Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 22, 2025

Interviewers also face a new challenge: developing golden standards to evaluate AI fluency. The metrics for success are evolving as rapidly as the tools themselves. The metrics for success are evolving as rapidly as the tools themselves. 1 Fueled by AI. Will they feed legal briefs back into AI systems for cross-examination?

Interviewing 113

Interviewing AI Sales Recruiting Construction 113

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Jason Lemkin has interviewed some of the best founders on his podcast, SaaStr Annual. He approaches interviews with profound respect for the founders he interviews. He believes that he is good at interviewing founders because he is better at interviewing than they are.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 298

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2024

The SDR Interview We’ve determined the profile we want to hire for dedicated outbound folks, so now, let’s look at the interview itself. It’s usually a simple interview with a hiring manager screen first and then an actual interview panel. It can go in two different directions: What is the right performance metric?

Sales Hiring 316

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Outbound Sales Team 316

SaaStr

OCTOBER 7, 2020

But often, they don’t really have all the data and metrics, or even really know what they are getting themselves into. But I’ve generally found that candidates who bash their prior boss in an interview tend to do it again at their next gig. And sometimes, those folks can be the perfect candidates for your stage and company.

Sales Hiring 362

Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing Startup 362

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

Here’s what I look for to try to get a sense if they’ll perform: Do they call out top performance with metrics ? Metrics are a good indicator here. If all of these look good, the interview usually goes well. The best reps are often quite precise. E.g., hit 152% of Quota last year, 143% year before, etc.

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring Interviewing Pricing Metrics 270

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2023

It’s time to do them again: First, have the best VP in that role you know interview the VP candidate you want to hire. Have the best CRO you know interview your potential VP of Sales. Get numbers and metrics, and push on them. Ok so what do you do? A few thoughts. We used to do these things.

Sales Hiring 308

Sales Hiring SaaS Interviewing Startup 308

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I sent cold emails and LinkedIn messages and ended up with nine interviews. From those nine interviews, I received four offers. Going into the interviews, I knew what I wanted out of a job– that part was simple. There are two things that help me analyze data: metrics and filters. . Build A Machine.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 290

User Pilot

MARCH 9, 2025

It could include conducting user interviews and surveys, analyzing product usage data, and tracking customer feedback , to name a few. User interviews: Conduct in-depth one-on-one conversations with customers for personal insights about a product or issue. Let’s go back to the goal of improving onboarding.

SaaS 83

SaaS Social Media Interviewing Scale 83

User Pilot

MAY 2, 2024

You will also learn how to build a retention strategy, what metrics to track, and 10 bulletproof retention tactics for SaaS companies. Key metrics to measure customer retention include customer retention rate , customer churn rate , customer acquisition cost, and customer effort score. Customer retention metrics: Retention rate.

Retention 111

Retention Metrics Strategy Scale 111

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2022

In the areas of your business where you have metrics to show you how well members of your team are performing, it’s easy to be vigilant about your talent. In these instances, you will want to set up informational interviews with strong department heads external to your company in the areas where you’re not an expert.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Interviewing Engineering 278

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 2, 2024

Userpilot’s SaaS Product Metrics Benchmark Report has found that compared to other industries, healthcare SaaS companies perform lower across most of the 6 metrics we studied. You will also learn how healthcare companies can improve their product metrics. In the report, we look into 6 metrics: New user activation rate.

Healthcare 105

Healthcare Benchmarks Metrics Onboarding 105

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2023

What would you ask in an interview, to see whether they’re good? People don’t actually know what they’ll buy, or at least you’re probably not good enough to use interviews to figure it out. Even professional interviews get it wrong all the time. So for example, at Smart Bear I knew we needed better SEO. Do less, better.

Engineering 297

Engineering Sales Hiring Interviewing Scale 297

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2024

Not only do you have to pass the hiring interviews as a Founder, but everyone on your team does, too. Brett has seen deals where the founder and a couple of employees are great, but most of the team failed the initial interviews. 2 Hit Your Metrics Another thing is milestones. Hit your metrics.

Software Review 278

Software Review Technical Review Acquisition Scale 278

SaaStr

OCTOBER 28, 2022

In the first session of the eye-opening CRO Confidential series, SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin interviews Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond about the current economic climate. In 2021, there was much less focus on efficiency and more on revenue metrics like ARR. A New SaaS Playbook.

Sales Recruiting 263

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Leadership Interviewing 263

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2021

Do at least 20–30 customer interviews before you start writing too much code. Make NPS a top company metric. Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Great at engineering. Great at marketing. More here. Otherwise, you often are building for an imaginary customer. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Engineering 317

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

But the metrics, especially for an SMB-focused SaaS business, are breathtaking. At SaaStr we’ve been super fans for a long time and a little ways back we did an amazing interview with CEO Andrew Bialceki here: Our 5 Interesting Learnings here: #1. 50k+ customers are growing almost 100% a year now. #4.

Scale 289

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Interviewing 289

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

One of the first things that stood out at the time was JFrog’s highly efficient financial metrics. Finally, I had a Zoom interview with JFrog’s Yoav Landman, who is the co-founder and CTO, and Jacob Shulman, who is the CFO. But even more appealing was the product vision the founders outlined.

New CTO 287

New CTO CTO Benchmarks Consulting 287

User Pilot

AUGUST 21, 2023

In this ultimate list of product manager interview questions, we have tried to simplify the process of hiring great product managers. While there’s no need to grill candidates with overly technical questions at your next product manager interview, favoring applicants with an innate product sense is only logical.

Interviewing 98

Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Management 98

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2022

Lots of SaaS founders are preoccupied with employee headcount as an important growth metric, but this indicator is not always true. As an example, Expensify includes a portion of their interview process where candidates solve a math problem on a whiteboard alongside their potential teammates.

Compensation 264

Compensation Leadership Company Culture Headcount 264

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 11, 2020

” But okay, if there’s not enough sales roles, it’s … people still have muddy lead generation metrics. They wanted to triple that growth rate and valuation, so what they were hyper-focused on are really three main metrics. In lead generation, it’s really hard to get accurate metrics that you can trust.

Scale 281

Scale Outsourcing Services Revenue Outsourced Development 281

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2022

The original function of demand generation was about the top-of-funnel awareness and vanity metrics. Rather than operating on our own in silos, marketers must extend our focus beyond top-of-funnel metrics and partner with sales to create a pipeline velocity. . The purpose and limitations of demand generation.

Scale 279

Scale Revenue Scaling Marketing 279

User Pilot

APRIL 30, 2024

Wes Bush , Founder and CEO of ProductLed and bestselling author of Product-Led Growth: How To Build a Product That Sells Itself, dives into this topic in an interview with Userpilot. The metric we look at here is self-serve revenue. This is just a quick sneak peek into what he discusses. It comes down to 3 basic things.

Interviewing 105

Interviewing Scale Strategy AI 105

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2022

To this end, their hiring journey—from sourcing to interviewing to offering—should be as seamless as possible. Know your metrics, and develop a robust qualification method to identify the best opportunities. Optimize the hiring process to keep up with growth. Try to attach data to every action and make your plays repeatable at scale.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 277

User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

PMs prioritize product performance metrics (user adoption, retention). PMMs also care about adoption but may additionally monitor marketing performance metrics like leads, sales pipeline, sales velocity, and win rates. PMs should offer usage analytics , behavioral trends, and findings from customer interviews.

Product Marketing 103

Product Marketing Interviewing Management Scale 103

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2022

This requires effort from your entire organization, and Handshake VP, Employer Partnerships Jessica Peluso outlines some changes that you can make to your brand, and your application, interview, and offer process that will help find the talent you are trying to attract and hire. Below is the transcript of Jessica’s session.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 264

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Set and reinforce them early — as early as interviews. Jameson at Gong recently received a coconut in the mail with some pun about “being nuts if you don’t want to talk to me” from someone wanting an interview to be on his team. Now, it’s become a matter of resetting of expectations that they’re no longer measuring effort only.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2022

So a top theme across SaaStr CEO interviews since 2017 or so, and across our 5 Interesting Learnings series with public SaaS companies, is … when should you go multi-product? . — Jason BeKind Lemkin #???????????? jasonlk) April 29, 2022.

Scale 311

Scale SaaS SMB Scaling 311

SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2022

A successful, growing business depends as much on its metrics as it does on its people. It doesn’t matter what metric you use, but look at your deals every month and decide whether they were good or bad. These regular metrics provide a cadence and pace to your organization, and those twelve viewpoints per year can prove invaluable.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Sales SaaS B2C 245

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

Schultz explained: “So I always say, ‘Think about how many hours this search is going to take by the time you do the research, talk to candidates, do your outreach, interview candidates many times, do your back channel reference checks — all of that adds up. Set the right metrics and goals to drive behaviors in a balanced way.

Sales Hiring 311

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 311

SaaStr

JULY 6, 2022

This SaaStr Classic podcast episode features an interview with Mathilde Collin, the Co-Founder & CEO of Front. into one inbox, automates repetitive tasks, supports collaboration, and delivers analytics to track key performance metrics. So how can you break into the market successfully? billion valuation.

Enterprise 264

Enterprise Sales Hiring Social Media Communication 264

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2020

I want to bring this up again because I interview so many VP/head/director of marketing candidates. But learning how they decided this #1 KPI and metric from your VPM will teach you a lot about if he can actually do it. Or sometimes an SAL commit (Sales Accepted Lead). Or SQL commit. And ask how was it determined. Did the CEO pick it?

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Marketing 244

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

When I’m hiring salespeople, I take the mission, vision, values, whether it’s helping practices thrive, whether your values are speak up, work hard, tying those into interview questions. Do they peel the onion back during the interview? Hey Dan, these are the quotas that we talked about during the interview process.

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

That Google sheet had six metrics for the business, and every metric was color-coded; red, yellow, green or super green. You’d walk into the Pardot office and you would know instantly where we stood across the most important six metrics in the business. At Pardot, SaaS wasn’t a mature industry.

Sales Recruiting 202

Sales Recruiting Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 202

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2021

We’ve talked in the past about the 48 Different Types of VP Sales , What a VP Sales Really Does , and even given you a Script to Use When Interviewing a VP Sales. If you have two metrics to hit as VP Sales — one, for yourself; the other, for your team — how do you prioritize? So then that time comes.

Sales Hiring 294

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 294

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2022

More here: 10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales During an Interview. #6. More here: Why NRR is Probably The Wrong Core Metric for Your Customer Success Team. #7. ” and their response is, “No one, but I’m going to hire a recruiter,” that candidate is not VP material yet. It never works out.

Sales Recruiting 287

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success 287

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2022

Metrics That Matter. It was a critical metric for us because when I started we were at -15% quota capacity. I’ve been in tech for 20+ years and have run tens of thousands of recruitment interviews. Watch it on Youtube or keep reading for a summary. In my first six months at Envoy , I grew the sales team from six to 17.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

When interviewing potential PMM candidates, ask them about a specific instance where they used data to inform a decision within their organization. It can be qualitative insights from the customer or quantitative metrics they’re pulling from the product. Hire a data-driven decision-maker.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Product Marketing Scale Marketing 263