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What does it mean to be a CTO for a startup? Should a startup CTO spend their time programming? The role of a CTO varies as the company matures. Here’s a graphic from Socal CTO that illustrates the roles as they change over time: In its earliest days, a startup’s top need is often to produce a product.
Co-founder and CTO Karim Atiyah came to SaaStr Annual to share how they got this rocketship … off the ground. ” SaaStr Take: Your early hires will define your company’s trajectory. Back in 2021 though, Ramp was just 2 years in — but already experiencing hypergrowth.
So I caught up the other day with the CTO of a leading SaaS company with tens of thousands of customers, growing quickly. AI is all over their homepage and website and comms. I asked him about a particular use case for AI, and his answer shocked me a bit: Honestly, our AI is basically still in beta. The same with other leaders.
I felt part of your core job as CEO was to assemble a management team, not complain about how you couldn’t get it all done. Or couldn’t stand your CTO. I still believe a CEO should “do it all” in terms of building a decent management team first before hiring a COO. Hiring a strong COO between Management Team 1.0
Worked out great for my CTO who stayed (proud of him), but if things were structured differently, I would have made nine figures just staying. Hiring a controller that didn’t care. I avoided this mistake for my first two-startups, but then made it several times after. We ended up needing another 6 months of runway.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 5 Interesting Learnings from Sprout Social at $240,000,000 in ARR. SaaStr 564: Top 10 Learnings Architecting a High Throughput Critical API with RevenueCat CTO Miguel Carranza. Product-Led Growth: Panacea or Boondoggle?
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Be Careful Hiring “Dualies” — Folks That Are a VP of More Than One Thing. SaaStr 564: Top 10 Learnings Architecting a High Throughput Critical API with RevenueCat CTO Miguel Carranza. appeared first on SaaStr.
IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m He asked which to hire first. If you have a few nickels in the bank, and you somehow find a great VP a half stage or even full stage early, just hire her. Hiring is so hard as it is. Make the hire now. ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m More here: [link].
Dear SaaStr: What Makes a Bad CTO? While there is no legal definition for CTO or bright line between CTO and VPE, I’d suggest a start-up CTO really only has to do a few things — which are very hard: Assemble a small team (3–9) of very good engineers. That often were never anticipated and aren’t part of the job spec.
Dear SaaStr: How does a First Time Founder Identify 10x Hires? How do you hire a great CTO, a great VP of Product, a great VP of Sales … if you’ve never worked with one? There’s a reason almost every founder you talk to had a mis-hire for their first head of sales. It’s hard.
Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers. Get on jets?
Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person. She can be your CTO forever. That’s a different, and critical, job than CTO. Marketing is also an art and science.
Many companies believe excellent product design comes from hiring the best engineers and signing up for the latest software instead of building from the users’ perspectives. Stripe’s CTO, David Singleton, shares how they use a system of feedback, iteration, and fast shipping to create products that meet users’ expectations.
What started as a simple WordPress blog in 2012 has now become the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. SaaStr began in 2012 as a simple WordPress blog and a few answers on Quora sharing Jason Lemkin’s learnings of going from $0 to $100m ARR at EchoSign. SaaStr is turning 10! Now a staple!)
He made many great leadership points, but one in particular rattles around my head a lot and I think deserves its own post: You usually won’t know if you’ve made a 10x hire … when you make the hire. A good / great employee can become 10x in a new environment was part of Auren’s point. But I didn’t know they were truly 10x hires.
Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person. She can be your CTO forever. That’s a different, and critical, job than CTO. Marketing is also an art and science.
He joined StubHub as CTO, but didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because he “wasn’t committed enough.” If your customers love your product now, hire reps. ” Times of crisis are actually great times to find hard problems to solve.
Co-founder and CEO of Plato, Quong Hoang, the #1 mentoring platform for engineering leaders , helped moderate a discussion between CTO of Change.org, Elaine Zhou, and Head of Engineering at Notion, Michael Manapat, on this subject. Focus on retaining your engineers from day one. More like this at 2022 SaaStr Annual, Sep 13-15 in SF Bay Area!!
While the appearance matters, remember you are hiring the development firm primarily for its development skills, not its graphic design skills. Our blog post 53 Questions Developers Should Ask Innovators has a list of questions any good development team would ask. cto , product , saas Either way, we can help!"]
Miguel Carranza, CTO at RevenueCat, shares ten learnings from firsthand experience in architecting an API & SDK that is currently on 5,000+ apps and has seen 3x growth Year-over-Year. . Instead, the CTO suggests that you avoid adding new pieces of infrastructure until absolutely necessary. What makes a great API?
Lately I’ve been working with 5+ SaaS companies all hiring their first VP of Product. And critically, most have a really strong CEO-CTO partnership. A few general learnings: A VP of Product that Reports to CTO / Engineering Rarely Meets With That Many Customers. I just see this time and time again.
Anyhow the one thing I learned, beyond getting help screening and hiring for these positions from domain experts, is to look for Flags. For signs the prospective hire just won’t work out, no matter how strong they might look on paper. Why join a start-up? Well reason #1 is personal and career advancement.
Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. What Your Job Is (And What It Isn’t) Your Job is to Make the Company Win A CTO may imagine their primary job is to provide technical expertise, lead engineers, and help build the product.
The first 2 scaled reps you hire that hit plan (some may churn before then) get special training. They get CTO training. And so we see reps 3-10, or reps-from-#3-until-The-VP-of-Sales-is-Hired … fail. Simplify to a 1 page contract. And the others perform so poorly vs. the 2 that are doing well? So what can you do?
They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag. If you joined a startup at $2M and wanted to get to $6M with reps doing $400k, that VP of Sales would need to hire ten reps. 90% of the time, sales falls when a founder steps out of it.
You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? David considers product to be its own department that should also report directly to the CEO, instead of falling under the CTO. CTO (40 Employees).
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Zendesk and Anaplan: A Tale of Two Very Similar, And Very Different, $10B SaaS Acquisitions. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. with Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone.
” — Jason Riedel, founder/CTO of Aspireship. “When on New Year’s Eve, customers kept sending us signed contracts.” “When customers get back $100k’s in minutes and want to pay us more” — Kanat Bekt, founder/CTO, SupplyPike. 20% conversion. ” — Drew Naugher.
In fact, right after that we hired a roundtrip employee as our CTO in my first start-up and it was amazing. Especially in tougher times, folks may be knocking on your door again. First, what doesn’t work, or at least hasn’t for me, is re-hiring: Folks that left for a company that was a better fit.
Including: CEO Snowflake CEO HubSpot CEO DropBox CEO Descript CEO Clio CEO Flock Safety CEO Own CRO ServiceTitan CMO Databricks CMO Infinite Reality CTO Rubrik CCO Canva CCO Bill CCO GitHub VP AI Wiz CEO Calendly and 100s more!! Investor Connections and Funding Opportunities — And $5m AI VC Pitch Stage!!
Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. I Need a VP of Sales.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Does Anyone Want To Be a Unicorn Anymore? Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit Dear SaaStr: Should You Hire Someone That Seems Good … But Always Job Hops? TAM is Great.
These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. And hire against it. More here.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: About 70% of SaaS Public Companies Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software (Updated) Growth Slowed Down About 33% On Average For Everyone in Q1 The Top 20 SaaStr Tips to Getting a SaaS Start-Up Going When Should You Add a Second Product?
But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).
Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. Folks come out differently here, but while Amplitude charges per volume, in part, it doesn’t make a material amount from overages. CEO Spencer Skates owns 8.5%, CTO Curtis Liu 8.0%. But Amplitude has 51% growth in paying customers on top of 57% overall growth.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: What All First-Time CEOs Should Know About Fundraising. with Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone. 5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom at $4.3B How to Handle, and Share, Bad News.
Hiring a reliable team is an all-encompassing issue where startups dive in head-first but fail to optimize it for success. . Hiring an expert produces 1000x better results than someone with interests elsewhere. . “A Hiring in a streamlined manner with a rigorous selection process initially builds momentum for long-term goals.
They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. But I forced us to hire him, over my CTO’s strong objection and my VPE’s grudging acknowledgment we had no choice. It was a hire I wasn’t really in favor of, but it was an experiment.
Almost all of them had an amazing CTO or CPO, and hired a simply epic VP or two. Some wicked smart, some merely very smart. Some direct, some warm and friendly. But what made them great: Ability to attract amazing co-founders and execs. Not just great, but epic. Ability to iterate pretty darn quickly.
The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. And if you are, you are going to naturally start off hiring up-and-comers to your first leadership team. That CTO that doesn’t quite have the traditional background. There are roughly 2 types of start-up management teams.
And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. But even if you’ve hired the world’s best VP of Sales … you can’t opt out of sales entirely. You still need to spend 15-20% of your time in sales. Hire a VP of Finance or even a CFO Early if You Are Growing Quickly.
Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.
Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. But I’ve almost failed every time.”
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