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Dear SaaStr: How Does a First Time Founder Identify 10x Hires?

SaaStr

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.

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“What Do You Mean They Quit?!” Don’t Give Your Engineers a Reason to Leave with Notion’s Head of Engineering: Michael Manapat, Change.org’s CTO: Elaine Zhou, and Plato’s CEO: Quang Hoang (Video)

SaaStr

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. Empower your engineers to excel in their roles.

CTO Coach 268
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The Top 10 Reasons to Attend 2025 SaaStr Annual, May 13-15 in SF Bay!!

SaaStr

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!!

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80 Founders Share The Moment They Knew … When They Really Had Something

SaaStr

” — 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 346
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Top 10 GTM Mistakes Founders Make Again … and Again with SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin 

SaaStr

They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product. Jason has sat in on interviews with 50-100 VPs of Sales, and many of them don’t even know what the product was in their 4th or 5th interview. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag. 99% of the time, they probably don’t.

CTO Hire 204
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If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.

SaaStr

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).

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What SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Really Thinks About AI, Sales & Lead Gen In 2024

SaaStr

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. In this interview, David Sacks talks about how 70-80% of investor time is spent looking at AI.

Scale 278