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11 Signs To Predict If a Venture Investment Will or Won’t Work Out

SaaStr

claiming bookings are ARR, or using Quarterly MRR, or claiming team members are full-time that aren’t) … then pass. Great CEO But Mediocre CTO. Sometimes, you can grow quickly at $1m-$2m+ ARR growing quickly even with a mediocre CTO. A mediocre CTO can’t keep up. If the metrics don’t make sense, don’t invest.

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An AI Deep Dive with Lightspeed and Typeface: Embracing the Potential, Addressing the Challenges

SaaStr

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.

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Calm’s Will Larson on how to build a technical leadership career

Intercom, Inc.

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. With his latest book, Staff Engineer , Will is hoping to answer all of these questions.

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Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot: From Day 0 to IPO. What Went to Plan. What Most Certainly Didn’t (Video, Podcast + Transcript)

SaaStr

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!

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Taking a $4B Company from Consumer to B2B with Pluralsight (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

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 cracked open a basic programming book and we started learning how to write our first lines of software together.

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Laura Klein on improving chemistry in product teams

Intercom, Inc.

Now the Vice President of Product at Business Talent Group , she has honed her expertise into a set of best practices and published them in two books: UX for Lean Startups and Build Better Products. Adam: You’ve also managed to write two books. Laura: I’m glad you asked, because my CTO currently lives in Hawaii.

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5 Secrets to Moving Upmarket – How the Right Sales Tax Technology Can Support SaaS Growth

SaaStr

So even the freshest new SaaS startup celebrating their 50th customer may find themselves dealing with sales tax in multiple states. . The risk in failing to comply with one state’s sales tax laws is that you could be subject to an intense audit where the state’s auditor scours your books for every instance of uncollected sales tax. .