years, demonstrating how “ Be technically conservative” allows us to scale fast while ultimately not being a constraint. As a company scales, there is a risk that some team members will follow the principles dogmatically or interpret them incorrectly.

Scale 160

Scale Technical Review Scaling Software Review 160

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 226

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 226

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

However, with the introduction of Events-Based Billing by Chargify, this event-based billing model is now available to small and medium-sized businesses, giving them the ability to offer the same pricing models and bill customers just as precisely as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or the popular voice and messaging platform Twilio.

AWS 98

AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

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 226

Azure AWS SaaS Customer Success 226

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 265

AWS B2C Scaling AI 265

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 320

Cloud AWS Data Analysis Benchmarks 320

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 208

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 208

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. That’s a high value for AWS.

AWS 216

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 216

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

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 258

Cloud Azure AWS Engineering 258

Frontegg

JUNE 30, 2021

Finally, when the business has unlimited possibilities for expansion, all the costs involved become smaller in scale as you expand. We will see later that the technologies integrated into AWS allow this difficulty to be quickly resolved. How to Build a Multi-tenant SaaS Application on AWS? Organize Your Databases with DynamoDB.

AWS 88

AWS SaaS Payments Payment Methods Enterprise 88

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

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 306

Cloud Azure AWS Marketing 306

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

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 248

Cloud Scale AWS AI 248

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 305

Startup Venture Capital Azure AWS 305

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

Being Multi-Platform / Multi-Product Key at Scale A story we’ve seen many times. 64% of Large Customers Sourced From Partners They are AWS’s largest cybersecurity partner. The majority of their customers use 5 or more modules. #3. ” #7. What’s your channel / partner strategy? #9. Only Founded in 2011.

Cybersecurity 268

Cybersecurity AWS Benchmarks Cloud 268

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 do you do instead?

AI Search 223

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 223

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 253

AWS Cloud Trends Startup 253

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 164

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 164

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

You do need “quota capacity” as you scale. A top mistake I see CEOs make is to scale back the amount of time they spend in sales once they hire a few reps. They can do it, but it’s pretty awful. Not to save money, but to concentrate the leads you do have in those that can close them. They love it.

Scale 227

Scale Sales Hiring Sales AWS 227