SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2021

Lately I’ve been working with 5+ SaaS companies all hiring their first VP of Product. And critically, most have a really strong CEO-CTO partnership. That means often it’s not entirely clear who the first VP of Product should report to. I just see this time and time again. This is also a truism.

Part-Time VPE 321

Part-Time VPE Outsourcing Services CTO Hire CTO 321

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2020

Is usually not really a VP of Sales. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. Front-end, mid-end, back-end engineers of all sorts and types. Just pass here, nine times out of ten at least.

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 259

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR.

Part-Time VPE 299

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 299

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2021

The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. And if you are, you are going to naturally start off hiring up-and-comers to your first leadership team.

Part-Time VPE 282

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 282

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

An organization that has come together voluntarily to take on a mission, at least in part. They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. The three times it happened to me: A very senior engineer that we just HAD to have. Something organic.

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 290

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

And if your team knows how to spend it, correctly — find a way to get them the capital they need to grow even faster than plan. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. But even if you’ve hired the world’s best VP of Sales … you can’t opt out of sales entirely.

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 290

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2019

We then had our own mini rocketship, hitting challenges and being acquired, and then being part of an IPO. But I got to part of the management team and make mistakes, and work cross-functionally with the other leaders and managers. But I started to learn what it took to recruit, inspire, and yes fail a team. I’m still learning.

Part-Time VPE 206

Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 206

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

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. But great teams find great markets, so that doesn’t really matter}. At least an acqui-hire. Whatever.

Part-Time VPE 263

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire New CTO CTO 263

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

And he made an observation to me that I’d been thinking about for a very long time, but didn’t know how to express. And for the most part, these were incredibly stressful times, when I was very underpaid, overworked, and worked to the bone. Not just being part of something great — but, Being Great.

Part-Time VPE 299

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 299

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. They know sales processes, objections, and timings, so they bring in a few deals in the pipe to close faster. Hiring someone too junior.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich Archbold , Senior Director of Engineering, has been at the forefront of codifying and scaling this philosophy over the past few years.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

As part of the run up to 2021 SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay Area Sep 27-29 , we’re taking a look back at some of our favorite classic sessions. (And 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. You’ll find out tomorrow.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Anyone who says the developer market is not strong is behind the times. 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. What’s Different About Selling to Developers.

Outsourced Development 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Julien Lemoine | Co-founder and CTO @Algolia. So I’m Julien, Co-founder and CTO of Algolia. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 171

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 171

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2018

On day one as Reddit’s new VP of Engineering, Nick Caldwell faced a dilemma. He had just spent 13 years at Microsoft, most recently as the head of 300 engineers. At Reddit, he led a team of 35 – none of whom knew how to manage other engineers. Short on time? Nick Caldwell: I’m VP of engineering at Reddit.

Leadership 141

Leadership Engineering Part-Time VPE CTO Coach 141

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. At Hired , we help top R&D, engineering, and tech talent find jobs they love.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 40

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

They wanted real-time results. And so we actually had to make some major adjustments and look for an alternative way to deliver the software which clearly meant that we needed to move to the cloud full-time. Traditionally we’ve been around since 2005 and traditionally have been a software on-prem business. How can you automate?

Cloud 173

Cloud Scale Trends Artificial Intelligence 173

BetterCloud

MAY 17, 2021

Secondarily, I had a chance to chat with [CTO Jamie Tischart ] even before he joined the company. Being a part of those journeys is the number one driver for why I stay in management. It’sone of the reasons people enjoy working with me;that they know I’m going to give them a good, honest conversation at all times.

New CTO 52

New CTO Part-Time VPE CTO Coach CTO Hire 52