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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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise software company that David grew to 500 employees and $60 million in sales. CTO (40 Employees).

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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?

CTO Hire 204

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 204

TechEmpower SaaS

JULY 24, 2023

Still, if you’re a business leader and your developers haven’t asked you these questions, look for a Fractional CTO to help navigate the critical early stage of development. Team and Process Are you using, or planning to use any software development methodologies? Do you have any existing hosting relationships?

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Innovation Development CTO Hire Technical Review 780

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Amplitude is a quiet Cloud leader that you might not have heard of — unless you are building software. There, Amplitude has become part of the core product stack for many SaaS and software leaders for product analytics. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

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Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 300

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 can be a useful option for startups or small businesses that may not have the resources to hire a full-time CTO or may not need one on a permanent basis.

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Fractional CTO CTO Hire Part-Time CTO CTO 52

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 I’ve almost failed every time.”

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CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

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

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. Q: Is it a prerequisite to have a high IQ in order to succeed as a tech entrepreneur?

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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

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 226

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.

Management 268

Management CTO Hire New CTO CTO 268

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

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.

Scale 278

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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. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

I’ve spent my whole career in B2B software. I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. BlackLine started out by building wealth management software. Then, even if you get the software in and they love it, sometimes they take three or four months to pay. prem software company? background music].

Startup 278

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 278

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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New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 305

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

It’s a little brutal, but if folks want to get rid of half their contact center that are people and replace it with software, you’d probably get budget for $50k. Is the CTO involved in these decisions? Is the CTO involved in these decisions? All the great software companies are built on 80% word of mouth.

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AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 292

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. I’ve built commercial software products before. A SaaStr Classic!! million in 2013 to $115.9 million in 2014.).

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 283

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.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2020

The transcript for this episode is below: Therese Tucker: I’ve spent my whole career in B2B software. I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. BlackLine started out by building wealth management software. Then, even if you get the software in and they love it, sometimes they take three or four months to pay.

Startup 217

Startup CTO Hire Scale CTO Coach 217

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

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. . Say you sell a subscription-based software but you also send your customers a handy flash drive with a version of your software on it.

Merchant Services 195

Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 195

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 ). Containers!

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Well Architected Framework Payment Methods CTO Hire Payment Solutions 130

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 27, 2018

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. If our product is down, we acutely feel our customer’s pain. The history of on call at Intercom.

Engineering 209

Engineering Software Review Technical Review Systems Review 209

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.

Outsourced Development 207

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 207

USIO

JUNE 28, 2024

is committed to empowering businesses to build powerful enterprise grade applications without the need for extensive coding expertise,” said Ben Hubbard, CTO at ues.io. Competitive Rates and Flexible Contracts: Benefit from Usio competitive pricing and avoid long-term commitments. Through this partnership, ues.io application.

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Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payment Services 130

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?

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

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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CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

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 164

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 164

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

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

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. 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. Sam’s Corner [28:45]. Show Introduction [00:10]. What is LinkSquares?

Scale 119

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 119

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

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

“The biggest thing I can do for Slack is to hire people who know a lot more than I do and give them free rein to do their best work” Adam Risman: You mentioned the team started with performance marketing. And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. Andrew Chen: Exactly.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

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 174

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

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

Time and time again SaaS companies are promising customers that they will save hundreds of thousands of dollars, but their pricing strategies are only capturing a tiny fraction of that savings. How to Screw Up Your Software Pricing and Packaging Completely. Startup Tips for Enterprise Software Pricing.

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