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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 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

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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’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product. He’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product.

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Leadership Learnings: 5 Things I Wish I Could Have Told My 2013 Self With Advisor and Former CTO of Heap Dan Robinson (Pod 663 + Video)

SaaStr

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.

CTO Coach 242
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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. Get on jets?

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

SaaStr

Speakers share their playbooks on everything from achieving product-market fit to optimizing CAC:LTV ratios and scaling go-to-market strategies. SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success.

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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. How do they sufficiently value and compensate an engineer’s skills in such a competitive market?

CTO Coach 273
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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. 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. That’s a field marketer, and you need someone who can do demand gen.

CTO Hire 209