SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Black Swan events. They were aware of it, but startups that I work with closely or invested in, if they got all the way to 25 million with 75% NRR, I would tell them to quit today. Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote.

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Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer. We all know this, but we forget about it, especially when the Hot New Deal and the sales team’s wants and needs consumes all of management’s resources. ” — Ankit Sindhi, Founder, Spurt.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 328

SaaStock

MARCH 8, 2019

Before getting into the investment world, she started and sold two successful companies in edutainment, and made a prominent name in the tech field around the world. After five years at Ernst & Young in New York, she served as Vice President at Citigroup in the Big Apple. Jessie Lam. Diane Mensah. Kathleen Ting.

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VP of Engineering CTO Coach Venture Capital SaaS 264

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

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. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

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Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 297

Scytale

MARCH 12, 2025

His investment portfolio spans fintech, biotech, and deep tech, reinforcing his passion for driving progress across industries. Recognized as the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman of the Year, she continues to drive policy change and invests in impact-driven ventures as a Venture Partner at Mustard Seed Maze.

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Startup Scale Cybersecurity AI Search 59

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

I spend a lot of time going to events. One of the great benefits of some of the investors that we’ve raised from is that we get invited to a lot of great networking events here. The catch was he had just moved his family four kids to New York city. We had no New York city presence. It’s a positive thing.

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CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 179

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

What sets apart some of the most successful, high-growth companies we see today—Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian—has been their ability to tap into and master a new GTM strategy: B2C2B. So we kept investing, we knew we were onto something, and little by little we saw our traction improve. Then something really interesting happened.

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B2B B2C Scale New CTO 173

FastSpring

DECEMBER 22, 2020

We dramatically increased our investment in product development. As such, we increased our investment in Product Development far in excess of any other business investment in 2020, as part of a two-year plan to approximately double our Product Development team’s size. We added three new executives to our team.

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Payment Methods Payment Services Payment Solutions Payments 131

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Though our second day of the event is focused on mythical creatures of all kinds, you’ll find that there are unicorns hiding in our agenda every day this year. Today, David Sacks is Co-founder of Craft Ventures, an early-stage VC fund that counts Bird, Reddit, Cloud9, and SpaceX amongst its investments. The Unicorns ??.

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Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 113

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Is it a particular event that triggers it? As you said, people take it hard if suddenly you say, “Hey, this is your new EVP. If I wasn’t at the programming background, probably a CTO was a good idea, but for us it was sales, definitely sales and marketing. The CFO makes sure you invest your money cleverly.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 265

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Growth is still good for them, but they had no net new customers last quarter. HubSpots NRR has fallen to 100%, so to grow 23%, they must add 23% net new customers. Are brand-new companies that seem epic with no revenue really worth $1.5B Maybe if you have the ex-CTO of Github, but that’s still a super speculative bet.

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CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 148

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

In the last two years there have been so many new services around security, around machine learning that literally did not exist. Eyal Manor : But there is a lot of investment in that direction. Eyal Manor : So we spoke about security, but one of the biggest trend we alluded to was the emergence of new AI services.

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Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 173

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Don’t overextend your resources when testing new SaaS growth ideas. Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business. You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

With that in mind, before we welcome the new year and all the good things to come, we’ve gathered our favorite insights and nuggets of wisdom from 2021 in a special wrap-up episode. Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. Zanade Mann , founder of Black Women’s Business Collective.

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VP of Engineering Technical Review Scale Outsourcing Services 118

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And then, invest your energy and time into the product. And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. 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. It’s too hard?

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Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 146

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Announcing new features, increasing customer satisfaction and retention are among the top functions of an online community. . #1 Our community is the best way for us to inform our customers about upcoming updates and new features. SaaS Community Marketing: 11 stories from software companies. We have received over 2.6k

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Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

What’s their new CAC Payback Time? New Gross Margins? Start by creating a new account from clicking the button New on the top-right. For example, if you know your advertising spend is $20,000 a month and it results in 200 new customers, your CAC is $100. Let’s start with Payroll – Support.

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Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

I looked back at our investment memo, it was a 2K ACV when Jason invested after Y-C. For instance, my first rep from Marketo, he was the first rep at Marketo in New York. The peak of your day starts around 3:00PM because that’s when New York wakes up. And we were acting as the CTO of Gap and whatever, another title.

Scale 150

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 150

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Investment funds like Indie.VC The fact of the matter is there are countless ways that you can choose to build your business, and even amongst this new flock of independent SaaS companies there are significant, deliberate differences in the approaches these companies have taken.

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CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

I’m not writing this post with my own self interest in mind—I’m writing it because I just returned from MicroConf , an event attended by hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are working on their own start-up projects, most of them in a part-time capacity.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

How to overcome no credible timing event. How to overcome no credible timing event (18:32). ? This is a relationship worth investing in. Have they created something new before? Have they ever created a new program, created a new event themselves, and how do they talk about what they care about?

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Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 82

Frontegg

OCTOBER 14, 2020

Frontegg provides a set of pre-built, essential SaaS product capabilities that easily integrate within any new or existing SaaS application. The company is set out to accelerate innovation in the global SaaS market, projected to reach over $116 billion in 2020 ¹, with over 80 percent of companies planning to offer SaaS by 2022 ².

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DevOps as a Service K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Innovation New CTO 52

OpenView Labs

MARCH 7, 2019

So, this started, it was a nine-year slog actually, and it started not with the CIO or the CTO, it started with the CEO and then started with a technology vision- we’re going to go to the cloud and shut down our data centers. Casey: It’s not that easy? Peter: By the way, it’s a gorgeous day in San Francisco! Absolutely beautiful.

Cloud 60

Cloud Transportation New CTO CTO 60

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

And many CEOs simply fail to understand the nuances of the role and the future building benefits of marketing investments made in areas like “brand” where the return on investment is not immediately recognizable on the balance sheet. This is empowering and allows me to execute at a dramatically fast pace than I otherwise could.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

Chargify

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Looking back at their own experiences, Sonnenberg has this advice for new subscription-based startups: “Start with Stripe + Chargify. Common issues of the billing bottleneck include: Not having correct billing in place when new products launch. Robert Kern, CTO & Co-Founder, PredictHQ.

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Payment Features Subscription Merchant Services SaaS Payments 51

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

The technology improves every month, and the companies investing now are positioning themselves for significant advantages in the years to come. Third, they invested heavily in the technical infrastructure. Most importantly, the market for AI customer service is still in its early stages.

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New CTO CTO Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 174

Crafty CTO

APRIL 12, 2020

In the event that the Basecamp guys happen to read this, they might be shrieking and gibbering right now, because they do not, never ever, in any way or sense, describe Shape Up as an “agile methodology.” Bigger – it speaks to every aspect of the software development process. Not all agile is bad agile.

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Underperforming Technical Team New CTO Technical Review Software Development 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

But what’s new this year? Let me make a list: New!! We’re super excited to have partnered with Women in Revenue to bring a mini event-within-an-event for women leaders in SaaS and Cloud. We have a mostly firm rule of “no repeats” for SaaStr events. The headline metrics: 15,000+ attendees.

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New CTO Sales Recruiting CTO Coach Scale 329

Crafty CTO

JULY 21, 2023

Meta AI Releases Llama 2 Meta’s Llama 2 release is a seminal event, given that (a) Meta’s initial LLaMA 1 release spawned AI March Madness , (b) Llama 2 is substantially more capable than the first LLaMA, and (c) This time Meta is allowing as opposed to blocking commercial use. I’ll concentrate in two areas.

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Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Generative AI AI 40

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

362: The Future of the Customer with Bernadette Nixon, CEO @ Algolia, Jay Snyder, Chief Customer Officer @ New Relic, and Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight. Nick Mehta: On a boat in Rhode Island and then our second guest Jay Snyder, who just recently took over as Chief Customer Officer of New Relic, publicly traded SaaS company.

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Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 274

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 174

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 174

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

I remember when I was in business school the internet was brand new and back then the hero was Jerry Yang. And so once I had the idea I convinced my father to invest and become a customer. He was investing in internet companies. The first event was four years ago. This was in 1997, and I spent two years.

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Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 233

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

and a New Era in Sales Tech Last week, we unveiled Operator , the first company incubated within GTMfund, alongside the announcement of a $3.6 Read more about true differentiation in sales data in Primary Venture Partners’ article on why they invested in Operator. Arrows – launched brand new CRM Cards for HubSpot.

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Technical Review Scale Technical Cofounder New CTO 76

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

I would say that’s number one for me personally, which means I may never work full time again, but finding a founder that you want to go invest four to five years of your life with and for because it really is. New category. So he’s the CTO? A founder that you truly like and truly respect is critical.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 233

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

And my retort was, for the first year, basically, well they’re the team that’s got my here so I’m going to stick with it, which I did for a year and then we kind of started turning around a little bit and saying, look, yeah, but are we growing as fast as we could be given the new reality of the ground? Vlad: So what’s the new reality?

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Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 208

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2018

At our inaugural SaaStr Europa last June, podcast host-with-the-most Harry Stebbings sat down with MuleSoft Founder and CTO Ross Mason to discuss the organization’s sales strategy, building a strong company culture, how to think about international expansion, and much more. In a new one, it was tough to keep up. Ross : Yeah.

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Technical Advisors Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 233