The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Phil Fernandez is a Silicon Valley veteran, with more than 35 years of experience building and leading breakout technology companies. Phil co-founded Marketo in 2006 and led the company as Chairman and CEO for a decade, overseeing its successful IPO and acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. Prior to Marketo, Phil served as president and COO of Epiphany, an enterprise customer relationship manageme...

Bill Binch is a leader and expert in the SaaS sales industry, currently CRO @ Pendo.io ,  the startup that helps you understand and guide your users, creating a product experience they can’t live without. They have raised over $58m in VC funding from some of the best in their space with the likes of Battery Ventures, Spark Capital and Salesforce Ventures, all backing them. As for Bill, prior to Pe...

Kristina Shen is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners , one of the world’s leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Pinterest, Skype, Box, LinkedIn, Yelp and many more incredible companies. As for Kristina, she serves on the boards of DoubleDutch, Glint, Retail Solutions and Zoosk and is also a board observer with RainforestQA, Vidyard, Gainsight and ServiceTitan. Kristina is...

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: How does Jason think founders shoul...

Timo Rein is the Founder & CEO @ Pipedrive , the startup that helps sales people focus on actions that close deals. To date, Timo has raised over $30m from the likes of Atomico, Bessemer Venture Partners, TransferWise Founder Taavet Hinrikus and Andy MCloughlin and has scaled the team to over 330 people across multiple continents. Prior to founding Pipedrive, Timo was a Partner @ Vain & Partners a...

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...

Jon Lee is the Founder & CEO @ ProsperWorks , the #1 recommended CRM for G Suite. To date, ProsperWorks have raised over $85m in VC funding from the likes of True Ventures, Norwest, GV, Bloomberg Beta and more incredible names. As for Jon, prior to ProsperWorks, he started in investment banking at Merrill Lynch before moving to run a large operations team at Yahoo. Jon then founded Bazaar Advertis...

Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner @ NEA , one of the world’s largest venture capital firms in the world with over $3Bn in their latest fund and a portfolio including the likes of Mulesoft, Jet.com , Uber, Houzz and many more incredible companies. As for Chetan, Chetan focuses on enterprise software and has made investments in MuleSoft, MongoDB, Elastic, Heap, just to name a few. Due to his ph...

Rob Reid is the Executive Vice President & Managing Director @ Sage Intacct , the undisputed global leader serving finance teams of any size. With over 10,000 employees and and over 3m customers, their financial solutions generate over $2Bn in revenue. As for Rob, prior to Sage Intacct, Rob led Intacct over an incredible 8 year journey culminating in their, reported $850m exit to Sage in 2017. Bef...

Kolton Andrus is the Founder & CEO @ Gremlin , the failure as a service startup finds weaknesses in your system before they cause problems. To date, they have raised over $8m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including the likes of Mike Volpi @ Index Ventures and Mike Dauber @ Amplify Partners. Prior to Gremlin, Kolton was a Chaos Engineer at Netflix improving streaming reliabili...

Ryan Williams is the Founder @ SalesCollider , the organisation that helps technical founders jumpstart sales. Ryan got his start as the first sales manager at Adroll where he grew the team from 3 to 32 reps in just 8 months, a team that was responsible for ARR growing from $4m to $58m in under 2 years. Ryan then became an advisor to the early team at InVision where he coached both CEO and sales r...

Pieterjan (PJ) Bouten is the Founder & CEO @ Showpad , the world’s leading sales enablement platform that allows for the creation of amazing buyer experiences. To date they have raised over $89m in VC funding from the likes of Insight Venture Partners, Dawn Capital and Hummingbird. As for PJ, Showpad is the second company he has founded. In 2010 he co-founded the mobile development agency, In The...

Clate Mask is the CEO of Infusionsoft , the leading cloud-based CRM platform for growth-minded small businesses with more than 145,000 users worldwide. Under Clate’s leadership, InfusionSoft has grown from a fledgling startup housed in a worn-down strip mall into a 550 person company, raising over $130m in VC funding in the process. If that was not enough, Clate is also an angel investor with the...

Harry Glaser is the Founder & CEO @ Periscope Data , the startup that allows you to transform your business with the fastest, most powerful analytics platform. To date, Periscope have raised over $34m in funding from some of the very best in the business including Bessemer, SV Angel, DFJ, Susa Ventures and Data Collective, just to name a few. With this funding they now serve over 975 customers inc...

Mark Godley is the President of LeadGenius, the startup that provides the power of human intelligence with the scale of machine learning. To date they have raised $16m in funding from the likes of a16z, Initialized Capital, Scott and Cyan Banister and SV angel just to name a few. As for Mark, he most recently served as Chief Revenue Officer for HG Data and before that was VP of Market Development...

Wade Foster is the Founder & CEO @ Zapier , the startup that moves information between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. A couple of incredible achievements from Zapier, they have scaled to a phenomenal $35m in ARR, they have built a time of over 130 people, all without a central office and they have done this with just $1.2m in early stage funding from the...

Olof Mathé is the Founder & CEO @ Mixmax , the startup that allows you to be a sales pro, providing powerful analytics, automation and enhancements for your outbound communication and a product that has achieved almost the impossible in SaaS, true viral growth and a $0 CAC. As for Olof, prior to Mixmax he led the team that built Inkling Habitat , now adopted by the world’s largest publishers and b...

Brad Feld is one of the world’s leading VCs having Co-Founded Foundry Group , Brad has made investments in the likes of Zynga , Makerbot and Fitbit , just to name a few. Brad is also Co-Founder of Techstars , one of the world’s most prominent startup accelerators, whose portfolio companies have raised over $1.3bn in funding. If that wasn’t enough Brad is also a best selling author having co-authou...

Mark Mader is the CEO @ Smartsheet , the company that allows firms the best way to plan, track, automate and report on work. To date, they have raised over $105m in funding from some of the best in the business including Insight Venture Partners. Prior to Smartsheet, Mark served as senior vice president of global services for Onyx Software, leading the consulting and customer operations teams in t...

Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, one of Boston’s premiere tech startups paving the way in the sales intelligence space. Throughout the InsightSquared journey, Fred has raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of DFJ, Bessemer, Salesforce and Atlas Venture. Prior to founding InsightSquared, Fred was a corporate development associate with Salesforce Ventures and befor...

Mike McDerment is co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks , the #1 cloud-based accounting software designed exclusively for service-based small business owners. Starting from his parent’s basement, Mike has grown Freshbooks to more than 10m users worldwide and raising over $75m in VC funding from the likes of Accomplice and Georgian Partners. Mike is also the co-author of Breaking the Time Barrier, downl...

Ross Mason is the Founder & VP of Product Strategy @ MuleSoft, one of the world’s leading software platforms making it easy to connect the world’s applications, data and devices. Following over $250m in VC funding from the likes of Lightspeed, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and NEA, MuleSoft then went public in March 2017, popping as much as 45% on it’s first day of trading. As for Ross, p...

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners . He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successf...

Des Traynor is the Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer and VP of Marketing at Intercom , one of the world’s hottest startups that simply put, makes communicating with customers easy and efficient. They have raised over $115m in funding from some of the world’s leading investors including Social Capital, Index Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and then titans of industry with Mark Zuckerberg, Jack...

Greg Sands is the Founder & Managing Partner @ Costanoa Ventures, one of the leading early stage enterprise funds on the West Coast with their latest $175m fund, raised earlier this year. At Costanoa, Greg has made investments in the likes of Intacct (acquired by Sage for $800m), Quizlet, DemandBase and previous guest, Grovo, just to name a few. Prior to founding Costanoa, Greg was a Managing Dire...