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Dear SaaStr: Why did Jason M. Lemkin Change his Point of View on The Value of a COO for Earlier Stage Startups?

SaaStr

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 didn’t want to do sales. 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. I still believe this.

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Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person.

Scale 280
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VPs That Can’t Hire … They Aren’t Real VPs. At Least, Not Yet.

SaaStr

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.

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What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In?

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. And your first VP of Marketing just increases qualified leads by 25%.

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What’s The #1 Challenge After $1m-$2m ARR?

SaaStr

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person. She can be your CTO forever.

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The Top 10 Reasons to Attend 2025 SaaStr Annual, May 13-15 in SF Bay!!

SaaStr

Our 10th Annual Meet-a-VC program to opt-in ahead of time, to set up VC-Founder matchmaking, Note: the above programs are only for Cloud / SaaS / AI founders and executives. Speakers share their playbooks on everything from achieving product-market fit to optimizing CAC:LTV ratios and scaling go-to-market strategies.

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Scaling a Product-Led Growth Model with 1Password, Apollo.io, Sentry, and Lightspeed (Pod 634 + Video)

SaaStr

Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. Then build your segmentation and sales processes around that. 20 million?

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