SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2021

” — 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.

CTO Hire 347

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Healthcare 347

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

Less and you under-invest. At $8m in ARR, if you have $2m of cash in the bank, you get real nervous investing much more than $500k-$750k, $1m max. It’s subtle, but in SaaS I’ve learned you under-invest if you have < 50% of your ARR in the bank. 5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. More here.

Part-Time VPE 300

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 300

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2020

Your investors and others will learn a lot more hearing about sales from your VP of Sales, your CTO co-founder … and not you. Just assume none of your investors invest again. But there are 1,000+ new firms since 2016 alone. Professional investors can even write off any given investment if they have to.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting New CTO Scale CTO 363

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships, and exchange strategies. Braindates are 1:1 and small group networking sessions designed for you to share knowledge and network with like-minded SaaS leaders during SaaStr Europa.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 299

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2023

A few that I’ve seen across the handful of investments I’ve made … that didn’t work out: Not really committed to going long. A great CTO usually can solve this problem just in time to save the customers, but without one, revenue stalls. Sometimes, in a new or emerging category you can be slow at first.

Startup 263

Startup New CTO CTO Investment 263

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2020

As the year starts to wind to a close, one exercise I go through with many CEOs I’ve invested in or am close to is this: Did you ship at least 3 truly game-changing features this year? Not launching 3 Truly Game-Changing Features doesn’t mean you didn’t ship any new code or features. Not just at $0.1m

New CTO 272

New CTO CTO Engineering Investment 272

SaaStr

JANUARY 22, 2021

Ciara Peter (Gainsight VP of Product & Design) and Mickey Alon (CTO & Founder of Gainsight PX) share their practical tips for product leaders looking to achieve business growth. Every year, millions of new products are created and launched. The return on marketing investment is much faster.

Scale 291

Scale New CTO CTO Acquisition 291

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

“Our journey with JFrog started back in November 2015 when I first met CEO and co-founder Shlomi Ben Haim and the JFrog team,” said Jai Das, who is the president and managing director at Sapphire Ventures , which participated in the $50 million Series C investment. “One But even more appealing was the product vision the founders outlined.

New CTO 287

New CTO CTO Benchmarks Consulting 287

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2024

“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal?

Management 279

Management CTO Hire New CTO CTO 279

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2023

Reference other great investments they’ve made, and why they are similar. Another month of progress, another set of new customers, etc. Share up front why your first CTO left. And no one is in a rush today to invest. But hiding both doesn’t help. #3. Truly hyper-personalize it. Share lots of details. Show the opposite.

New CTO 307

New CTO CTO Banking Cloud 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. The co-founders of Hubspot were at SaaStr Annual last year and said that for two years, they each had to write a blog post every single day. When Lemkin started investing ten years ago, his first five early-stage investments were wildly successful.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 291

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Alex Kayyal and Julie Kainz, Partners at Lightspeed, shared at SaaStr Annual a framework they developed around how to think about this new era of Artificial Intelligence in SaaS, what opportunities are out there for startups, and how to think about incumbents. CRM wasn’t a new category, but they were done on-premise.

AI 295

AI Artificial Intelligence New CTO Healthcare 295

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer. We all know this, but we forget about it, especially when the Hot New Deal and the sales team’s wants and needs consumes all of management’s resources. ” — Ankit Sindhi, Founder, Spurt.

CTO Hire 328

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 328

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales. Amazing, great emails that are perfect, that solve your problems as a buyer for real right now, or are a jaw-dropping investment, get opened,” says Lemkin. Q: What Do You Think About Specialization In This New Era Of Efficiency? They wanted a one-call close.

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 297

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 297

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. Also, determine whether you have the right CTO to handle these changes. If they aren’t sure how to integrate AI into your product, ask if you need a new CTO. Profitability isn’t the end state for investing or an exit.

CTO Hire 212

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 212

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They were aware of it, but startups that I work with closely or invested in, if they got all the way to 25 million with 75% NRR, I would tell them to quit today. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote. VCs can only invest in outliers.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2024

Benjamin added, “I think a lot of people think about this new AI technology as something that’s gonna just come in and like work from day one. ” What are the Most Important Investments that Ensure a Future 50 Company Can Adopt? But actually, it turns out its still software. Compliance matters. Security matters.

AI 299

AI Enterprise Artificial Intelligence compliance 299

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

The concept was the foundation for his popular talk and ultimately his classic, long-form blog post. This was a team value that became to talk, when led to a blog post and ultimately this conversation. Ciaran, our CTO , came up with this magical line. To extend that conversation, I hosted Rich on our podcast.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

Scytale

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Whether you’re a new entrepreneur in the software industry, scaling your startup, or a seasoned SaaS provider, securing a SOC 3 audit report can be a game-changer for your business , helping you strengthen customer trust while demonstrating your unwavering commitment to data security. The good news?

compliance 52

compliance Underperforming Technical Team Scale Technical Review 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

What sets apart some of the most successful, high-growth companies we see today—Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian—has been their ability to tap into and master a new GTM strategy: B2C2B. So we kept investing, we knew we were onto something, and little by little we saw our traction improve. Then something really interesting happened.

B2B 173

B2B B2C Scale New CTO 173

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

For those who don’t know him, Will has over 10 years of experience in the likes of Yahoo, Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and he’s currently the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app that helps millions of people to lower their stress levels and sleep better. They often superimpose it on the new company they’ve joined.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

Buffer Resources

JANUARY 30, 2023

Then he became CTO at Bezos Academy, a non-profit organization founded by Jeff Bezos. He wanted to invest as little time as possible to get the most value, and was constantly searching for ways to optimize his time. “ I want to invest as little as possible to get 80% of the value. Each insight becomes a Buffer post.

Social Media 22

Social Media CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO 22

Scytale

MARCH 12, 2025

His investment portfolio spans fintech, biotech, and deep tech, reinforcing his passion for driving progress across industries. Recognized as the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman of the Year, she continues to drive policy change and invests in impact-driven ventures as a Venture Partner at Mustard Seed Maze.

Startup 59

Startup Scale Cybersecurity AI Search 59

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Growth is still good for them, but they had no net new customers last quarter. HubSpots NRR has fallen to 100%, so to grow 23%, they must add 23% net new customers. Are brand-new companies that seem epic with no revenue really worth $1.5B Maybe if you have the ex-CTO of Github, but that’s still a super speculative bet.

CTO Hire 148

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 148

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As you said, people take it hard if suddenly you say, “Hey, this is your new EVP. In the good sense, like go and build the kind of organization and process that made them successful in the past, but you need to hire that kind of person when you’re willing to make a big investment and a big change in that area. What is good?

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 265

Panintelligence

JUNE 7, 2024

In this blog, we asked Panintelligence CEO Zandra Moore and CTO Ken Miller what they think are some of the most frequent mistakes in SaaS development and offer actionable insights to help you steer clear of them. But keeping what you’ve got is as important as bringing in new customers. Also – live by your cultural values.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire SaaS Business Underperforming Technical Team 98

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

You can read blog posts, tweets about why you shouldn’t try to create a company outside the Bay area. The catch was he had just moved his family four kids to New York city. We had no New York city presence. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. This was a problem.

CTO Hire 179

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 179

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

When the company was first founded, two of its co-founders, Wade and CTO Bryan were freelancing on web projects and soon noticed a pattern around their clients who were asking for more and more integrations built from one app to another This is where the idea for Zapier was born. Hear how you can turn your SaaS Startup into an army.

Payment Services 113

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 113

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

In the last two years there have been so many new services around security, around machine learning that literally did not exist. Eyal Manor : But there is a lot of investment in that direction. Eyal Manor : So we spoke about security, but one of the biggest trend we alluded to was the emergence of new AI services.

Cloud 173

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 173

Unbounce

JUNE 24, 2020

I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI. Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce. Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages.

Artificial Intelligence 145

Artificial Intelligence AI Search Machine Learning Marketing 145

Neil Patel

JULY 7, 2021

Is it something we just have to continually improve and build on as new opportunities roll out? As new options roll out, keeping customer experiences seamless and continuous across all digital platforms grows is highly important. Are sales at a point where we can justify investing in and learning a new platform?

AI Search 124

AI Search CTO Hire Scale Artificial Intelligence 124

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman , a former host of the podcast, asked Rachel what made that point when Rachel joined Slack in 2016 the right time to invest in growth marketing? For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. They had occasional advertising here and there. Here’s Rachel.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Scytale

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

What happens if you add new services or locations? Better attract and retain new clients ISO 27001 is known as “The Golden Standard”, proving that your organization has implemented the highest security standard. An additional fundamental cost to consider is the possibility of an ISMS scope extension.

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Software Review CTO Hire compliance 52

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Time to Market for New Products : Also known as velocity, this metric measures the CTO’s effectiveness and speed in rolling new products /features. Come up with product and new feature ideas.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Announcing new features, increasing customer satisfaction and retention are among the top functions of an online community. . #1 Our community is the best way for us to inform our customers about upcoming updates and new features. For example, before releasing/starting to develop a new feature, we run it by our community first.

Marketing 98

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And then, invest your energy and time into the product. And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. It’s too hard?

Sales Hiring 146

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 146