SaaStr

MAY 26, 2023

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.

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CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 242

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. But how do you find the pirates and romantics? It’ll fail.

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CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2020

It is a prerequisite to hire folks with a high IQ to success in software. You probably need a wicked smart CTO, some incredible engineers, maybe an insanely smart head of product or marketing, etc. But if you can recruit people smarter than you … which is a superpower … then that works, too.

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CTO Hire CTO Engineering Software 228

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

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. Software is better, and AI makes it more so. Or why you lose?

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 212

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

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. He did it, and anyone can do it if they’re a product-focused founder who uses software. It’s up to you.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 291

Valerian Tech

DECEMBER 30, 2022

The role of a Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is to provide technical expertise and leadership to a company on a part-time or temporary basis. This includes identifying new technologies and innovations that can help the company achieve its goals and stay competitive.

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Fractional CTO CTO Hire Part-Time CTO CTO 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

You have to be careful to pair that with someone strong to manage the relationship, that has more time and that also can be trusted. As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on.

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SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: About 70% of SaaS Public Companies Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software (Updated) Growth Slowed Down About 33% On Average For Everyone in Q1 The Top 20 SaaStr Tips to Getting a SaaS Start-Up Going When Should You Add a Second Product?

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SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. Obviously, I can’t imagine a chief executive not having loss of sleep over building a management team. Mallun : Sure.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 265

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2024

Jason Warner , who was CTO of GitHub before and during my time as COO there (and a former partner at Redpoint!) joined forces with the incredibly talented Eiso Kant to build the world’s most capable AI for software development. Why did you do the deal? Erica Brescia is a managing director at Redpoint Ventures.

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Management CTO Hire New CTO CTO 279

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Yet competition and the exponential rate of change in software are pushing against that mission. Enter our philosophy of Run Less Software. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers.

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Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

.” It’s a better use of time and a much more efficient sales cycle to focus the team on expanding and attracting these Enterprise accounts, rather than having them follow up and call every person when they could sign up for the platform now themselves. The worst emotion for software sales is uncertainty.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. More time may make them better if they’re already progressing, even if it’s just 10-15% in the first sales cycle. Hiring someone too junior. That often compounds.

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Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 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. There are rules in starting an enterprise software company. You’ll find out tomorrow. A SaaStr Classic!! million in 2013 to $115.9 million in 2014.).

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Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 297

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

So even the freshest new SaaS startup celebrating their 50th customer may find themselves dealing with sales tax in multiple states. . Software as a Service is currently taxable in about one-third of US states, and that number is only growing as outdated state sales tax laws slowly catch up with the way we’re doing business today. .

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Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 208

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 27, 2018

Being on call out of office hours is inherently disruptive to your life. Uptime is influenced by many factors such as the software architecture and the quality of day to day operations. Back in the early days of Intercom, our CTO Ciaran was the entirety of the on call team, both in and out of the office.

Engineering 209

Engineering Software Review Technical Review Systems Review 209

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

What if you don't have that SaaS founder dream team – a CEO with domain expertise, a great CPO and a rock-star CTO? I'm going to assume that you want to build a modern SaaS solution for the "Fortune 5,000,000" – a great product that's easy to understand and so useful that it will almost sell itself. What comes next?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers? They’re able to actually swipe a credit card, and what starts off similar to a freemium self-serve product can turn into a six-figure contract in just a few months. The contract size grows.

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Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 215

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

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Panintelligence

JUNE 7, 2024

The margin for error is slim in the fast-paced world of Software as a Service (SaaS). 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. Recruit on your cultural values.

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CTO Hire SaaS Business Underperforming Technical Team 98

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman: What were some of the aha moments you experienced in those early days when you were trying to find a product/channel fit? And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. You find a bunch of nuances in there that are very interesting. Here’s Andrew.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

TurnKey Labs

JUNE 6, 2023

Ah, the age-old question: How do you hire a great backend developer when you’re running a startup or company? As a CEO/CTO/COO, you know that hiring the right team member is paramount to your company’s success.

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CTO Hire Development CTO Software Development 57

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 31, 2019

. “Take the work out of work, that’s my motto in life” Prior to that, I was the CIO of another large Fortune 500 company called KLA-Tencor, and the rest of my life has been in software engineering: building tools to help people get things done without having to do all the work. Balancing human-computer interaction.

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Artificial Intelligence Scale CTO Hire Technology 169

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

So my father sat down with me in our basement, and I remember working in this makeshift workstation that we built together and we learned how to code, because back then there weren’t a lot of applications, there weren’t a lot of games, a lot of software to be used, so we actually had to create it ourselves.

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B2B B2C Scale New CTO 173

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Much of the success here depends on how competent and motivated the CTO and their team is.

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Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

We are a purely B2B fund, focused on software and fintech. So if you’re a software founder in that stage, come talk to us. I think it’s more around a consciousness of what you know, or what you may not know, and then hiring around it to become successful. ” Everyone wants to do software. Evgenia : Hi.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

CloudGeometry

JULY 8, 2021

When you treat your cloud provider as a fractional colo. Stories evolve as customers use the software, as new technologies emerge, as market behaviors come and go. Smart software development is driven by an actionable bias for paying it forward. See a useful background talk from their CTO Pini Reznik here ).

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Well Architected Framework CTO Hire Payment Methods Payment Solutions 130

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

That question has been on Will Larson ‘s mind for a long time. 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.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Ideas Ryan finds transformative [29:33]. Hiring managers are also just trying to sell as well. And most of our data now as a software company it’s because that’s my background, but you as a sales professional can go to RepVue and view detailed analytics about sales organizations related to compensation data.

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Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 113

Scytale

DECEMBER 3, 2024

Penetration Testing Explained Imagine you hire someone to try to break into your business – not physically, but digitally. Cybercriminals are at the top of their game and they know just how to find those sweet spots. Scytale streamlined the process by providing expert-driven technology. Why Do You Need It?

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compliance CTO Hire Technical Review Software Review 52

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. How to find advisors when you’re a CEO [22:32]. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract.

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Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 120

Valerian Tech

MAY 4, 2023

DevOps is a software development methodology that can help legacy businesses streamline their digital transformation efforts. In this article, we'll explore the benefits of DevOps for legacy businesses and how a Fractional CTO can help overcome the challenges of DevOps adoption.

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CTO Hire New CTO CTO Business 52

Stax

AUGUST 14, 2024

Krahl’s appointment cements Stax’s commitment to investing in its team and bringing on new team members with deep industry knowledge and is the latest executive hire at Stax. Since 2014, Stax has grown to process over $30 billion in payments and serve more than 30,000 businesses and software platforms across the U.S. and Canada.

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Payments Stax Payment Solutions Payment Services 88

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Flexible integration with any other software, hardware or business workflow applications. 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. Mallun Yen : And so, what led you to decide, that okay, my first 33 hires are going to be engineers?

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Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 146

Scytale

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

By integrating automation into your compliance strategy, your business can achieve and maintain ISO 27001 compliance at a fraction of the cost and in significantly less time. This ensures businesses stay compliant without incurring over-the-top operational expenses. The result?

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Software Review CTO Hire compliance 52

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 8, 2018

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Chris Degnan , Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake Computing, one of the fastest growing SaaS platforms in the world. Chris is a 20 year Silicon Valley veteran having launched the first part of his career at EMC before finding his way to Snowflake in 2013.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 83

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

Modern software is obsessed with tools. ” It’s called that because it introduced the world to early versions of many of the tools we still know and use today: things like the computer mouse, video conferencing, graphics, hypertext, word processing, revision control, collaborative real-time editing. Developing a career plan.

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Underperforming Technical Team New CTO CTO Hire Technology 223