SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2023

What are some qualities of a bad startup CEO/founder in Silicon Valley? A great CTO usually can solve this problem just in time to save the customers, but without one, revenue stalls. Sometimes, in a new or emerging category you can be slow at first. The post Dear SaaStr: What Are Some of the Qualities of a “Bad” Startup CEO?

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Startup New CTO CTO Investment 261

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2021

I recently asked on Twitter when folks knew their startup had something … great. What was the moment when you knew your startup was really doing something great? ” — Jason Riedel, founder/CTO of Aspireship. “When on New Year’s Eve, customers kept sending us signed contracts.”

CTO Hire 347

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Healthcare 347

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 8 Signs a New VP Won’t Work Out. An updated classic SaaStr guide on how to know if that new VP you worked so hard to find, recruit and get on board … is really going to make it. 5 Scale-Up Mistakes for Startups with Dave Kellogg.

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New CTO CTO SMB Venture Capital 303

TechEmpower SaaS

JULY 24, 2023

At TechEmpower, we frequently talk to startup founders, CEOs, product leaders, and other innovators about their next big tech initiative. The conversations are interesting and varied because they’re about new, exciting, different things. What are your key Startup Metrics ? Will you need to add arbitrary new pages?

Innovation 780

Innovation Development CTO Hire Technical Review 780

TechEmpower SaaS

AUGUST 21, 2023

Common Signs You Need a Technical Review We’ve already mentioned the most common signs that you might need a technical review: Slow or late delivery: “I’ve authorized two new developers, and we’re still behind.” Are you preparing to expand, take your business in a new direction, or take on new partners? And what causes that?

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Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Systems Review 390

TechEmpower SaaS

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

We recently completed a web-based application that uses a unique algorithm to match professionals with new career opportunities. This isn’t just our opinion - our startup metrics prove it! Drop-off on the first page of an application is bad news. cto , infotech , innovation , product , project , saas

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Generative AI Artificial Intelligence AI New CTO 443

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2021

There’s so much incredible new content on the SaaStr YouTube Channel and podcast — check it all out here ! And with 20+ sessions from the recent SaaStr Enterprise to dig into alone, as well as an incredible new session with the CEO of Klaviyo. OK — now on to The Top 10. The 10 most watched videos of the week.

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New CTO CTO Cloud Enterprise 258

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2020

He joined StubHub as CTO, but didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because he “wasn’t committed enough.” Jeff says he’s realized startups are either “product constrained or distribution constrained “ Make your investments accordingly.

CTO Hire 355

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Airlines 355

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 18, 2020

Here are our most popular answers over the past 12 months: How do VCs value startups? Which startup did you leave too early? (74k What makes a bad CTO? Are there any examples of a unicorn startup that was bootstrapped? I’m tired of running my (very) successful (VC funded) startup after 5+ years. 90k views).

Venture Capital 266

Venture Capital New CTO CTO Startup 266

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

The founders named their startup JFrog because a frog is agile and always leaping forward. Yet the strategy was not to have a conventional startup. They included: Team and Culture : “In my opinion, having the right team and culture in place is the most important thing when it comes to building a startup. JFrog offered 11.6

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New CTO CTO Benchmarks Consulting 285

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships, and exchange strategies. with Yamini Jain, Co-founder at Global roots inc How to manage a SAAS startup effectively? Straight from a SaaS CCO with Yellow.ai’s CCO with Shekar Murthy, Chief Customer Officer at Yellow.ai

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VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 296

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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CTO Hire New CTO CTO Startup 246

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. It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales.

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CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2023

It’s a time when SaaS and Cloud spend are also at record highs , and many Cloud leaders are still growing at strong rates … yet many startups have stopped growing at all. VCs would overlook startups that had raised too much money in the Go-Go days, or had lots of founder turmoil, or lots of churn, if the growth was there.

New CTO 303

New CTO CTO Banking Cloud 303

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Alex Kayyal and Julie Kainz, Partners at Lightspeed, shared at SaaStr Annual a framework they developed around how to think about this new era of Artificial Intelligence in SaaS, what opportunities are out there for startups, and how to think about incumbents. CRM wasn’t a new category, but they were done on-premise.

AI 292

AI Artificial Intelligence Healthcare New CTO 292

Scytale

MARCH 12, 2025

As the UKs tech startup ecosystem continues to thrive, visionary founders are driving innovation across various industries, shaping the future of technology , finance , healthcare , and beyond. In this article, we highlight the top 10 tech startup founders in the UK for 2025 (who you should be following if you arent already!),

Startup 59

Startup Scale Cybersecurity AI Search 59

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Indeed this was also my #1 mistake and the #1 I see from so many startups learning to go upmarket. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer. ” — Echeyde Cubillo, Co-founder and CTO, Acme Ticketing. They don’t show up in person.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 327

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. Also, determine whether you have the right CTO to handle these changes.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 210

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

” If that works for your new product, sell it with your existing team. Time and time again, I see an exciting new product sort of stall out at launch when the buyer is a different ICP. The downside to an add-on is it usually doesn’t really count radically expand your TAM. “Want fries with that?”

Scale 263

Scale New CTO CTO Scaling 263

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2019

We passed a new milestone on Quora — crossing 50,000,000 total views. What makes a bad CTO? Do startups ever have one founder with substantially more equity than the other founder(s)? Do startups ever have one founder with substantially more equity than the other founder(s)? Does this work?

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CTO Hire New CTO CTO Payment Methods 170

SaaStock

MARCH 8, 2019

Because, as she says, building a startup is simply much more fun. She has been around the globe, working in startups and digital agencies in Brazil, Germany, Southeast Asia, and Hong Kong. After five years at Ernst & Young in New York, she served as Vice President at Citigroup in the Big Apple. The reason? Diny Gomes.

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VP of Engineering CTO Coach Venture Capital SaaS 264

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last night I read this question on Quora : In general terms, what is the ideal size and make-up of a team for a pre-revenue SaaS startup? I do have a slight preference with respect to the team size as well, but it's light because I've seen and worked with very successful SaaS startups with different team sizes.

CTO Hire 106

CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

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 181

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. Q: What are the Odds of Success for a Startup to Hit $100M in Revenue? All startups are trying to figure out how to grow. There’s a stat floating around about how many startups fail. The point of this story is that successful startups bend the odds.

Scale 287

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 287

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2020

And, like every software startup, their small team had a million other things to worry about. Meanwhile, new tax legislation for SaaS companies was brewing. Our first introduction to sales tax was dealing with it as a liability,” David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, told TaxJar.

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New CTO SaaS Sales CTO 230

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 293

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

We identified some “ known unknowns” too; problems we needed to solve, but didn’t know how just yet – like integrating the new region into our billing system. In a recent Intercom on Product podcast , our co-founder Des talked about that old Jedi bell curve meme, and how it often applies to startups’ speed.

Scale 234

Scale New CTO Engineering CTO 234

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

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. Jason Lemkin: Our base.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. When that person starts, you have to stand back and let the new employee learn the job, making the mistakes they need to make to become great at it. Last, after your startup finds product market fit, hiring becomes the top priority of the business.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 3, 2024

Tagging your partner organizations, influencers, or thought leaders at your company (your CEO, CTO, etc.)   Many small startups don’t have a person dedicated to managing social media. If I left each day to find something new to publish on social, I would have struggled to keep up and certainly would have missed some days. 

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Social Media B2B Interviewing New CTO 105

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2019

Every week we’ll be rolling out new winners until we get to the very pinnacle of our list. Over the years, Dug has been an advisor to many startups from Mu Dynamics, Olark and Tech Brewery to Trace and Stratos Card. Keep your eyes peeled as we unveil the list and a bit more about your favorite leaders.

CTO Coach 30

CTO Coach New CTO CTO Web Development 30

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

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you have the CEO, CTO, some executive chat through, here’s the big picture of the company. Why are you looking for a new job? And I hear a lot of startup founders, they’re like, oh, I want someone that’s so into working for equity. Let’s find a new shirt. Lizzie Mintus (07:58) Yes.

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SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 106

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 27, 2018

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. Soon after, new teams started building a lot of new features and services, and they assumed full on call responsibilities. The history of on call at Intercom. There were too many people on call at any moment.

Engineering 209

Engineering Software Review Technical Review Systems Review 209

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 3, 2015

After the meetup, many of the attendees told us that they've never attended an event which was nearly as useful as this one, and everyone left the meetup energized and eager to implement all the new learnings.

New CTO 108

New CTO CTO SaaS Startup 108

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

So even the freshest new SaaS startup celebrating their 50th customer may find themselves dealing with sales tax in multiple states. . Expanding into new sales channels is a common growth play. And, these laws often completely contradict one another. . Maintain oversight of channel-based sales tax.

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Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 205