The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors (SaaStr)

As a global technology provider powering thousands of SaaS companies, Google is at the forefront of driving exciting and innovative technologies to market. Eyal Manor and Megan Lueders host a fireside chat between Google Cloud and Zenoss, a leader in software-defined IT operations. They discuss the most common and emerging challenges facing SaaS companies today. You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Join us for this lively discussion between two innovators.

Missed the session? Here’s what Eyal and Megan talks about:

• How to develop software faster
• The emergence of new A.I. services
• Why the “strongest” conversations need to happen between engineering and marketing

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

Amy Appleyard, SVP Global Sales @ Malwarebytes, Michelle Benfer, VP, Head of North America Sales @ HubSpot Tony Benvenuto, SVP of Sales West @ Seismic, and Anna Baird, CRO @ Outreach share lessons learned when scaling their sales teams, the importance of BDRs, key hires and when to prioritize them, and more.

SaaStr 775: If You Fall Off the Venture Track, At Least Stay on The PE Track with Andy Wilson CEO Logikcull and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

In this episode of the SaaStr podcast, Jason Lemkin and Andy Wilson dive deep into the topic of selling your SaaS company to private equity.

 From initial discussions in 2012-2013 to strategic exits and lucrative sales, Andy shares valuable lessons learned from his own journey.

Key takeaways include the impact of private equity on the SaaS industry, essential tactics for re-accelerating growth, aligning incentives, handling investment bankers, and mastering the deal process. Whether you're a founder looking to scale, exit, or just curious about the PE track, this session offers crucial insights to navigate your path to a successful sale.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code NOVEMBER20 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.

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This episode is sponsored by: mmhmm.app

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Join Sarah Patterson as she shares key lessons on scaling marketing engines from her experience as a Marketing EVP at Salesforce and now the CMO at Samsara. Sarah will share three key lessons she has learned along the way, from building successful feedback loops to knowing when to invest for the long term or push for rapid growth.

Video: https://youtu.be/z7qITAzT5wc

Blog: https://www.saastr.com/3-lessons-from-building-a-marketing-engine-to-grow-pipeline-from-millions-to-billions-with-samsara-cmo-sarah-patterson-pod-619-video/

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

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Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Over the past ten years, Zapier has grown from a weekend side project to global unicorn, serving millions of small and medium businesses around the world. But Zapier isn’t your typical startup story and their roots aren’t in Silicon Valley. Come hear what Zapier’s early employees learned from building the foundation of one of today’s most successful startups.

As digital business and collaboration models have been permanently accelerated by the events of 2020, our panel of SaaS experts discuss who's buying in the Enterprise, and how to drive conversions across multiple business functions.

Video and blog post: https://www.saastr.com/buying-patterns-in-the-enterprise/

SaaStr 788: Going Multi-Product in the Age of AI with Webflow, Rubrik, Zoom, and ProductBoard

At SaaStr Annual's AI Summit, we asked product leaders from some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies to share their insights on navigating the AI revolution while scaling multi-product strategies. This panel of product leaders featured Anneka Gupta, CPO at Rubrik, Mahesh Ram, Head of AI Product at Zoom, Hubert Palan, CEO at Productboard, and Rachel Wolan, CPO at Webflow.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code JASON50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.

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As Showpad is close to crossing $100 in ARR PJ will share his most important learnings from scaling Showpad as its CEO. 

He'll cover the hard lessons learned, the highs and the lows on hiring, board dynamics, raising money, internationalization and personal growth.

Full video: https://youtu.be/YGfjHVAMFQ0

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Mikael Cho, CEO of Unsplash shares his lessons learned from starting Unsplash as a side project and growing it to a market leader, and disrupting an industry of giants like Shutterstock, Getty, and Adobe Stock with a free business model.

Full video: https://youtu.be/t3nmvxlybJM

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-389-with-unsplash-ceo-mikael-cho-and-morning-brew-business-editor-kinsey-grant-how-to-really-disrupt-the-big-guys-with-free/

Join Mailchimp Co-Founder Ben Chestnut and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin in a follow-up to their popular fireside chat held during SaaStr @ Home 2020. Ben and Jason will chat about the highlights–and the challenges–of scaling a company like Mailchimp to $1B ARR.

Full video: https://youtu.be/5fx3qFD62ak

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

At the end of Day 3 of SaaStr Annual 2022, Jason opened up the mic for an AMA. This episode is the first half of the session.

In this episode, Jason discusses:

• Breaking rules
• Setting goals
• Technical debt
• Black Swan events
• Y Combinator

The second half of the session will be published in Episode 608. You can watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/apc5GwLlaDI

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• David Skok: General Partner @ Matrix Partners: Why does David believe that all good products have at least one variable pricing axis? How can founders determine which variable they should choose for their product? What are the pros and cons?
• Chetan Puttagunta: General Partner @ Benchmark: Why does Chetan believe we have seen a strong decline in the per seat pricing model? What are the major drawbacks of it? What are we seeing replace it? What has Chetan seen work well amongst his portfolio?     
• Mark Suster: General Partner @ Upfront Ventures: What were Mark’s two biggest lessons on pricing from seeing the hyper-growth of Salesforce first hand? WHat does Mark advise founders when it comes to price anchoring and discounting? How does Mark view the sale of professional services with this in mind?
• Amanda Kleha: Chief Customer Officer @ Figma: What were Amanda’s biggest learnings from running the Zendesk pricing playbook? What does Amanda mean when she says that successful pricing is broke up into 3 separate product features?   
• Brad Birnbaum: Founder & CEO @ Kustomer:Why does Brad push back on the common suggestion of a “no man’s land in SaaS pricing”? Why is innovation in pricing actually detrimental to sales in most cases?
• Guy Podjarney, Founder & CEO @ Snyk: How does Guy think about having a large enough base to test pricing strategies? How does Guy think about the balance between freemium and paid? Does one have to come first?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Given that so many VC pitches are over Zoom now, we thought it would be worth sharing the things it’s easy to get wrong when pitching investors.

Pitching VCs is like anything.  You’ll get better at it over time.  Later, you’ll even get great at it.  Once you know how it works, it’s not even that hard to knock it out of the park.

But until then, so many founders make unforced errors.   Rookie errors.  Here are 16 that you can easily avoid / fix right now today.

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-344-with-saastr-founder-jason-lemkin/

Max Yoder is the Founder & CEO @ Lessonly, the modern learning software used by teams to translate important work knowledge into Lessons that accelerate productivity. They have raised funding from the likes of former ExactTarget CMO Tim Kopp, OpenView Ventures and New York Times Bestseller Jay Baer just to name a few of the impressive figures involved. Fun tact; they are based in Indianapolis and so Max brings a fantastic perspective on scaling and operating a growing SaaS business outside Silicon Valley.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Max made his way into the world of startups and came to found Lessonly, one of the hottest SaaS startups outside of Silicon Valley?
• Max has previously stated that ‘SaaS scaling happens in 3 stages’. What are those stages? What is the most challenging stage? How does the CEO need to transition with each stage?
• How does Max view the scaling of the team? Why does Max think it is bad to give large and often inflated titles in the early days? How can CEOs most effectively look to place people in the right place to ensure the most productive of scaling?
• What does Max most look for in potential Lessonly employees? Why is it so fundamental that candidates have experienced some form of professional hardship before?
• How does Max view the role of the board in the scaling of a SaaS organisation? What are the components that make the best boards? What are the components that make the best board members?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What one hire does Max wish he had made sooner?
2. What SaaS reading material can Max not live without?
3. Pros and Cons of running a SaaS startup outside the valley?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Max Yoder

Generative AI has taken the world by storm, and VCs and SaaS founders are looking at new opportunities it can bring. Even considering the more conservative fundraising market in 2023, there are opportunities for startups to get investor attention with AI.

Tomasz Tunguz, Founder & General Partner at Theory Ventures, believes that with the right GTM plan and capital efficiency, it is still possible to get funding. It’s simply a matter of watching your burn: “The main difference in the market between 2021 and today is that efficiency matters more than growth.”

Full video with Q&A: https://youtube.com/live/xiYzzLe9BAs

*****

Sage Intacct is a powerful cloud-based financial management system that delivers automation around billing, accounting, and reporting. Voted market leaders by G2, Sage Intacct is the ideal Finance Solution to scale your business. Visit us at sage.com/uk/intacct.

What if you could prospect in a single click? And what if that click came with accurate, intent data you need to meet your goals? Meet Klarity with One-Click Prospecting by DemandScience. Let’s make your job easier. Visit demandscience.com.

SaaStr Europa is back! And this time, we’re heading to London for 2 fun-filled days of content, networking, and SaaS. Join us June 6th and 7th for SaaStr Europa 2023. Use code FAVE100 for $100 off tickets at saastrlondon.com.

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Raise.Work is a leader in planning, leasing, and sourcing tech real estate spaces.

Full video: https://youtu.be/0MnlhVXUo3Q

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter, Zoom Head of Sales Ops Hilary Headlee and Fireeye VP of WW Sales Christina Foley share the seven tips and tricks to getting more revenue per AE.

This episode is an excerpt of a SaaStr Annual 2019 session. You can see the full video on our YouTube channel.

In this new episode of CRO Confidential, we take a look at the proven customer acquisition strategies behind Toast's explosive growth to over $1.1B ARR. Hosted by Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond, this episode features the CRO of Toast Jonathan Vassil, who walks us through Toast's go-to-market and customer acquisition strategies.

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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent

When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.

The SMBTech economy is very different from enterprise software, and there is massive opportunity to capture it. There are over 400M small businesses worldwide. That’s more than 90% of companies and 40-50% of GDP. 

In this episode, Jeff Richards and Tiffany Luck, Managing Director and Partner at GGVCapital, share what it takes to win as a SMBTech startup in today’s economy. 

Full video with Q&A: https://youtube.com/live/pcgXYRMX2XU

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Leyla Seka is the executive vice president of the Salesforce Mobile platform experience. Over Leyla’s incredible 11 year journey with Salesforce she has seen the team scale from 1,800 to over 40,000 and revenue scale from $500m to over $16Bn. In Leyla’s role today, she leads the charge on extending the power of Salesforce with a full portfolio of mobile apps, and is responsible for driving product, go-to-market and other key programs around Salesforce’s mobile offerings. Prior to her current role, Leyla was executive vice president of the Salesforce AppExchange, where she launched a refreshed AppExchange storefront, a new partner program, and built an entire AppExchange-focused team, resulting in more than 4,000 solutions, installed nearly 6 million times. Beyond her day-to-day role, Leyla is also the executive sponsor of BOLDforce, Salesforce’s organization for expanding and empowering the black community at Salesforce.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Leyla made her way into the world of SaaS with Salesforce when it had 1,800 people and $500m in revenue?
• What were Leyla’s biggest learnings on people and business model through seeing the first hand hyper-scaling of Salesforce from $500m to $16Bn? How did Leyla evolve and scale as a leader herself in those 11 years? What advice does Leyla give to young people considering whether to found a startup, join a startup or join a hyper-growth company?
• Where do things start to break in the scaling of SaaS companies? What needs to be put in place to prepare for hyper-scale? What are the commonalities of where many founders go wrong in the scaling process?  
• What does Leyla mean when she says, “growing up in product, you have to lead through influence”? How does Leyla think this influence can be created and maintained? How does Leyla think about the balance between effective influence and excessive influence?  
• Why does Leyla believe that, “you can teach skills but you cannot teach empathy”? What have been her learnings from scaling teams when it comes to hiring and detecting candidates with true empathy? What can one do to nurture that empathy in the culture of the company?

60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Leyla know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
2. What is the hardest element of Leyla’s role at Salesforce today?
3. What does Leyla believe in SaaS that most around her disbelieve?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Leyla Seka

Where is Venture Capital today? And how do you hack it? SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, sits down with Sunil Dhaliwal, General Partner at Amplify Partners to discuss.

Full video: https://youtu.be/8w6K7slhLX4

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-394-with-sunil-dhaliwal-and-jason-lemkin/

Product-led growth is a disruptive go-to-market strategy adopted by the most successful companies in the subscription business, including Slack, Dropbox, Twilio, and Shopify. Drawing on his personal experience building innovative SaaS products, Mickey Alon, the creator of Gainsight PX, and Ciara Peter, VP Product at Gainsight, will cover the principles of Product-led growth strategy, how to build a product growth team, and how product teams can apply this strategy as part of their 2021 roadmap.

Video and blog post: https://www.saastr.com/mastering-the-art-and-science-of-product-led-growth-with-gainsight/

Mat Ellis is the Founder & CEO @ Cloudability, the startup that provides cloud cost efficiency at scale and they have raised close to $40m in VC funding including from our good friends at Foundry Group and Data Collective. As for Mat, prior to Cloudability, Mat held executive positions with four startups, and key technology roles at Frito-Lay, Pepsi Cola and Goldman Sachs and he currently sits on the boards of the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network and the Technology Association of Oregon.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Mat make the move from the UK to SaaS startup founder in Portland, Oregon?
• How has Mat seen elements change within the business when moving through the stages of company growth? What were the challenges when going through these strategic inflection points?
• At present, many SaaS founders are looking to hire COOs, what does Mat believe about this hire? When is the right time to make the hire? What should one look for in their first COO?
• How does Mat assess the balance of sustainability and growth? How does Mat balance between this tough line? What are the inherent challenges?
• What are Mat’s thought on culture maintenance when startup move into hypergrowth? What is core to retain this startup culture with the scaling through stages?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Mat Ellis

SaaStr 782: The Future of AI in B2B SaaS: Insights from Synthesia's CEO and Theory Ventures. Hosted by SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

As the AI revolution accelerates, it can be hard to keep up with the pace of innovation. SaaStr’s AI Day 2025 brought together the top minds in the SaaS, AI and Cloud to dive deep into the intersection of AI and B2B. Featuring insights from Victor Rippabelli, CEO of Synthesia, and Tomas Tunguz of Theory Ventures, Jason Lemkin leads the discussion that covered everything from enterprise AI adoption to the evolution of video technology and the changing landscape of venture funding. 

Learn about the latest advancements in AI video models and how they enhance productivity and innovation. The discussion also explores the evolving landscape of venture funding in AI, the impact of cheaper AI models on enterprise costs, the dynamics of seat-based vs. outcome-based software pricing, and the future of AI agents in business workflows. Don't miss this insightful conversation on the current and future state of AI in the enterprise.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code JASON50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.

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Kyle Parrish is the Head of Sales @ Figma, the company that helps teams create, test and ship better designs from start to finish. To date the company has raised over $132M in financing from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, a16z, Index, Greylock and Kleiner Perkins to name a few. As for Kyle, prior to Figma he spent over 5 years at Dropbox achieving some incredible milestones including launching and scaling the Austin, Texas office from 3 to 80 people and being responsible for growing Dropbox’s leading partner ecosystem. Before Figma, Kyle spent close to 3 years as an Account Executive at ADP. 

 In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Kyle made his way into the world of SaaS and sales and came to be Head of Sales at one of the fastest-growing companies in Figma?
• Kyle was in charge of creating the Austin, Texas sales team @ Dropbox, what were some of his biggest lessons when it comes to moving sales outside of HQ? What worked? What did not work? At what stage does culture and process really start to break?    
• Why is it so hard moving from 0-1 in sales? How does Kyle advise founders when it comes to making your first sales hire? Does Kyle agree that it has to be the founder who develops the sales playbook? How does one create sales targets that are both ambitious but also achievable? What is the balance? 
• What does it take to create a performance led sales culture? Where do many people go wrong here? How is the best way for sales and product to work together? What can one do to proactively make those discussions with sales and product both frequent and productive?   

Kyle’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What is the hardest element of Kyle’s role today with Figma?
2. What would Kyle most like to change in the world of SaaS today? 
3. What does Kyle believe that most around him disbelieve? 

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-364-with-figma-head-of-sales-kyle-parrish/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Kyle Parrish

The future of work is here and digital automation is now essential for today’s workforce. Tools have improved, but companies are STILL using outdated and manual processes to conduct business. Enter Pipefy. Pipefy is a workflow management software that makes business processes such as purchasing, onboarding, and recruiting—hassle-free, so requesters, processors and managers are more efficient. Pipefy seamlessly integrates with other tools in your toolchain to ensure a completely automated experience with a low to no code implementation. Dispersed or remote team members? NO PROBLEM! Pipefy can automate your requests from anywhere. Scroll over to pipefy.com/saastr to try it out and get 10% off your first 3 months. Empower your teams everywhere with Pipefy.

Ryan Barretto is the SVP of Global Sales at Sprout Social, a leading provider of social media engagement, advocacy and analytics solutions for business. To date they have raised over $111m in funding from the likes of NEA, Goldman Sachs and their very recently announced $40m Series D led by Future Fund.  At Sprout Social Ryan oversees both the Sales and Customer Success organizations. Prior to Sprout, he was the VP of Global Sales at Pardot–a Salesforce company. At Pardot, Ryan's team tripled revenue growth in two years, making Pardot one of Salesforce's fastest growing businesses and during his 10 year tenure at Salesforce he saw the company grow from $180m to $7.5Bn.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Ryan made his way into the world of SaaS with Salesforce over 13 years ago? What were some of Ryan’s biggest takeaways from seeing Salesforce scale from $180m to $7.5Bn?
• Why does Ryan think that it is lazy to believe that you have to pick a market and you can’t have them all? How can one approach the element of very different messaging being required for SMB vs enterprise? How can one do both? How does that change the structure of the team? How can one build a product with the simplicity of SMB and functionality of enterprise?  
• When it comes to winning the market, what does Ryan mean when he says, “boring is better than sexy”? What are the 4 elements all founders must consider when pricing their SaaS product? Where does Ryan see many go wrong with pricing? When serving SMB, how can one provide enterprise quality customer support? How does Ryan feel about customisation? What number justifies it?  
• Why does Ryan believe that being good at sales won’t make you a great sales leader? What is needed to make the transition? What can sales reps do to learn and bridge that gap? What has worked for Ryan in the past? Where has Ryan seen many go wrong here? What 3 elements does Ryan look for in al additions to the team?
• What is the number 1 issue that is preventing people building truly diverse teams? How can we change our job descriptions to make the more inclusive? How can we expand our candidate pool to include more diverse people than usual? What can leaders do to build environments of inclusion where people can really bring their full selves to work?

Ryan’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. Sales rep productivity, what is good to Ryan?
3. What motto or quote does Ryan frequently revert back to? Why?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Ryan Barretto

Zig Serafin, CEO @ Qualtrics shares his lessons in scaling with Julia Laroche, Correspondent @ Yahoo Finance. Hear how Zig focuses on building the right team, simplifies organizational design, and scales from the ground up.

Video and episode notes: https://www.saastr.com/qualtrics-ceo-zig-serafin-on-high-growth-and-scale/

Freshworks is a successful public SaaS company that has a humble beginning in the small town of Chennai, India. Founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham shares five big bets that paid off as he scaled this multi-product company.

 Listen to discover Mathrubootham’s key decisions in launching and scaling a company, which include:

*Betting on inbound while going global

*Hiring talent when talent is hard to find

*Going multi-product early on

*Layering a sales-led motion on top of a product-led motion

*Betting on AI and the future before it arrives

SaaStr 731: 10 Things Founders Should Know About Getting Acquired with Brett Goldstein, Former M&A at Google

Former member of the M&A team at Google, Brett Goldstein, now Founder at Micro and Co-Founder & CEO of Launch House Ventures, shares the nine things founders should know about getting acquired. It’s a common dream for founders to hope their startup be acquired one day, but what is a company, like Google, really looking for in their acquisitions? And what should all founders know about the process if the time comes? 

First, there are three types of acquisition deals: 

1. Talent — To get the expertise on your team and more firepower. 
2. Asset — To gain certain assets like code, patents, data sets, etc, while leaving the team and often the company behind. 
3. Talent + Asset — Taking everything to expand the business or some core piece of the product. Or integrate the features into an existing product, which is an acquisition of the product. 

Now, we'll dive into what founders should know before, during, and after the M&A process. 

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Join us in 2024 at:

• SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20
• SaaStr Europa: June 5-6 in London. We'll be hosting the 5th SaaStr Europa in London for two days of content and networking. Join 3,000 SaaS and Cloud leaders. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on Europa tickets here: https://www.saastreuropa2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave200

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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent

Get more when Northwest Registered Agent starts your business.

They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes.

That means business free domain, business email, website, hosting, address, mail scanning, business phone app, all within minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.

Amanda Kleha is the Chief Customer Officer @ Figma, the startup that allows you to turn ideas into products faster through design, prototyping and feedback gathering, all in one place. To date, Figma have raised over $42m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners and former guests on 20VC, Daniel Gross and Adam Nash. As for Amanda, prior to Figma, she held numerous roles at Zendesk including SVP of Marketing and Sales Strategy. Amanda joined Zendesk as the first marketing hire and over the next 7 years Zendesk grew to over 2,000 employees. Before Zendesk, Amanda worked on the marketing team for Google’s Enterprise SaaS businesses. If that was not enough Amanda is also an advisor at Airtable and Smartling.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Amanda made her way into the world of SaaS and came to join Zendesk as their first marketing hire seeing the company scale to over 2,000 over the next 7 years?
• What were some of Amanda’s biggest learnings from seeing Zendesk scale from 12 to 2,000? How does one determine those that can vs cannot grow with the business? What is the sign a stretch VP is a stretch too far? How does Amanda balance between a culture of risk taking but also not accepting failure to easily?     
• How does Amanda like to run the interview process? Why does Amanda like to not show emotion when interviewing a candidate? What are the benefits of this for the brand of your company? What single question does Amanda find most revealing in showing the abilities and character of a candidate in an interview?   
• What does Amanda mean when she says “pricing is made up of 3 components”? Where does Amanda believe most people go wrong with pricing? Is there such thing as no man’s land in SaaS pricing? How does Amanda think the go-to-market has to change with every stage of development? What are the challenges with this?
• How does the structure of decision-making change with scale? What are the inflection points? When does both decision-making and communication tend to break down? What can be done to ensure seamless cross-functional communication across the org? Where do most people fail here?   

Amanda’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Amanda know now that she wishes she had known when she started in SaaS?
2. Is there such thing as no man’s land in SaaS pricing?
3. How to ensure customer support is strategic and not just reactionary?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Amanda Kleha

SaaStr 788: The Real Data on What it Takes to Go Big and Eventually IPO with Meritech Capital

Join Alex Clayton and Kathy Choi from Meritech Capital as they delve into the path to IPO for SaaS companies. With 25 years of experience and over 60 IPOs, they explore the size, performance, qualitative factors, and post-IPO success metrics that matter. Learn essential considerations for going public, from creating a compelling story to demonstrating durable growth, operational excellence, and predictable business outcomes.

They also provide case studies of successful companies like HubSpot and CrowdStrike, underscoring the importance of durable, long-term revenue growth and strategic multi-product approaches.

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Alright everybody in SaaS, this is it. 

The biggest, best, most action-packed SaaS + AI event of the year—SaaStr Annual 2025—is coming this May. Three full days. 10,000+ SaaS and AI leaders and more tactical, no-fluff content than you’ll find anywhere else.

If you want to scale faster—$10M, $50M, $100M ARR and beyond—you need the right playbooks, the right connections and the right people in your corner. And SaaStr Annual is where it all happens.

• We'll have 100's of Legendary speakers from companies like Snowflake, HubSpot, OpenAI, Canva, and more.
• More networking than you can handle—meet your next investor, co-founder, or biggest deal.
•  A New AI Demo & Pitch Stage— with your chance to win up to $5M in funding!

 So don’t wait—grab your tickets now at SaaStrAnnual.com with my code jason100 to save $100 on tickets before prices go up. That's jason 100 at saastrannual.com

See you in May! 

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Do you know what would make your customer service helpdesk dramatically better?

Dumping it and switching to Intercom. 

But, youʼre not quite ready to make that change.

We get it!

Thatʼs why Fin, the worldʼs leading AI customer service agent, is now available on every helpdesk.

Fin can instantly resolve up to 80% of your tickets, 

Which makes your customers happier.

And you can get off the customer service rep hiring treadmill.

Fin by Intercom.

Named the #1 AI Agent in G2ʼs Winter Report.   

Learn more at : inter.com/saastr

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Ryan Fyfe is the Founder & CEO @ Humanity, the employee scheduling software that allows you to value your employees. Ryan has built Humanity to serve more than half a million users across 87 countries, with a team exceeding 100 people and continually growing across 3 continents. They have raised funding from our friends at Point Nine and a huge thank you to Christoph @ Point Nine for making the introduction today.

In Today’s Episode with Ryan We Discuss:

• How did Ryan come to be founder and CEO at Humainty?

• How does Ryan and Humanity use data to affect the marketing decisions they make with regards to customer acquisition?

• How does Ryan look to integrate customer success into the pre-purchase period to facilitate adoption?

• How does Ryan view free trials with Humanity? How do they A/B test free trials to optimise for conversion?

• How can startups ensure efficient time to value in a trial period and what is the role of customer success in this?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Ryan Fyfe

Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO and the author of  “Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century,” shares secrets on bridging the gap between your technical team and leadership team to maximize success.

This episode is an excerpt of Jason and Jeff’s session from SaaStr Build. You can watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/WPvjG-44zJ4

10 Terrible Pieces Of SaaS Advice To Avoid If You Want To Succeed with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin

Bad advice is everywhere these days. Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. Many of those voices are incredible, yet terrible bits of advice pops up again and again.

On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. 

SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares the 10 worst pieces of SaaS advice, excuses, and mistakes founders make, and what to do instead. 

Matt Murphy is a Managing Director @ Menlo Ventures where he focuses on multi-stage investments across cloud infrastructure and AI-first SaaS applications. Since joining Menlo, Matt has led investments in Heap Analytics, Usermind, and Veriflow. Previously, Matt was a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins for over 15 years.  Matt was also an observer at Google (from initial investment to IPO), launched the iFund in ’08 (a collaborative initiative with Apple to build the defining applications on the iOS platform), and led KPCB’s investments in AutoNavi (Nasdaq: AMAP, 2010) and Aerohive Networks (Nasdaq: HIVE, 2014). Before joining KPCB, Matt worked at semiconductor startup Netboost (acquired by Intel) and prior to that at Sun Microsystems.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Matt made his way into the world of VC and enterprise investing? What were his biggest takeaways from working alongside John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins?
• How is the enterprise investing landscape changing? What fundamental shifts have we seen and what have been the dominant repercussions of this?
• Nakul Mandan stated that ‘we would see the 2nd wave of consumerisation of enterprise through business model’. Does Matt agree with this and what key trends is Matt most excited about in SaaS?
• How does Matt look to evaluate early stage SaaS valuations? What are people fundamentally misvaluing and how should the topic be approached?
• Is it harder now for SaaS companies to raise than ever before? What metrics does Matt look for in a Series A investment opportunity?  

60 Second SaaStr

1. Matt's Fave SaaS reading material?
2. What are the greenfield opportunities in SaaS today?
3. What was Matt's biggest takeaway from working with John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Matt Murphy

Despite the global pandemic, seed investing remains hyperactive amongst VCs. Satya Patel of Homebrew shares his expert advice on how to raise seed capital in 2020. 

This episode is an excerpt from Satya’s session at SaaStr Summit: The New New in Venture. 

Full video: https://youtu.be/xXNLUKzcESg

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-355-with-homebrew-partner-satya-patel-the-ppp-you-really-need-for-raising-capital-during-a-pandemic/

Not every leader is created equally. A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. 

In this week’s CRO Confidential episode, Blond talks to one of the best revenue operations leaders on the planet, Cherishma Shah, where she shares insights into the Rev Ops role, why your startup might need one, and how to maximize impact with this powerhouse position. 

Shah is the Senior Vice President of Go-To-Market Strategy, Operations, and Enablement at Guild Education and formerly held the same role at Brex, working alongside Blond. 

1:40 Intro 

2:57 How Rev Ops fills critical gaps in the sales org  

4:35 Cherishma's background, how that led to Rev Ops, and what a great Rev Ops candidate looks like 

8:45 How to define Rev Ops 

12:43 When is the right time to hire dedicated Rev Ops 

20:47 More on the ideal candidate profile 

24:11 Mistakes Cherisma has seen startups make as they make the first Rev Ops hires or build out the function 

28:26 Where should Rev Ops sit within the org 

35:07 Biggest opportunities for impact on the business for first hires 

38:33 Scaling the Rev Ops org 

40:35 How to structure the Rev Ops team and how to measure impact 

47:00 Tactical examples of success Cherishma and Sam have seen 

Video: https://youtu.be/S5JpOvgNtSY

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

SaaStr 790: AI at Scale: 8 Learnings from monday.com Co-Founder and Co-Ceo Eran Zinman and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

Join us for an inspiring conversation with monday.com co-CEO and Co-Founder Eran Zinman and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin.

From humble beginnings at $10 million ARR in 2017 to smashing the $1 billion ARR mark in just eight years, Eran shares their journey, challenges, and strategies that have fueled their remarkable growth. Discover the importance of customer diversity, maintaining NRR and GRR levels, leveraging AI for business efficiencies, and the impact of adopting a multi-product approach.

Learn how monday.com effectively manages SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers, and gain valuable insights into the future of AI in SaaS solutions. Perfect for SaaS founders and tech enthusiasts looking for proven strategies to scale their businesses.

----------------------

Alright everybody in SaaS, this is it. 

The biggest, best, most action-packed SaaS + AI event of the year—SaaStr Annual 2025—is coming this May. Three full days. 10,000+ SaaS and AI leaders and more tactical, no-fluff content than you’ll find anywhere else.

If you want to scale faster—$10M, $50M, $100M ARR and beyond—you need the right playbooks, the right connections and the right people in your corner. And SaaStr Annual is where it all happens.

• We'll have 100's of Legendary speakers from companies like Snowflake, HubSpot, OpenAI, Canva, and more.
• More networking than you can handle—meet your next investor, co-founder, or biggest deal.
•  A New AI Demo & Pitch Stage— with your chance to win up to $5M in funding!

 So don’t wait—grab your tickets now at SaaStrAnnual.com with my code jason100 to save $100 on tickets before prices go up. That's jason 100 at saastrannual.com

See you in May! 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Do you know what would make your customer service helpdesk dramatically better?

Dumping it and switching to Intercom. 

But, youʼre not quite ready to make that change.

We get it!

Thatʼs why Fin, the worldʼs leading AI customer service agent, is now available on every helpdesk.

Fin can instantly resolve up to 80% of your tickets, 

Which makes your customers happier.

And you can get off the customer service rep hiring treadmill.

Fin by Intercom.

Named the #1 AI Agent in G2ʼs Winter Report.   

Learn more at : inter.com/saastr

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SaaStr 745: Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC

Dominic Grill, Head of Technical Success at OpenAI, and Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Sales at Retool, answer some of the most pressing questions from Harry Stebbings, Founder at 20VC, about mastering the customer lifecycle, how roles and motions in sales and post-sales have changed, the role of AI in sales, and some of the biggest lessons learned at these hyper-growth companies.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Join us in 2024 at:

• SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20

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This episode is sponsored by Pendo, the all-in-one product experience platform.

Pendo helps your users do the things you really want them to do. You can try Pendo for free at Pendo.io/saastr and check out Mind The Product, the community for product people like… us.

This episode is sponsored by: Remote.com

Are international payroll regulations giving you a headache? Remote.com is your solution. With our best-in-class interface and expertise, we consolidate payroll for your employees, whether in one country or a hundred. Trust us with swift, secure payments for your team while you focus on scaling markets and driving business growth.

This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent

Get more when Northwest Registered Agent starts your business. They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes. That means business free domain, business email, website, hosting, address, mail scanning, business phone app, all within minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.

Discover the secrets to scaling a SaaS business with UiPath's CEO & Founder Daniel Dines, and Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel.

Learn 10 interesting lessons for driving a new category in SaaS to over a billion dollars in annual revenue and beyond. Sharing the learnings from the founding of UiPath in 2005 to its present-day success with over a billion dollars in revenue, watch to learn insights into how UiPath has achieved its monumental growth, and how you can apply these strategies to your own SaaS business.

*****

Shipping projects doesn’t have to be a mess. Notion combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI. So you can stop jumping between tools, and stop paying too much for them too. Get Notion Projects for free at Notion.com/SAASTR.

Vention provides technology leaders with the top engineering talent they need to accelerate their roadmap, innovate faster and more efficiently, and ultimately catapult their operation to new heights. Vention developers sync with clients’ in-house teams, helping them get to market 30 percent faster and saving them more than $600,000 on average. Looking for the edge to outpace your competition? Vention is your partner. Learn more at ventionteams.com.

*****

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Chen Amit is the Founder & CEO @ Tipalti, the only global payable automation platform that scales with you and now remitting $5Bn annually across 3M suppliers. To date, Chen has raised over $146M with Tipalti from the likes of Oren Zeev, Dan Rose, Mike Chalfen and then Greenspring, Truebridge and 01 Advisors to name a few. Previously, Chen was CEO of Atrica, acquired by Nokia-Siemens. He also was co-founder and CEO of Verix. At ECI Telecom, Chen founded its ADSL business unit and led it from inception to $100 million in annual sales. 

 In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Chen made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found the leader in account payables with Tipalti?
• Why does Chen believe so much of his success is derived from saying no to customers? How does Chen determine which customer feedback to ingest vs to reject? If rejected, how can startups do this in a polite and respectful way? How can startups give the appearance of a large company to enterprises?   
• Given the infinite supply of capital, how does Chen think about unit economics? How does Chen think the right way to calculate LTV is? Where do many go wrong? What can we learn from Amazon when it comes to LTV? How does Chen advise founders to think about annual dollar churn? 
• How does Chen think about optimising pricing models today? How can SaaS companies have variable pricing mechanisms without disincentivizing usage? How does Chen think about aligning revenue scale to your customers? How can this be done? What are the benefits?  

Chen’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What is the hardest element of Chen’s role today with Tipalti?
2. What would Chen most like to change in the world of SaaS today? 
3. What does Chen believe that most around him disbelieve? 

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-358-with-tipalti-founder-ceo-chen-amit/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

The future of work is here and digital automation is now essential for today’s workforce. Tools have improved, but companies are STILL using outdated and manual processes to conduct business. Enter Pipefy. Pipefy is a workflow management software that makes business processes such as purchasing, onboarding, and recruiting—hassle-free, so requesters, processors and managers are more efficient. Pipefy seamlessly integrates with other tools in your toolchain to ensure a completely automated experience with a low to no code implementation. Dispersed or remote team members? NO PROBLEM! Pipefy can automate your requests from anywhere. Scroll over to pipefy.com/saastr to try it out and get 10% off your first 3 months. Empower your teams everywhere with Pipefy.

Bessemer's 5th Annual State of the Cloud Report returns for a definitive look at the cloud industry today. Byron Deeter and Elliott Robinson, partners at Bessemer Venture Partners, offer macro trends in the public and private cloud markets, strategic advice to cloud founders, and insights into why entrepreneurs should feel auspicious about the future.

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Annual @ Home. 

Full video: https://youtu.be/WrGhD0qaIow

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcasts-for-the-week-with-byron-deeter-elliott-robinson-henry-schuck-and-jason-lemkin/

From a remote-first company founded in 2005 to a $7B valuation in 2022, 1Password grew for 14 years through word-of-mouth marketing and a core focus on its customers. Today the company has grown to over 600 employees, serves over 100,000 businesses, and counts individual customers in the millions. The processes have changed and the teams have grown, but the core focus on customers remains. CEO Jeff Shiner and Board Advisor Carilu Dietrich will dive into the seven most meaningful tactics that have brought 1Password to this stage.

Full video: https://youtu.be/HpNsBsnafBo

Lexi Reese is the Chief Customer Experience Officer at unicorn startup, Gusto and is one of the top female executives in Silicon Valley. Lexi’s passion for serving customers was sparked by her early career in microfinance as a public policy advocate with ACCION International—giving loans to people living in poverty to start their own ventures. She later worked at Google for eight years, most recently serving as Vice President of Programmatic Sales and Strategy globally. Lexi also started the Cambridge AdWords team for Google's small business organization. Now at Gusto, Lexi ensures that Gusto is continuously going above and beyond to serve all customers.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Lexi make her way from the world of Google and Facebook to SaaS with Gusto?
• What were the biggest takeaways from spending 8 years at Google and seeing the immense hyper-growth there? How has Lexi applied those learnings to Gusto today?
• How does Lexi look to put the ‘customer first’ thesis into practice? What does this look like in reality and from day 1?
• How can one maintain such high levels of customer service with an ever increasing customer base? How can one insert elements of repeatability to make this easier?
• Question from Hunter Walk: How do you fundamentally measure customer satisfaction? What benchmarks do you calibrate against to consider success?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Lexi know now that she wishes she had known in the beginning?
2. Most challenging aspect of Lexi’s role?
3. Question from Tien @ Zuora: How do you look to avoid the hype culture that pervades the valley?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Join ServiceNow’s Chief Customer and Partner Officer, Lara Caimi, and VP of Strategic Operations for the Customer and Partner Organization, Aneesa Sayall, as they discuss how hitting the gas on how they deliver partners is fundamental to how ServiceNow scales to $10B and beyond.

Video + show notes: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-459-and-video-the-role-of-partners-to-scaling-to-15-billion-with-servicenow/

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS event with over 20,000 of the world’s best SaaS founders and investors attending every year. Jason also invests from SaaStr’s debut $70m fund and has made prior investments in the likes of Algolia, TalkDesk, MixMax, Rainforest QA and many more incredible companies.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• When is the right time to hire your first sales rep? What characteristics must those sales have? Why does Jason believe it is impossible to poach a rockstar from another fast scaling startup? Should you then hire the stretch VP or the more experienced, potentially burnt out exec?
• How does Jason think about aligning compensation to company objectives? Within the company, which functions serve as the best test areas for variable compensation? What must you be wary of when installing a system of variable compensation?
• When is a stretch VP a stretch too far? What must a stretch Head of Sales have done to make him ready? What must a VP of Product done before to make him ready? What resources can you build around stretch VPs to provide them with additional support?
• How does Jason think about the first time you spend to acquire customers? Why does Jason suggest just trying to make $1 for every $1 you spend? Why is it crucial to think of your marketing spend on a blended basis? How can you create alignment between the marketing teams number and the cadence of sales?  

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

There are so many interesting things everyone selling to SMBs can learn from HubSpot. Don't miss this talk with Hubspot's and SaaStr's CEOs Yamini Rangan and Jason Lemkin where they'll dig into how HubSpot is growing a stunning 41% year-over-year at $1.7 Billion in ARR. 

Yamini and Jason discuss:

-why Hubspot chose to "take a step backward" by moving from sales-led to product-led
-why focusing on free makes your product better
-the importance of having multiple products
-why NRR should be a North Star metric for SaaS businesses
-working with partners
-international expansion and localization: why less is more

Full video: https://youtu.be/sNU4h7LpHOI

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

From strategies in recruitment and team building to sales tactics, these leaders from Salesforce, nCino, and Vlocity, will discuss the top tips for moving beyond horizontal SaaS and building a billion-dollar SaaS company.

Matt Garratt, SVP, Managing Partner, Salesforce Ventures

Trisha Price, Chief Product Officer, nCino

David Schmaier, CEO & Founder, Vlocity

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Summit: Enterprise.

Full video: https://youtu.be/ZxmCVOTW1lQ

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcasts-for-the-week-with-matt-garratt-trisha-price-david-schmaier-rob-bernshteyn-and-jason-lemkin/

Greg Schott is the Chairman and CEO @ Mulesoft, provider of the leading platform for building application networks. They have raised over $250m in funding from some of the best investors in the world including NEA and Lightspeed and then some of the largest companies of the day in Cisco, Salesforce and SAP. Greg joined Mulesoft in 2009 when the company only had 20 employees, over the last 8 years Greg has scaled the team to over 1,000 today in 18 countries. A real software industry veteran with over 20 years of experience building and leading high growth technology companies from early stage through IPO.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Greg made his way into the world of SaaS and came to be CEO @ Mulesoft?
• Greg has seen Mulesoft scale from 20 to 1,000 employees today, what have been the biggest challenges in scaling the team? Where are the breaking points? What are the signs of those impending breaking points? How does that show through the team behaviour?
• Where do most companies go wrong in the hiring process? What is the right and wrong way to respond when a bad hire has been made? How long is long enough to determine whether a bad hire is a bad hire? Does Greg agree with the hire fast, fire fast thesis?
• If Greg could go back to 2009 when he joined the firm with 20 employees, what would Greg change about the way he approached hiring? What hiring advice would Greg give to an early stage SaaS company?   
• How does Greg think about scaling sales teams? How does Greg view specialisation in the scaling of sales? When is the right time? What should CEO’s look for in their sales leaders? How does that alter at different points in the journey?

60 Second SaaStr

1. How have things changed since IPO?
2. When is the right time to expand product line and enter new segments?
3. Biggest challenge with Mulesoft today?
4. Which SaaS CEO does Greg most admire and why?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Greg Schott

Zach joined Canva in 2013 as one of Canva’s earliest employees and has worked across product management, communications and human resources before establishing the global marketing function. Eight years later 50 million people are now using Canva every month and the company recently approached $1 Billion in Revenue. In this podcast, Zach and Jason dive into the initial growth marketing strategies and framework behind Canva’s exponential growth as a start-up, the strategies for targeting and growing into the enterprise, and how to build out a global marketing function.

Full video: https://youtu.be/CEoam_9sHt0

Blog post: https://www.saastr.com/lessons-learned-scaling-canva-to-1-billion-with-zach-kitschke/

Jeetu Patel is Senior Vice President of Platform and Chief Strategy Officer of Box where he leads the Box Platform organization, driving the strategy of the platform business and developer relations. He also oversees the corporate strategy and development organization for Box. Before joining the company, Patel was General Manager and Chief Executive of EMC's Syncplicity business unit. Prior to EMC, Patel was president of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm focused on collaboration and content management across a range of industries.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Jeetu made his way into the world of SaaS and came to be one of the key executives at Box?
• What are Jeetu’s 3 tips to startup founders looking to build high performing teams? Why does Jeetu believe that team sizes must always remain small? What are the inflection points in team size when dynamics change?
• What does Jeetu argue that founders must pursue really hard problems? What are the benefits of this when hiring new people to the team? How does Jeetu balance between visionary hard problems and unrealistic?
• What does Jeetu mean when he says, ‘do things that do not scale so you can do things that sustainably scale? What are some examples of how this has been done effectively? Where do most startups go wrong in scaling sustainably?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Jeetu believe that most around him do not?
2. Fave SaaS reading material?
3. Why businesses will find the rules of the future very different to the rules of the past?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Jeetu Patel

Taro Fukuyama is Founder & CEO @ AnyPerk. Born and raised in Tokyo, Taro is a Y Combinator graduate with AnyPerk and part of the first Japanese team ever to be admitted to YC. He was also named one of Business Insider’s “Silicon Valley 100 Coolest People in Tech Right Now.”Fun fact, Taro co-founded AnyPerk in a Taco Bell car park! What a story! They also have investment from the likes of DCM, YC, Gary Vaynerchuk, previous SaaStr guest Nick Mehta and many more incredible people. I would also like to say a huge thanks to Jason lemkin for the intro to Taro today.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Taro make his way to San Francisco and come to found AnyPerk?
• As a first time founder, how did Taro look to build out the management team? What were the inherent challenges and what did Taro look for in his core executive?
• What are the 6 questions that will determine whether you have clarity in your organisation? Why is clarity so important to unify the team? What does this clarity allow?
• What are the 5 steps to building a cohesive team? How can CEOs be both vulnerable and authoritative as a leader?
• How should founders approach offsites? What is the necessary preparation? How should they be structured for optimal productivity? What can be done to ensure they produce meaningful outcomes?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Favourite SaaS reading material?
2. What does Taro know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
3. The biggest mistake companies make with employee happiness?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Taro Fukuyama

Denise Persson, the CMO of Snowflake, shares the five secrets to a winning marketing strategy to grow your company’s revenue and cement customer loyalty.

Video + blog post: https://www.saastr.com/building-your-marketing-to-100m-with-snowflake-cmo-denise-persson/

Eoghan McCabe is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Intercom, one of the fastest growing saas companies of the day providing a new and better way to acquire, engage and retain customers. Due to their phenomenal growth they have raised over $240m in funding from some of the best in the world including Kleiner Perkins, Social Capital, Bessemer and Index, just to name a few. As for Eoghan, prior to co-founding Intercom, he founded an award-winning software design consultancy called Contrast, and co-founded Exceptional, a developer tool startup acquired in 2011 and now a part of Rackspace.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Eoghan come to be founder of one of the hottest growing startups in SaaS from founding a software design firm in Ireland?
• What does Eoghan believe are the core pillars for success in making the move from SME to enterprise? How does one reinvent oneself to make this transition? How has Eoghan seen te org structure and internal decision-making change with the adoption of many more enterprise clients?
• How does Eoghan determine between the decision to hire the young jack of all trades vs the much more experienced senior exec? Why does Eoghan believe you can never be too early to bring someone more senior than you onto the team? What makes Eoghan say, “we are all learning on the fly”?  
• How does Eoghan look to create a culture of experimentation and accountability without the fear of failure? What must the leader do to imbue this culture? Where does Eoghan see many going wrong in trying to make this happen?
• How does Eoghan think about “transparency” with SaaS companies today? Why does he think that not only is it not healthy but also largely not possible? Instead, what is a better, more sustainable solution to transparency?   

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Eoghan McCabe

Companies that have access to more accurate financial data have the ability to develop seamless exchanges of information, providing consumers with improved ways to manage their finances. But how do companies gain secure access to that data in the first place? Enter the platform company. Hear from Plaid co-founder and CEO, Zach Perret and CNBC's Ari Levy as he walks through his lessons learned building Plaid and how it found itself at the center of the fintech ecosystem.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

Zach Perret

Duo Security Co-Founder and CEO Dug Song and PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada discuss building, enabling, and leading great teams through 10K+ customers, $100M+ ARR, $1B+ valuation and beyond - all while earning 4.5+ Glassdoor company ratings and 98%+ CEO approvals from 500+ total employees!

Duo Security is a cloud-based provider of unified access security and multifactor authentication was acquired by Cisco for $2.35 billion in October 2018. PagerDuty is a leading digital operations management platform for organizations announced new financing in September 2018 at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Missed the session? Here’s what Jennifer and Dug talk about:

• When is the right time to raise money?
• How can you better manage the board?
• Should you worry about competitors?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

Jennifer Tejada

Dug Song

Many people make the false assumption that the path for a highly successful SaaS company is straight “up and to the right”. Of course, for those involved, the reality of the journey is characterized by a series of obstacles that must be navigated. Fmr. Shasta Ventures Doug Pepper will share the key challenges that were overcome to allow Marketo to become a $5B SaaS Category Leader in Marketing Automation.

This podcast is an excerpt from Doug’s session at SaaStr Europa. You can find the full video and transcript on our blog.

Following our meeting at SaaStr Annual 2016, I am thrilled to welcome David Cancel. Now David really is a serial entrepreneur having founded 5 companies, with the last, Performable, being acquired by Hubspot, resulting in his taking up the position as Chief Product Officer at Hubspot. Now David is the CEO @ Drift. Drift allows you to talk to your website visitors and customers in real time. David is a master when it comes to hiring, company culture creation and maintenance and team building and we dig into all that in today’s episode, as well as:

• Why David’s golden rule to recruiting is hiring people not skills?
• Why is cultural fit so important for future employees? How can you test for it in an interview? Can you hire a team of all A team players without having insane competition and friction?
• What does David mean when he says it is important for candidates to be scrappy? What signals are there that the person is an insane hustler?  
• What questions does David pose to get the candidate out of the standard interview style answering? How does david push them out of their comfort zone?
• Why does David believe it is crucial to never hire PMs who have done it before? What is the benefits of this?
• How does David view success? What commonalities does David se in thementiality fo those that have and have not been successful?

In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:

1. Must read books for startup CEOs?
2. What are the 3 biggest lessons you learnt the hard way?
3. What is David’s approach to learning?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• David Cancel

Paul Albright is one of the valley’s most experienced SaaS execs with extensive operational and capital management experience, including 3 IPOs. Most recently Paul was the Founder & CEO @ Captora, the marketing acceleration software solution that raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of NEA and Bain Capital Ventures. Prior to Captora, Paul was Chief Revenue Officer at Marketo where he drove the overall revenue strategy across sales and marketing that delivered global revenue growth over 100% year-over-year, from $14m to $58m. In a similar position at SuccessFactors, he grew revenues to more than $200m and over 80% year-over-year growth. Previously, Paul led worldwide marketing at NetApp and at Informatica, which he joined pre-revenue through their successful IPO. If that was not enough he has also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Paul made his way into the world with the likes of SuccessFactors and Marketo? What were his big lessons from seeing both companies scale into hyper-growth mode?  
• Does Paul agree with Dave Kellogg in stating, “CAC/LTV is the single most important metric for SaaS startups? What other metrics must all VPs of Demand Gen and Sales be watching constantly?
• What does an efficient sales and marketing engine look like? What are the core components to build that? What are the requirements to both run this engine and scale it quickly? How does the growth of this engine affect hiring in other parts of the business?
• Why does Paul believe that it is much harder to go SMB up than enterprise down? What are the changes that are required on both ends? For this in “no man’s land of pricing” what does an efficient sales process timeline look like from lead to conversion?

60 Second SaaStr

1. How does Paul think about picking the investors he works with?
2. Is customisation always wrong?
3. What is “good sales rep productivity” to Paul?
4. What does Paul know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Paul Albright

David Rodnitzky is founder and CEO of 3Q Digital, a leading digital agency that was acquired by Harte Hanks in 2015. Prior to 3Q Digital, he held senior marketing roles at several Internet companies, including Rentals.com (2000-2001), FindLaw (2001-2004), Adteractive (2004-2006), and Mercantila (2007-2008). David currently serves on advisory boards for several companies, including Marin Software, MediaBoost, Mediacause, and a stealth travel start-up.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did David enter the world of B2B SaaS marketing? What was the entry point for him?
• What really is SaaS marketing? Is it more consumer or B2B like? How does this alter and develop with the growth of the company?
• Before spending heavily on marketing, what gating factors should SaaS founders think heavily about before the big spend? Should this marketing plan be undertaken by an external firm or an internal team?
• What market channels should a SaaS company consider as ‘must haves’ in today’s world, as compared to ‘nice to have’s’? How does David differentiate between the two?
• We are always told if you cannot measure it, do not do it? How can SaaS companies measure the success and effect of their marketing campaigns? What are the key metrics that define success?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Biggest mistake current SaaS companies are currently enacting with their marketing?
2. Favourite marketing resources and tools?
3. What does David know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

David Rodnitzsky

Michael Seibel has spent the last eight years advising thousands of startups at Y Combinator. In this podcast, he'll talk about the advice that he's found to be most transformative for startups.

Blog post and video: https://www.saastr.com/the-essential-startup-advice-for-founders-with-y-combinators-michael-seibel-podcast-488-and-video/

Sponsors:

https://www.invoca.com/

https://stripe.com/

https://www.ontheclock.com/

I am thrilled to welcome, Doug Pepper, Partner @ Shasta Ventures to the show today. Doug is a master when it comes to SaaS investments with his companies generating over $500m in revenue in 2015, having funded the likes of Marketo, Optimizely and Flurry. In today's show with Doug we discuss: 

• How Doug made his approach into investing?
• What metrics are required for startups to get Series A investors interested?
• What are the guidelines for a startup to manage their burn rate?
• In future tough markets, we will see greater consolidation?
• How can startups stand out when selling to CIO, CEO's and VPs? 

In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:

1. What has been the scariest moment of Doug's VC career?
2. Why Doug is so excited for the future of mobile SaaS? 
3. What the main effects are of the rise of bottoms up sales strategies?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Doug Pepper

Michael Cardamone is the Managing Director of Acceleprise, a SaaS focused accelerator based in San Francisco and backed by leading operators. He is also an advisor to and angel investor in early stage SaaS companies. Prior to Acceleprise, Michael was one of the first 30 employees at Box in a business development role and then led partnerships at an EdTech company called AcademixDirect.  

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Michael make his way into the world of SaaS and then start Acceleprise in SF?
• How can founders know when is the right time to ship product? Does Michael agree with Reid Hoffman, ‘if you are not embarrassed by your V1, it is too late’? How should startups look to establish a pricing mechanism at such an early stage?
• What are Mike’s thoughts on freemium? Before Mike has said founders can charge more than they think. Why does he think this and how can founders know when they have reached their price ceiling?
• Do founders need to sell their own product? How should founders approach the sales learning process? What questions should they be asking
• How important is it for a startup to have an ideal customer profile? Should founders be looking for influential customers early or just getting as many dollars in as possible? How impactful can big brands and companies be as customers to early stage companies?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Scrappiness: good or not as it just simply isn’t scalable?
2. Most common challenge for Mike’s companies?
3. Fave SaaS reading material?
4. Entrepreneur optimism: Let it run or be wary?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Michael Cardamone

SaaStr 756: From Challenges and Churn to Triumph - How to Deliver Exceptional Customer Support at Scale with Monday.com's VP of Customer Experience

In this episode of the Official SaaStr Podcast, Natalie Margolin, VP of Customer Experience at monday.com, shares her journey and strategies for enhancing customer experience in a rapidly growing company. From tackling challenges of scale, implementing AI and chatbots, to ensuring customer satisfaction and building an expert support team, Natalie explains the transformative steps and guiding principles that have positioned monday.com as an industry leader in customer experience.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Join us in 2024 at:

• SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20

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This episode is sponsored by: Paragon

• Are you constantly saying no to your customers’ integration requests? You’re not alone. That’s why companies like Copy.ai and Sinch use Paragon, an embedded integration platform, to ship integrations 7 times faster. Ready to scale your product’s integration strategy? Visit useparagon.com/saastr to explore how Paragon can help you go-to-market faster with integrations today.

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This episode is sponsored by: remote.com  

• When the right person for the job is a world away, Remote Talent brings the world to you. As the top job board for remote-first companies, we give you powerful tools to post your listings and reach the world's top candidates and remote professionals. Start building your dream team from anywhere—visit Remote.com/jobs today.

SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin and Partner at QED Investors Amias Gerety chat on the Fintech Beat podstream about all things SaaS, money, and what makes a great founder. 

Some topics covered include: 

• What makes SaaS so great
• How SaaS is fairing in the “macro” economy
• Perspectives on fintech and SaaS and how they overlap
• How an investor chooses what to invest in and when it’s time to walk away

Fintech Beat is all about the intersection of finance, tech, and policy, and now they’re touring outside the neighborhood of fintech and into the great big world of SaaS. 

While the world of public tech stocks is defined by consumer-facing juggernauts like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, the world of venture capital is defined by the North Star of SaaS. 

Let’s dive right in. 

Lars Nilsson is the VP of Global Inside Sales for Cloudera and with over twenty-five years of sales and operations experience, Lars Nilsson is a global leader in enterprise software and selling solutions. One of Lars many incredible achievements was he and his team at Cloudera built the sales methodology Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD), which has transformed how businesses approach high-value targets. Prior to Cloudera, Lars founded SalesSource, a business services consulting firm specializing in CRM customization and sales process development. Lars has also served in sales executive roles at ArcSight/Hewlett Packard, Riverbed Technology and Portal Software – all three of which achieved IPOs, in addition to Cloudera (2017). As Special Advisor at True Ventures, Lars helps True portfolio companies develop sales compensation plans from the ground up, implement best-of-breed sales technologies, and rapidly scale sales teams to meet demand.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Lars make his way into the world of enterprise sales back in 1995? How has Lars seen the industry change so significantly over the last 22 years?  
• Why does Lars believe that SDRs are the most important role in sales? How does their role of ensuring a full pipe compare to the role of demand gen and marketing?
• How does Lars think about setting a quota that ensures a desired behaviour beyond pure revenue chasing? What is his framework for setting and optimising the right quota? Why does Lars believe that ales is all about activities? What activities is Lars most eager to measure and test?
• What is Lars’ biggest advice to someone looking to build out their SDR team from the ground up? What core characteristics should one look for in those initial SDR hires? What is and has been Lars’ biggest challenge in building out his SDR team? Why is building SDR teams in the bay so hard?
• How does Lars think about setting ideal customer profiles? How big a TAM is large enough to be excited, yet narrow enough  to be achievable and solve a true and inherent customer need?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Lars know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. What is Lars favourite piece of SaaS reading material?
3. Sales rep productivity, what does Lars believe is the scale from exceptional to poor?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Lars Nilsson

Neha Sampat is the Founder and CEO @ Contentstack, a modern content management system bringing business and tech teams together to deliver personalised, omnichannel experiences. Atypical in our world, but Neha scaled the business to well over $1M in ARR before raising funding. Now Neha has raised over $31M from the likes of Insight Partners and Illuminate. Prior to Contentstack, Neha was the Founder and CEO @ Built.io and before that spent 10 years as the Founder and CEO @ Raw Engineering, building a leading digital transformation consultancy.

 In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How did Neha make her way into the world of SaaS and content management systems having previously built a digital transformation agency?
• How the heck did Neha scaled Contentstack to over $1M in ARR without raising capital, whilst being based in the Bay? What were the signals that made Neha realise she had a scalable software business? What did Neha look for in her first seed round investors? How did that profile change when she went out to raise the Series A?  
• How has being a sommelier helped Neha break the glass ceiling of business? What are some lessons Neha has learned in terms of build true and genuine relationships with customers beyond the transaction? What are the counter-intuitive strategies Neha has found works when it comes to motivating remote teams?
• Why did Neha decide to build out so much of the tech team well outside of the Bay in a town outside of Mumbai? Does Neha believe the future of tech is in the valley or decentralised?  

Neha’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. Neha’s biggest strength and biggest weakness as a leader?
2. What does Neha believe that many around her do not?
3. The biggest obstacle to the success Neha has achieved?

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-350-with-contentstack-founder-ceo-neha-sampat/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Neha Sampat

Welcome to Episode 1 of The Official Saastr Podcast, the show will delve behind the scenes of the latest and greatest SaaS rocketships talking to the founders and operators themselves. We will also be chatting with the investors and VCs funding these hyper growth companies to reveal their tactics and strategies when it comes to deciding whether to invest. 

To celebrate, we have a very special guest: Tiago Paiva. Tiago is the CEO and Co-Founder of Talkdesk, the world's leading browser -based call center software solution and in today's show with Tiago we discuss:

• The Origin Story For TalkDesk
• How Tiago achieved $3m in Sales without spending a $ on marketing
• When is the right time to hire your VP of Sales? 
• How important is it for SaaS startups and founders to be in SF?
• How did Tiago choose his investors? 

In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:

1. The biggest challenge Tiago has faced to date?
2. Tiago's favourite SaaS resource?
3. What role is the hardest to fill in a SaaS organisation?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Tiago Paiva

JD Peterson is CMO of Trello where he heads the company's marketing and customer service teams. A true child of Silicon Valley, J.D. has been helping startups for nearly 20 years.  Before Trello, he held positions as the CRO and interim CEO at Scripted, the VP of Marketing at Zendesk, and the VP of Products at Marketo. JD takes pride in building world-class teams, helping companies accelerate growth, and ensuring the customer remains at the center of every strategic effort.  

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did JD make his slightly unconventional entrance into the world of SaaS?
• Having picked Marketo and Zendesk, what does JD assess when picking companies? Once picked, how does JD evaluate culture? How does JD measure this?
• How does JD approach lead qualification? How does JD measure the effectiveness of lead generation, revenue or amount of leads? How does JD unify the sales and marketing team?
• JD has previously said that now is ‘the best but hardest time to be a marketer’. Why is this and what is behind this thesis? What are the pros and cons of the data driven marketing world? What are the commonalities among the best marketeers?
• JD has seen many companies scale into hyper-growth, when does JD believe is the right time to hire and expand aggressively? What roles should be filled first? What does JD optimize for in the hiring process? When is the transition point needed to have a VP?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Is SaaS marketing B2B or B2C?
2. What does JD know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
3. Biggest mistake companies are enacting with their current marketing plans?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

JD Peterson

Justin Welsh is the former SVP Sales @ PatientPop, the startup that offers the first all-in-one practice growth platform that’s HIPAA-compliant and is proven to grow your practice. During his 5 years at PatientPop, Justin grew sales from $0 to $56m alongside the full build-out of the sales team. Before PatientPop, Justin was one of the first 10 employees at ZocDoc, where he spent 4 years in different roles including Director of Strategic Sales. 

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Justin made his way into the world of Sales and came to be one of the industry's leading scale up Sales leaders with PatientPop and ZocDoc?
• How did Justin experience burnout? What were the first indications and signals for him that he was suffering from it? How did it manifest itself in how he carried himself and his behaviour? How did Justin communicate the situation to his bosses? What does Justin advise others in communicating burnout to their superiors?  
• As a manager observing their team, what are signs that an individual is burning out? What is the right way to approach them to discuss the situation? What options do managers have available to them when faced with a burned out employee? How does micro-management fit into the signals that suggest clear burnout of the individual? 
• Justin has said before that “culture must precede performance”, what did he mean by this? What actions and communications must they adopt to ensure that this feeling of culture over performance is accepted by the team? With that in mind, how does Justin think about KPI and goal-setting? What can leaders do to create an environment of safety for their team? Where do many leaders go wrong here? 
• Having seen multiple scaling culture, where do SaaS organisations tend to break down both in terms of culture and process? What are those inflection points? What can be done to actively mitigate these 2 significant points of failure?   

Justin’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Justin know now that he wishes he had known when he started at PatientPop?
2. Sales leader Justin most respects and why?
3. If Justin could change one thing about the world of SaaS today, what would it be? 

Read the full transcript on our blog. 

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Justin Welsh

Ever feel like you can’t really connect with prospects or have an organized workflow to get deals closed? Outreach.io, the leading Sales Engagement platform, supports sales reps and their managers by making it simple to humanize and personalize communication at scale; automating the soul-sucking manual work; and dramatically increasing the productivity and efficiency of all revenue-generating teams. You can check them out at outreach.io/saastr to chat with them and receive a free copy of their new book -- Sales Engagement: How The World's Fastest-Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale.

To help revenue and sales leaders navigate and identify ways to leverage cloud marketplaces, join Sapphire Ventures, Snowflake, Sumo Logic, and Crowdstrike to understand: How to successfully sell enterprise software through the major cloud marketplaces, what investments and alignment you need at your company need to be successful transacting on cloud marketplaces, and how to cultivate and enable a successful co-sell relationship with cloud marketplaces.

Panel:

Colleen Kapase, VP of WW Partner & Alliances, Snowflake
Jessica Alexander, Senior Director Cloud Technology & OEM Partnerships, Crowdstrike
Jabari Norton, VP WW Partner and Alliances, Sumo Logic
Rico Mallozzi, Sr. Director of GTM Ops, Sapphire Ventures

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. You can view the full video here: https://youtu.be/k4KEth7sNzw

Transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-414-how-to-leverage-the-cloud-giants-to-scale-to-100-million-arr-and-beyond/

Visit Dell.com/SaaStr for exclusive savings on Dell products and more information about the Dell for entrepreneurs program. Everything from Dell financial services to Dell rewards, Dell for Entrepreneurs wants to help your business run smarter through technology.

Bandwidth makes it easy to add enterprise-grade voice calling, text messaging, and emergency calling to your platform all backed by the power of a fully owned and operated tier-one carrier network that gives you direct to carrier pricing with better quality, control, and insights that other API providers can't. See why the biggest brands in the world rely on bandwidth and sign up for a free trial at bandwidth.com/SaaStr.

• Why being a serial entrepreneur in SaaS is a bad idea
• Why hiring VPS is critical to really growing your startup

This episode is an excerpt from Jason and Lloyed's discussion. You can see the full video here: https://youtu.be/RqgjBMlQ6ik

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

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We're celebrating episode 500 of the SaaStr Podcast! Our SaaStr 'OG' podcaster, Harry Stebbings, Founder of The 20 Minute VC and, Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder discuss the future of the markets and how to build a successful SaaS sales team from the ground up. 

Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/how-to-scale-saas-sales-team-with-harry-stebbings-jason-lemkin/

Sponsors:

https://shortcut.com/saastr

https://www.litmus.com/saastr

https://flatfile.com/saastr/

As SaaS companies slash campaign budgets, marketing leaders need to find other ways to augment customer wins from their remaining campaigns. Increasing down-funnel conversions by having marketing enable sellers to “all-star” levels along the funnel can help make up the difference.

In this episode, Datadog's CMO Alex Rosemblat will explore the tactics, personas, best practices, and tracking metrics to significantly up-level product and campaign-level sales enablement.

Our guest today is Pipedrive SVP of Global Sales Tara Bryant.

Globalization opens up a world of opportunities for sales growth. We often focus on the positive sides of growth—but what about taking a look at the ugly sides? Even what we could consider “good problems” need preparation, and it starts by understanding your team and your goals, including knowing when and how to recruit members of your team, and building in a way that compliments your growth. Do you need more man-power on the customer facing side, or do you need to bring in new management to keep everything in line? Growth isn’t always linear, and the steps to success aren’t always one after the other. How do you prioritize and organize to bring the best possible results? This side of success can be scary, but knowing how to prepare can set you up to reach your companies long term growth goals.

Missed the session? Here’s what Tara talks about:

• What does the ideal candidate look like?
• How to hire your core staff really well
• Enabling salespeople to share learnings

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

On the show today I am thrilled to welcome Russell Glass, Head of Products For LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Formerly founder, president and CEO of Bizo, a B2B audience marketing and data platform which he, from founding in 2008 to $50mm+ revenue run-rate and over 150 employees before being acquired by LinkedIn for $175mm in August of 2014 he really is a Serial technology entrepreneur, having founded or held senior positions at four venture-backed technology companies. If that wasn’t enough he is also the Co-author of The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits 

In today's show with Russell we discuss:

• What did Russ and the Bizo team do effectively that allowed them to scale, leading to their acquisition by Linkedin?
• Is customer focus a constraint on long term growth and how can you communicate this long term vision to your investors?
• How important a role will data play in the future of content marketing?
• How can SMB marketers determine which platforms will be most effective for them?
• To what extent can content marketing reduce customer acquisition? What are the other benefits?

In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:

1. Who Is Doing SMB Marketing Most Impressively At The Moment?
2. The Biggest Leanring Curve From Being Acquired By LinkedIn?
3. What SaaS resource or blog is a must for Russell?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Russell Glass

Tom Bogan, CEO of Adaptive Insights, a Workday company, will review the key principles to building a successful SaaS company. From team to vision to metrics to funding and more, these principles provide the framework for high-growth, high performing SaaS companies.

How can you develop a winning culture? How can you set aggressive but realistic goals? What’s needed to build the right team in SaaS today?

Missed the session? Here’s what Tom talks about:

• The important maxims about team building
• Insights on fundraising and why you might not want to always raise at the highest valuation
• Personal stories from his time building Adaptive Insights

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

How did the largest product-led growth enterprise company in the world find success? In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, Cameron Deatsch, CRO of Atlassian, shares his wisdom with Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond. Atlassian is trading at over $40B with revenue north of $3B. When the company started 20 years ago, it didn’t hire salespeople. Not because they planned to start as a product-led company but because they couldn’t afford to. So what should earlier-stage companies do: immediately build out a big sales team or focus on product-led growth?

Video: https://youtu.be/s897t3MSAxM

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

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Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

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Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Craig Walker is the Founder & CEO @ Dialpad, the startup that provides a business phone system for the modern workplace. To date, Craig has raised over $120m in VC funding with Dialpad from some of the best in the business including Iconiq, Andreesen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Felicis and Bill Marris’s Section 32. Prior to Dialpad, Craig was an EiR @ Google Ventures and founded and product managed Google Voice. Before that Craig founded Grand Central Communications, a personal communications startup that was acquired by Google. Finally prior to that, Craig enjoyed roles in the world of VC as General Partner @ Sterling Payot Capital and Founder & Senior Director of Yahoo Voice.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Craig made his way into the world of SaaS following time as both a GP in the world of venture and then as the creator of what would become Google Voice?
• Why does Craig think go-to-market is the most challenging element of being a CEO? How does Craig think about when is the right time to go large on go-to-market? Where does Craig believe most founders make mistakes here?
• How does Craig look to balance aggressive scaling of team with the maintaining of early company culture? What are the foundations to doing this successfully? How does Craig approach the element of hiring external talent vs promotion from within? How does Craig think about managing the internal discontent if hiring an external candidate?  
• How does Craig assess the effectiveness of trials in attracting large enterprises? What are the parameters that must be set for a trial, before it is agreed? What must founders learn to say no to when it comes to trials? How does Craig approach discounting? Why does Craig argue if your client asks for aggressive discounts, you have not explained your core USPs successfully?    

Craig’s 60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Craig knows now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. When I say success in SaaS, who does Craig first think to and why?
3. Quality or quantity of logos and why?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Craig Walker

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. This episode is an excerpt of that AMA.

See the full transcript: https://www.saastr.com/scaling-from-1-to-10m-an-ama-with-saastr-ceo-and-founder-jason-lemkin-pod-573

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

At his core, Jeff Lawson is a software developer first, and a CEO second. He knows both sides of the executive & engineering equation intimately. He gets what goes on in a developer's brain and the detailed process of building software, but he understands that businesses are motivated to move quickly. And in turn, developers need to adapt.

An all-time SaaStr fan-favorite, Jeff recently chatted with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin to discuss his thoughts on collaborating, managing, and working with developers.

Video and blog post: https://www.saastr.com/how-to-collaborate-manage-and-work-with-developers-featuring-jeff-lawson-twilio/

Super excited to welcome a heavy weight of the SaaS industry today as we have Mark Organ, Founder & CEO at Influitive. Influitive helps B2B companies mobilize their army of advocates for more rapid and profitable revenue growth. Prior to Influitive, Mark was the founding CEO of Eloqua, growing the business to over 150 people, hundreds of clients and a major presence around the world in 7 years. Eloqua was eventually bought by Oracle in 2012 for a reported $810m.

In Today’s Episode with Mark We Discuss:

• The founding story behind Influitive? What was the a-ha moment behind the concept?
• What were Mark’s biggest takeaways from watching Eloqua scale into the global force that it became?
• Influitive are creating a category, so how is that for Mark? What are the inherent challenges?  What are the commonalities of successful category creators?
• What is the difference between good and bad competition? Why does Mark try and encourage good competition?
• Why are brand advocates crucial to the success of a business? Is it a really scalable solution? How did you figure out the model for making customers successful?  

In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:

• Mark’s fave SaaS resource and reading material?
• Thought leadership: Fundamental or unnecessary?
• Target Markets; Go large or be specific and niche?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Mark Organ

Jerry Jao is the Founder & CEO @ Retention Science, the startup that brings intelligence to your marketing automation through artificial intelligence that delivers a personalized customer experience, at scale. To date, Jerry has raised over $10m in VC funding with Retention Science from great friends of the show in Forerunner Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Clark Landry, Andy Rankin and more fantastic names. Prior to founding Retention Science, Jerry founded two other e-Commerce marketing technologies and served as Strategic Innovation Officer to Clear Channel Radio. Jerry is also a Guest Lecturer at The Kellogg School of Management and sits on the board of Penango.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Jerry make his way into the world of SaaS with the founding of his first company? What have been the top 3 mistakes that Jerry has made since founding Retention Science?
• With P&G, Unilever and Olay all as enterprise clients, how did Jerry first sell into them as a small startup? What is required to give these large enterprises confidence in buying from startups? What does the perfect case study look like to convert these mega accounts? In the early days is it a quality or quantity of logos game?  
• How important is it for the founder to be really actively involved in the sales process to these mega corporations? How does Jerry divide his time now between new and existing customers, as well as team and investor management How does Jerry approach multi-year and prepaid deals with these incumbents? What is the line of reasoning for suggesting prepaid is fair?
• Retention Science have been profitable since 2018, how does Jerry look to balance the mindset of fast growth and profitability? How does Jerry think about payback period for enterprise sales reps with this profitability mindset? How does this affect his thoughts and views on internal asset allocation?

Jerry’s 60 Second SaaStr

1. A moment in Jerry’s life that has changed the way he thinks?
2. When I say success in SaaS who embodies this to Jerry?
3. What does Jerry know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Jerry Jao

It’s no secret that businesses today are struggling with an unpredictable economy. In this session, Mailchimp Co-founder and CEO Ben Chestnut will share the story of Mailchimp’s founding amidst—and despite—the dot-com bubble burst, and how the company navigated a number of inflection points in the first 10 years of its founding. 

This episode is an excerpt from Jason and Ben’s session at SaaStr Annual @ Home.

Full video: https://youtu.be/LfLZzakn2r0

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcasts-for-the-week-with-jennifer-tejada-ben-chestnut-and-jason-lemkin/

SaaStr 779: 5 Things That Are Actually Working and 5 Things That Aren’t in B2B SaaS AI with Ironclad's CEO and a16z

Ironclad CEO and co-founder Jason Boehmig joined Seema Amble, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz at SaaStr Annual to share their observations on what's currently working – and what's not quite there yet – for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in SaaS. With Ironclad's journey from an AI-first concept in 2014 to a Series E+ company and a16z's extensive portfolio view, their insights offer a valuable perspective on the current state of AI in SaaS.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code JASON50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.

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This episode is sponsored by: Anrok

A question for SaaS finance leaders, do you know where your customers are? Anrok tracks where your sales are creating exposure, and automates tax calculation and filing worldwide. Built for high-growth software companies, Anrok protects your revenue and saves you time. Visit anrok.com/saastr to learn more.

SaaStr 767: The Future of AI in SaaS Sales with Henry Schuck, CEO of ZoomInfo and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin joined ZoomInfo's Season 2 of its ZI Labs Podcast as the opening guest alongside ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. Along with co-host Ben Salzman, Jason and Henry discuss the transformative power of AI within SaaS and the evolving dynamics that are reshaping the landscape of software as a service.

Together they explore the intricacies of scaling SaaS companies, including the importance of recruiting and developing strong management teams, implementing multi-product strategies, and navigating emotional and operational hurdles as the company grows. The discussion also emphasizes the significance of hiring passionate and top-tier talent, leveraging AI to enhance sales efficiency, and maintaining a core Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for profitability. Real-world examples from companies like HubSpot, DocuSign, and Zendesk provide valuable lessons on leadership, innovation, and the future of sales. A must-listen episode for SaaS founders and entrepreneurs aiming to scale their business and stay ahead in a competitive market.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code jason50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.

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This episode is sponsored by: remote.com

When the right person for the job is a world away, Remote Talent brings the world to you. As the top job board for remote-first companies, we give you powerful tools to post your listings and reach the world's top candidates and remote professionals. Start building your dream team from anywhere—visit Remote.com/jobs today.

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This episode is sponsored by: Anrok

A question for SaaS finance leaders, do you know where your customers are? Anrok tracks where your sales are creating exposure, and automates tax calculation and filing worldwide. Built for high-growth software companies, Anrok protects your revenue and saves you time. Visit anrok.com/saastr to learn more.

Sara Varni is the CMO @ Twilio, the company building the future of communications allowing you to engage customers like never before on voice, SMS, WhatsApp or Video. Prior to their IPO in 2016, Twilio had raised over $250m in VC funding from some of the best in venture including USV, Bessemer, Salesforce and Techstars just to name a few. As for Sara, prior to Twilio she spent 10 years with Salesforce in numerous roles including SVP of Marketing for Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and CMO @ Desk.com, among other roles. If that wasn’t enough, Sara is also an advisor @ Anthos Capital.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How did Sara made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be one of the industry’s leading CMOs with Twilio today? What were Sara’s biggest takeaways from her 10 years at Salesforce seeing the incredible hyper-growth first hand?
• What does Sara mean when she says, “you have to have a creative plan to get your message to market”? Does Sara really believe that there is a playbook when it comes to marketing? How does Sara determine when to throw the playbook out of the window? What resounding question do you always have to ask yourself when thinking messaging?
• Messaging is very dependent on the customer being targeted, how does the messaging need to be different when targeting SMB vs enterprise? How does the creative plan to get the message to the target customer change dependent on SMB vs enterprise? Where does Sara see most people go wrong here?   
• Why does Sara so strongly believe in the power of customer stories? What makes the very best customer stories? What would Sara’s advice be to someone who is wanting to start creating them? Where does Sara see so many people go wrong? What are Sara’s tips for creating this alignment between the marketing team that make the stories and the sales team that sell them? Where are there often points of tension?
• What does the very commonly used term, “enablement”, really mean to Sara? Does it mean you can hire lower quality candidates and upgrade them? How does Sara distinguish between a stretch VP and a stretch too far? What questions does Sara find most revealing in the interview process?  

60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Sara know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
2. Who is crushing it in the world of SaaS marketing today?
3. What is the most common reason for the breakdown of an efficient funnel?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Sara Varni

Founders of 2023 ask themselves, “What does it take to raise money right now in this uncertain market environment?” Peter Specht, Partner at Creandum, shares a data-driven perspective and real-time insights into the market of very recent rounds and current VC expectations. 

Unfortunately, raising money isn’t the same as raising in 2021. Specht walks you through what has happened in the last 12 months and the best practices for today. 

Welcome to the Official SaaStr Podcast Episode 710:

Running a PLG and Sales-Led Motion at the Same Time: What’s New at ZoomInfo with CEO Henry Schuck and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo, Henry Schuck.

So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

In this episode, Jason and Henry discuss:

*PLG vs. a sales-led motion, and which is more efficient

*The macro-environment and what to expect next year

*What’s new at ZoomInfo

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Join us in 2024 at:

• SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20
• SaaStr Europa: June 5-6 in London. We'll be hosting the 5th SaaStr Europa in London for two days of content and networking. Join 3,000 SaaS and Cloud leaders. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on Europa tickets here: https://www.saastreuropa2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave200

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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent

When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.

Rajeev Batra is a Partner at Mayfield, a firm that has championed bold entrepreneurs since 1969. Rajeev’s investments at Mayfield include the likes of Crunchbase, SmartRecruiters, Marketo (IPO then taken private by Vista Equity), ServiceMax (acquired by GE Digital) and more incredible companies. Prior to Mayfield, Rajeev was at Mobius (Softbank) Venture Capital and Austin Ventures. Before making the move into VC, Rajeev was on the operational side as an entrepreneur and executive with three of the companies he worked with going public and later being acquired, including the very notable Siebel Systems.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Rajeev made the transition from successful operator with 3 IPOs under his belt to investing in the next generation of enterprise companies with Mayfield?
• What does Rajeev mean when he says “startups do not die of starvation, they die of indigestion”? How does this realisation affect Rajeev’s approach to customer profiling and segmenting customers?
• Why does Rajeev believe that “early product market fit can be misleading”? How does Rajeev look to provide context and action from numbers and analytics in the early days?
• How does Rajeev feel that founders should approach gross margin from the early days? How should this relationship and thought process towards gross margin change over time?
• Why does Rajeev believe that retention is the number 1 metric for SaaS founders to focus on? In the stack of metrics, how does this compare to gross margin, CAC/LTV and payback period?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Enterprise investing is spreadsheet investing: True or false?
2. How does Mayfield use an internal budget to align themselves to entrepreneurs?
3. What does Rajeev mean when he says “I look for 2 act opportunities”?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Rajeev Batra

In today's SaaStr insider episode SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin catches up with Ben Hindman, Co-Founder & CEO at Splash to talk about the future of digital events.

This interview was part of Splash’s Boom, a video series about the innovation explosion in events and the tech stack.

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-400-with-splash-ceo-ben-hindman-and-saastr-ceo-jason-lemkin-the-future-of-digital-events/

SaaStr 789: What to Expect from a New CRO with Kathy Lord, CRO at Zensai and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder

SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin sat down with Kathy Lord, CRO of Zensai (and formerly of Intacct), to talk about what CEOs and CROs should really expect from one another, especially in those critical first 90 days.

Kathy shares her journey and insights, and together they discuss the critical aspects CEOs and founders should align on when hiring a CRO or VP of Sales, the importance of having a real 90-day plan, and the differences in expectations between a CRO and a VP of Sales. Kathy provides actionable takeaways for ensuring alignment and setting realistic goals while addressing common pitfalls in hiring executive sales roles. This episode is packed with valuable strategies and real-world examples, making it a must-listen for anyone involved in scaling up SaaS companies.

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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.

Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code JASON50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.

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In a crowded and distracted world, it can be hard to break through with customers, the media, recruiting and investors. Capturing the zeitgeist is more important than ever in making you stand out. In this session Josh will share his story building DoNotPay and how building a movement has given his company an advantage and the non-traditional lessons that he has learned.

Video: https://youtu.be/kORBMIxRLs4

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

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Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

The last few years have certainly tested marketers, but 2022 serves up a brand new array of challenges. Uncharted territory stretches ahead, but the unknown can also present opportunities for growth and greatness. 

At Mutiny's The Second Lever digital conference, SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin hosted a star-studded CMO panel featuring Salesforce President & CMO Sarah Franklin, Box CMO Chris Koehler, and Attentive CMO Sara Varni. In the eye-opening session, these marketing leaders discuss the market pulse, impactful branding, and strategies for the future.

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Kurt Muehmel is the Chief Customer Officer @ Dataiku, the platform democratizing access to data and enabling enterprises to build their own path to AI in a human-centric way. To date, the company has raised over $146M in funding from some of the best in the business including ICONIQ, Firstmark, Battery Ventures and CapitalG to name a few. As for Kurt, he joined the company over 5 years ago and has risen from AE to VP EMEA to VP Sales Engineering to today as Chief Customer Officer. Before Dataiku, Kurt spent 5 years at Deloitte as a Manager advising primarily European public authorities on sustainable development policies.

 In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Kurt made his way into the world of enterprise SaaS with Dataiku having started his career at Deloitte in Paris?
• What does it take to go from 0-1 in implementing both AI and data science disciplines in 20th-century companies? Where do many go wrong with their first steps? How can one assist them in the right way? How does Kurt feel about services revenue? At what stage or ratio does it become too much? 
• How does Kurt approach the challenge of change management? What does great change management look like? Where do so many go wrong? How can content be used to efficiently scale change management practices? How does one need to engage different teams for effective change management? 
• How does Kurt think about the right pricing mechanism for the customer today? How does one find a mechanism that does not disincentivize the customer with usage? How does Kurt feel about discounting? To what extent is Kurt and Dataiku willing to engage with pilots and POCs? Where do many go wrong here? 

Kurt’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. Biggest challenge of Kurt’s role with Dataiku today?
2. What does Kurt know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of SaaS?
3. Who does Kurt look up to in the world of customer experience? Why?

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-348-with-dataiku-chief-customer-officer-kurt-muehmel/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Kurt Muehmel

Keith Rabois (Paypal, Linkedin, Square) and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin talk about the landscape of SaaS & Cloud fundraising and valuation in 2020. 

This episode is an excerpt from Keith and Jason’s session at SaaStr Summit: The New New in Venture.

Full video: https://youtu.be/KxTZfx_QpjY

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcasts-for-the-week-with-keith-rabois-and-jason-lemkin/

Buying software has changed significantly over the past 27 years. Despite the economic headwinds we’ve seen, buyers still buy a lot. The average mid-size company has 111 SaaS applications. By next quarter, that’s estimated to rise to 119. 

Of course, companies are experiencing some economic impact, and average spend is coming down slightly. Chris Perrine, the Vice President of G2, Asia Pacific, shares what’s holding up buyers in today’s economy and how you can meet them where they are.

Video with Q&A: https://youtu.be/S9yQ1Oe30zU

Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.

Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform

Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976

Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/

Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh

Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Kyle Porter is the Founder & CEO @ Salesloft, the leading sales engagement platform delivering a better sales experience. To date, Salesloft have raised over $75m in funding from some of the best in the business including Emergence, Insight Venture Partners, Techstars and even LinkedIn. As for Kyle, he has led the team from 4 employees in 2014 to over 320 today where they have also been awarded Atlanta’s No 1 best place to work. Prior to founding Salesloft, Kyle was the Founder @ B2B camp, a conference focused on B2B revenue generating professionals. Before that he was Vice President of Marketing @ NanoLumens.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Kyle made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Salesloft?
• Kyle made the decision to pivot the product when it was at $7m in ARR, what was the thinking behind that? How does Kyle think about pivots more broadly? How does one know when it is truly not working? How long did it take Kyle to get the core Salesloft product to $1m in ARR?
• With the pivot, what were Kyle’s core learnings on migrating from a prior product and platform to a new one? What were his big lessons on seeing the change in buyer persona? What does Kyle mean when he says “selling is hard but buying is even harder”?
• Does Kyle agree with many CEO’s the most important role of the CEO is “management upscaling”? What elements does he find most challenging? What have been Kyle’s big lessons in the building out of his exec team? What is the fundamental element for a successful exec team to function?
• Salesloft is in an immensely competitive space, what would Kyle’s advice be in standing out in an intensely competitive space? Where do many go wrong? What are the pros and cons of being in Atlanta and not SF? What advice would Kyle give to founders operating their HQs external to the core hubs?

Kyle’s 60 Second SaaStr

Is it important to have early champions? How does one get them?

How has having kids changed your perspective on work?

Tell me a moment in your life that has served as an inflection point and changed the way you think?

When I say success in SaaS who is the embodiment of this to you?

What does Kyle know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? 

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Kyle Porter

Dave King is the Head of Marketing at Asana, the work management platform that teams use to stay focused on the goals that grow their business. To date, Asana has raised over $210m from some of the biggest names in tech including Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, Benchmark, Founders Fund and more incredible names. As for Dave, prior to joining Asana, he led the marketing teams at Percolate, Highfive, and Salesforce Community Cloud.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How did Dave make his way into the world of SaaS and startups? When did he realise his love of marketing SaaS companies?
• What does Dave mean when he says, “we are entering the 3rd wave of marketing”? What were the 1st and 2nd chapters? What does the “3rd wave” of marketing mean for marketers today? How does it change what marketing should be focusing on? How does it change how marketing works with sales and customer success? 
• What does Dave mean when he says, “offsites serve as a crutch for 2 core elements of the marketer's role”? How does Dave advise marketers on crafting their playbook? What are the core questions to ask? Where does Dave see many going wrong here? How does one turn a playbook into a repeatable, measurable process? With channel volatility being so high, is it possible to have a repeatable and predictable process?  
• What are Dave’s biggest observations on what B2B marketers can learn from B2C? How does that change how Dave thinks about new campaigns and community building with Asana today? Who does Dave think has done this particularly well in the world of enterprise? Are there any challenges to trying to carry over B2C into the world of B2B? 

Dave’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Dave know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his career in marketing? 
2. Biggest breakdown in the working of an efficient funnel?
3. A moment in Dave’s life that has served as an inflection point and changed the way he thinks? 

Read the transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Dave King

David Politis is the Founder & CEO @ BetterCloud, the company that helps IT discover, manage and secure the digital workplace. To date, David has raised over $186M in funding with BetterCloud from the likes of Accel, Warburg Pincus, Greycroft, Flybridge and Dropbox to name a few. Before founding BetterCloud, David was an early employee of Cloud Sherpas (acquired by Accenture), where he led the company to become the leading cloud services partner to SMB worldwide. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, David was a founding employee and General Manager of Vocalocity (acquired by Vonage), which he grew into one of the top providers of cloud PBX technology.

 In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How David made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found BetterCloud? How has David seen the rate of cloud adoption within enterprise over the last 5 years? Has it been faster or slower than he thought? 
• People often suggest operators are suited to certain stages of a company lifecycle, does David agree with this? What are the leading indicators an individual is struggling to scale? How does one communicate that to them effectively? How does David think about the decision to move an individual to another role vs release them? 
• What does radical transparency really mean to David? How does the ability to have radical transparency within your org change when the org is 10 people vs 100 people? What are the biggest challenges of scaling transparency? From a meeting structure view, what can leaders do to encourage transparency? 
• How does David feel about the method of OKR setting? How has his mindset changed towards OKRs? What does the decision-making process look like for deciding which OKRs to focus on? What OKRs do they focus on at BetterCloud? How does one know when they need to change their OKRs?

David’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What would David most like to change in the world of SaaS?
2. How has David seen himself emerge and develop as a leader?
3. What is the biggest challenge of David’s role within BetterCloud today?

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-341-with-bettercloud-founder-ceo-david-politis/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

David Politis