SaaStr

MARCH 16, 2025

Prior to Datadog, Alex held leadership positions at several high-growth SaaS companies and has a proven track record of building marketing engines that deliver consistent, measurable growth. He spent over eight years scaling their marketing from zero to supporting a multi-billion dollar public company.

Scale 242

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Marketing 242

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

SaaStr favorite Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures was gracious enough to sit down with Nick Caldwell, former CPO of Looker and current VP of Engineering at Twitter. Nick has vast experience when it comes to B2B and B2C, which is why we asked them to share their best tips for growing product and engineering orgs from 0 to IPO.

Engineering 284

Engineering Part-Time VPE Scale B2C 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Here’s a deeper dive into SaaStr Annual and why it’s considered the top SaaS event: Core Elements: Takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area (usually Silicon Valley) Features over 300 speakers across multiple tracks Focuses exclusively on SaaS metrics, growth strategies, and operational excellence Typically runs for 3 days with pre and (..)

Software 243

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 243

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 28, 2020

During my experience as an Engineering Manager, I’ve learned a lot of lessons about how to build engaged teams (as well as how not to build them!). I also didn’t know why I had become an EM specifically as opposed to a tech lead or some other IC leadership role. Lesson 4: Show people that you care.

Engineering 222

Engineering Engagement Leadership Management 222

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2022

The competition for engineers is fiercer than ever — and that means that companies need to work harder than ever to attract and retain them. Everyone involved has experienced these struggles firsthand, and what they say may help inform how you treat the engineers on your team. #1. Focus on retaining your engineers from day one.

CTO Coach 273

CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO Engineering 273

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Why Are So Many CEOs Former Engineers, or At Least Have Technical Backgrounds? I’ve come to almost exclusively invest in founder-CEOs that are engineers. You need to recruit a great engineering team. You don’t need to be an engineer to do this, but most “salespeople” CEOs can’t pull this off.

Outsourcing Services 293

Outsourcing Services Engineering CTO Scale 293

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

As the co-founder and CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow), Guy brings a unique perspective from his journey through iconic companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter, as well as his background in aerospace engineering. And then originally trained as an aerospace engineer. Jin, my co-founder, was an engineering leader.

Scale 102

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 102

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

The most important leadership framework is to establish and grow this team culture. At Databricks, we have a defined cadence for success that draws a line straight from leadership to each sales rep and committed deal. At the leadership level, we’re focused on overall performance and the direction we want to take the company as a whole.

Scale 261

Scale Leadership Sales Hiring Sales 261

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2023

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. Engineering culture usually rewards complex and clever solutions to problems, but when it comes to business strategy, simple wins.

CTO Coach 242

CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 242

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2024

Engineering resources: With thousands of engineers, companies like HubSpot can make substantial AI investments when they choose to 3. Proprietary data access: “We’ve got the zoom data, the calling data, the email data…If you’re a startup breaking in and you want to do some amazing AI work, it’s tricky.”

AI 284

AI Marketing SaaS Interviewing 284

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

With a trillion in payment volume coming through BILL in the last five years, managing the payment and compliance engine has required an ongoing effort of a sizable team. This fundamental technology will be even more integrated into all of BILL’s platforms, customer service touchpoints, and engineering.

SMB 307

SMB Payment Services Payments Payment Methods 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2024

Hire those extra engineers. But then a time comes at $1m, $2m, $4m ARR when you have to let it go. You have to pay folks market. You have to hire those extra few reps that we don’t really have leads for today. Do that extra trade show. It’s OK … it resolves itself over time.

Scale 307

Scale SaaS Social Media Business Model 307

TechEmpower SaaS

AUGUST 21, 2023

The explanation from software leadership is often unsatisfying or unclear. It’s written for a business leader, not an engineer. Pragmatic Assessment : An in-depth evaluation by working engineers who understand what it takes to deliver in different development situations. What does a business leader do in this situation?

Technical Review 390

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Systems Review 390

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

About Dave Kellogg Dave Kellogg brings a rare combination of marketing and executive leadership experience to his analysis of SaaS businesses. Reverse Engineer Marketing from Buyer Empathy Great marketing starts with understanding the buyer’s state of mind. There are two fundamental questions to consider: “Why buy mine?

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 202

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

She should hire leaders for Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product and Customer Success, or at least most of them. If growth is accelerating, especially. 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 and Management 2.0

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Startup 260

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2020

Sales breeds leadership. Someone to take over the hackey way you pick features, drive engineering to get there, and also, to live at the intersection of sales, customer sucess and dev. A “head” of product that sales, engineering and customer success won’t respect … can’t get the job done. And who certainly haven’t owned enough.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring Management Leadership Engineering 293

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2024

I see this on LinkedIn the other day, one of our DevOps leaders moved on … after 13 years.

Startup 311

Startup CTO Leadership Acquisition 311

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Bringing your leadership team to SaaStr Annual allows for compressed learning experiences that would otherwise take months to acquire.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2024

Deeper Bio: Early Life and Education Graduated with a Computer Science degree from The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo Demonstrated early interest in technology and software development Served in the Israeli Defense Forces’ Intelligence Corps, where he developed technical and leadership skills Early Career Began career as a software developer (..)

Scale 252

Scale SaaS Company Culture Leadership 252

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2022

Focus on scaling what works best, but don’t over-engineer and waste valuable time. The post 3 Lessons from Building a Marketing Engine to Grow Pipeline from Millions to Billions with Samsara CMO Sarah Patterson (Pod 619 + Video) appeared first on SaaStr. Test, measure, and iterate. Scale what works.

Scale 237

Scale Engineering Marketing Scaling 237

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

Whether you manage a team of engineers, a team of regional sales managers, or the company, your first responsibility is to hire and successfully manage the seven people who will form your leadership team. Second, a leadership team will have the capacity to focus on many more important topics than a team of two or three people.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Management Leadership 263

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2022

They can grab 5–25 or more extra engineers (unlike you, the BigCos have extra, talented engineers they literally can repurpose), use your app as a framework, and copy it. If the business itself is different than their core business, they may not have the right leadership talent internally. Be under no illusions that they can’t.

Leadership 303

Leadership Engineering Startup Branding 303

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2021

Create a Sales Engine. You need to be strategic about the architecture of your sales cycle, and for that, you should create a powerful sales engine. Pipeline generation really serves as the fuel for the engine for the sales rep, especially when it gets to the enterprise. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Enterprise Sales 293

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2023

Jessica brings nearly 20 years of marketing and leadership experience to Calendly. Before Asana, she served as CMO of three high-growth, venture-backed startups, building their global enterprise marketing engines during rapid growth periods. Previously, she co-founded Fraiche Yogurt, a successful chain of yogurt stores in the Bay Area.

Marketing 300

Marketing Leadership Engineering Enterprise 300

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Go-to-Market matters because sales and marketing spend remain the biggest proportion of SaaS spend, so honing in on that spend to build an engine and drive growth is paramount. There’s also a management and leadership layer to enable and coach individual contributors. That’s why getting the right leadership in place is so important.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 274

SaaStr

JANUARY 20, 2022

In fact, if you have an A+ engineering team, it might be borderline great news. Do you need better sales leadership? CEO has put full revenue accountability on the marketing team. How do I keep sales from failing? Not to be too much of a Pollyanna — but a 7% win rate isn’t all bad. You’re getting a shot.

Sales 292

Sales Leadership Engineering Revenue 292

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

leadership #womenintech #SaaStrScale [link] pic.twitter.com/JMuRqVP3ae. Director, Solution Engineering, Freshworks. Payal Patel, Manager, Solution Engineering, Freshworks. Vijay Gill, SVP Engineering and Product, Twilio. " Save your seat today! — Rolf Heimes (@rolfester) November 13, 2020. And so much more!

VP of Engineering 249

VP of Engineering Scale Scaling CTO 249

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2024

Not only do sales and Field CTOs need to trust each other, but you also need to have processes in place to ensure that information from sales and solutions engineers gets back to product. For landing customers, they’ll have solutions engineers who can call the Field CTO to support conversations.

CTO Coach 300

CTO Coach CTO Technical Review Customer Success 300

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

The reality was that they were heavily relying on the enterprise deals closed by the leadership team. Even after that exciting third year of growth, leadership at Treasure Data began noticing the lack of product-market fit. In the first two years, Treasure Data grew to $5 million ARR, but most of that money came from $3.6

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 307

SaaStr

APRIL 29, 2022

For that reason, scaling teams require different leadership chains inside the company. Poorvi previously spent five years in Product & Engineering leadership at Microsoft, as well as five years in Product leadership at Salesforce. Structure and grow the right team for your company.

Scale 246

Scale Scaling Company Culture Leadership 246

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2024

She joined GitHub in 2015 after a career in the public sector, and has since held leadership roles in nearly all aspects of GitHub’s enterprise business. Highlights: (9:13) Transitioning from IC to sales leadership and driving a forecast cadence. (18:20) Insights on hiring, retention, and the power of promoting from within.

Engineering 125

Engineering Sales Hiring Revenue AI 125

SaaStr

OCTOBER 2, 2023

options: Find a replacement “founder” While this isn’t literally possible, by that I meant someone who can operate at a very senior role and carry the founder-level emotional and leadership role. Return the capital (or I guess, try to engineer an acqui-hire). Basically, you have 2.5 Fake it for a while.

Startup 284

Startup Banking Leadership Engineering 284

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2022

SaaStr 555: Secrets to Building a High-Performing Revenue Marketing Engine with Demandbase VP of Marketing Tracy Kraft. 10 Tips: CMO + CRO = Love… Building Lasting Leadership with Gusto’s CRO Tolithia Kornweibel. Top Videos This Week: 1.

Scale 272

Scale Sales Hiring Payment Features Marketing 272

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

The three core areas to focus on are: Evolving your growth engine Building and solving for when to become a multi-product platform Investing in your people and team #1: Evolving Your Growth Engine Let’s start with some context for Bitly’s journey. So, the leadership team leaned in. They weren’t clear on their goals.

Scale 300

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 300

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

Customer success at Braze was a big umbrella, with onboarding, CSM, tech support, sales engineering, and more under it. The first stage within the CSM department at Braze was hiring leaders to lead sales engineering. Braze invested in this, and the leadership team agreed to do so. It’s not about marketing or user acquisition.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 291

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2020

or bright line between CTO and VPE, I’d suggest a start-up CTO really only has to do a few things — which are very hard: Assemble a small team (3–9) of very good engineers. A bad CTO is an OK engineer him or herself but can’t get 3 other great engineers to join him/her. Sometimes, CTOs can grow into true VPs of Engineering.

Part-Time VPE 361

Part-Time VPE CTO Engineering Scaling 361

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

Adam Blitzer, EVP & GM, Marketing Cloud Salesforce and former VP, Marketing @ Pardot, shares insights from launching a company in the already crowded marketing automation space and zig-zagged the way to market leadership. They had to engineer the business and plans knowing there was no funding to fall back on. 3 Asymmetric Funding.

Scale 269

Scale Marketing Engineering Leadership 269