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. A few general learnings: A VP of Product that Reports to CTO / Engineering Rarely Meets With That Many Customers. I just see this time and time again.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Outsourcing Services CTO Hire CTO 318

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2021

And that means your initial leadership team often takes you faster, and further, than you might ever think. The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. And if you are, you are going to naturally start off hiring up-and-comers to your first leadership team. And that’s great.

Part-Time VPE 284

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 284

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? You can find the full slide deck from David’s presentation on Slideshare. Positions Needed: FP&A Analyst, Accountant, HR, Ops, Recruiter.

CTO Hire 284

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 284

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2022

Co-founder and CEO of Plato, Quong Hoang, the #1 mentoring platform for engineering leaders , helped moderate a discussion between CTO of Change.org, Elaine Zhou, and Head of Engineering at Notion, Michael Manapat, on this subject. On a purely human level, most employees like to settle down if they find a place that feels like home.

CTO Coach 273

CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO Engineering 273

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

That question has been on Will Larson ‘s mind for a long time. For those who don’t know him, Will has over 10 years of experience in the likes of Yahoo, Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and he’s currently the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app that helps millions of people to lower their stress levels and sleep better. How do we fix it?”

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Or at least where the co-founder CTO is a true equal partner to the CEO. You need to recruit a great engineering team. You’ve got to recruit a much bigger, and more expensive, engineering team in many cases. Unless again, you have a true CTO as well, that is also leading the company. But — Jobs had Woz.

Outsourcing Services 293

Outsourcing Services Engineering CTO Scale 293

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%.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 229

TechEmpower SaaS

AUGUST 21, 2023

We hear them explain that their current software development is expensive, deliveries are rarely on time, and random bugs appear. The explanation from software leadership is often unsatisfying or unclear. Findings Sessions : A review meeting to decode findings, gauge their business implications, and chalk out a roadmap for the future.

Technical Review 390

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Systems Review 390

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

I’ve been reminded of this question in several meetings lately where founders are doing pretty well, getting to and past Initial Traction, but with hindsight it’s interesting that the founder that took the CEO gig perhaps was better suited to a different role, say CTO or SVP of Sales or President or COO or SVP Product.

Sales Recruiting 326

Sales Recruiting Venture Capital CTO Hire CTO 326

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 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

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 284

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 284

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. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).

Part-Time VPE 260

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire New CTO CTO 260

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Hiring a reliable team is an all-encompassing issue where startups dive in head-first but fail to optimize it for success. . Hiring an expert produces 1000x better results than someone with interests elsewhere. . “A Hiring in a streamlined manner with a rigorous selection process initially builds momentum for long-term goals.

Scale 259

Scale CTO Hire Cloud Scaling 259

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2020

But everyone hears from you all the time. Your investors and others will learn a lot more hearing about sales from your VP of Sales, your CTO co-founder … and not you. But that aside, usually one investor will be the one that helps you most recruit the team, recruit more capital, promote the company, be its biggest champion.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting New CTO Scale CTO 363

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2023

Almost all of them had an amazing CTO or CPO, and hired a simply epic VP or two. Good but not great CEOs just can’t find a way to iterate fast enough. But what made them great: Ability to attract amazing co-founders and execs. Not just great, but epic. Ability to iterate pretty darn quickly. Not overnight. But eventually.

CTO Hire 282

CTO Hire CTO Investment Marketing 282

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

That means we’ll be hiring 350 people over the next 18 months across our offices in San Francisco, Dublin, London, Chicago and Sydney. We are committed to finding the best people and talent, no matter who they are, and fostering an authentic and diverse environment where we all can do our best work.

Scale 195

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Engineering 195

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2019

“Juggling People, Processes, and Priorities: Leadership Lessons from Intuit, SurveyMonkey & Stitch Fix” with Heavy Bit GM Dana Oshiro Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel, SurveyMonkey CTO Robin Ducot and Stitchfix CTO Cathy Polinsky. ” When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster.

CTO Coach 188

CTO Coach Engineering CTO Hire Development 188

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2018

He had to quickly determine which team members displayed a potential for leadership and teach them the fundamentals of management so they could make new hires and scale – without ruining the culture. Short on time? Here are five quick takeaways: Management and leadership aren’t one and the same.

Leadership 141

Leadership Engineering Part-Time VPE CTO Coach 141

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2024

Wait and find a co-founder just as committed as you are. If you’re a “business” founder, know it’s really, really hard to win without a truly great CTO. At least, not to get enough paying customers from Code Zero. Almost always. Someone else great already has the same idea. Like, always.

Startup 307

Startup CTO SaaS Interviewing 307

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2023

And the few that don’t generally had a founder that decided to bring someone else in themselves (often a CTO type): This doesn’t mean it is easy. I thought several times about bringing in a CEO to replace me at Adobe Sign / EchoSign. I know I get behind on recruiting. It never really gets easier. But I don’t now.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review CTO SaaS Scaling 274

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. Obviously, I can’t imagine a chief executive not having loss of sleep over building a management team. Mallun : Sure.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In my first start-up as a founder, I had a great CTO and VPE and a pretty darn good VP Ops from the very beginning. Second, hire the best management team you can as early as you can. But don’t wait a moment after that to hire the best senior help you can. If you haven’t experienced this yet, you don’t know.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 293

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. 90% of the time, sales falls when a founder steps out of it.

CTO Hire 209

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 209

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. Technology staff management: A fractional CTO is responsible for managing the technology team, including hiring, training, and motivating employees.

Fractional CTO 52

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Part-Time CTO CTO 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 7, 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. Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… Jean-Michel Lemieux, Shopify CTO. Here is a glimpse at just a few of our standout unicorns.

Part-Time VPE 200

Part-Time VPE CTO Leadership Cloud 200

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Well, let’s transition then to leadership. Excited to be back emceeing.

CTO Coach 159

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 159

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

With 3 full days of sessions, featuring over 300 speakers from the best SaaS companies around the world, SaaStr Annual will be filled with actionable thought leadership to help grow your business. I retired from SunGard Treasury Systems as their CTO. Your big money is going to go into hiring your employees.

Startup 284

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 284

BetterCloud

SEPTEMBER 6, 2019

Our new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Andra Milender defected from a medical career track before finding her footing on a technology path. What does your role as the CTO entail? You wear all hats as CTO. The definition of CTO is so broad and that’s what I like about this role!

Part-Time CTO 8

Part-Time CTO CTO New CTO Technology 8

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Tim: I was hired in 2010, when Facebook was what I like to call a “teenage company”. There were about 1,400 people, just under a billion dollars in revenue, and I was hired as the CIO of the company with the mission of driving the productivity of the workforce. That was actually a pretty tall order at the time.

Artificial Intelligence 169

Artificial Intelligence Scale CTO Hire Technology 169

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2019

We tend to find that there are three key technology initiatives that we can help our customers with when they’re undergoing a digital transformation. And for that, you need leadership and the right kind of leaders. Hire builders who are experienced, strategic, and agile. So, good luck with your hiring efforts.

Scale 238

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 238

OpenView Labs

APRIL 12, 2019

Getting hiring right is absolutely critical. If you push them, what a VC will also tell you is that they back founders who have the ability to attract and recruit singular talent. I’d like to talk about two different companies with two very different approaches to hiring post-seed raise. We needed a CTO. Full disclosure.

CTO Hire 64

CTO Hire Investment New CTO CTO 64

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman: What were some of the aha moments you experienced in those early days when you were trying to find a product/channel fit? And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. You find a bunch of nuances in there that are very interesting. Here’s Andrew.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2022

Darragh Curran , our Chief Technology Officer, emphasizes how promoting diversity has to be more than just a question of how we hire. Darragh Curran , our Chief Technology Officer, emphasizes how promoting diversity has to be more than just a question of how we hire. Investing in education.

Software Engineering 104

Software Engineering Engineering CTO Software 104

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

It’s challenging to find super high-quality folks unless you’re in B2C, where customer support is sales. You can find some pirates and romantics, and you might have to use AI. At the CIO’s office, there’s a certain amount of budget for experimentation, but not that much. Give everyone x amount of money to go find the best one.

AI 299

AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 299

Panintelligence

JUNE 7, 2024

In this blog, we asked Panintelligence CEO Zandra Moore and CTO Ken Miller what they think are some of the most frequent mistakes in SaaS development and offer actionable insights to help you steer clear of them. But the people you hire and lead are absolutely essential to the success of your business. Recruit on your cultural values.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire SaaS Business Underperforming Technical Team 98

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

Again, we felt that there was much greater value in being authentic than trying to be someone that we weren’t and try to find positives. It’s never a waste of time to find a great customer and take care of them and that’s led to frankly a lot of our success to date. This is never going to work.”

CTO Hire 177

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 177

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely.

CTO Coach 114

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 114