The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

As you grow from nothing to $100M and beyond, you will run into a unique set of challenges at every stage.  Spenser Skates, CEO and co-founder at Amplitude took the stage at SaaStr Annual 2023 to share four key lessons he learned building a great organization and a long-lasting sustainable business.  Amplitude is a digital analytics platform that started out of another failed startup with three co...

How do you sell against the competition or become a market leader in a very crowded space? SaaStr’s CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond chats with the CRO of Apollo, Leandra Fishman, about just that. Leandra has over 30 years of experience leading large sales and revenue teams. This hypergrowth platform raised $100M at a $1.6B valuation in a challenging fundraising environment.  Apollo is a ne...

So Redpoint Ventures published some of the slides they recently presented to their Limited Partners (their own investors) here . There's a ton of good data there, but this one slide stood out to me, because it was put together in a really clear fashion, better than other data sources I've seen. And what it says is that even though Seed stage investing remains arguably as strong as ever ... Series...

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Take Care of Yourself As a Founder? Quiet quitting, feeling sorry for yourself, working 30 hours a week, etc. — that doesn’t really work for a founder. It may feel good in the short term, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t get you to success. But you do need to take care of yourself, at least as much as possible. What works: * Go hire one great VP . A VP of Sales, Marketing, P...

So you’re hiring your first few sales reps in the early days?  Before you have a great VP of Sales?  It’s an interesting time.  Leads are precious, everyone is a team.  So you need a very certain type of sales rep. Let me give you a checklist of a few signs they won’t work out: #1.  They’re Late Many will challenge me here, but if they’re late to the interview, they’ll be late to customer calls, t...

So Okta is one of our favorite SaaS and Cloud leaders. The story is super inspiring.  Founder CEO Todd McKinnon was VP of Engineering at Salesforce and left to start Okta in the depths of the last downturn.  Salesforce and Marc Benioff at first said the core market, security identity, was too small of a market.  Then, they brought out a competing product :). That mostly failed. Today, Okta is at ~...

Generative AI is a platform shift where models can take inputs such as text, image, audio, video, and code and generate new content into any of the modalities mentioned. TJ Nahigian, co-founder and Managing Partner of Base10 Partners, and Luci Fonseca, Partner, deep dive into the current GenAI landscape, incumbents vs. startups, and the six questions founders should ask themselves to drive value f...

So Braze is one of the quiet winners in today’s SaaS and Cloud world.  At $500m in ARR, they’re growing a strong 33% and trading at about $6 Billion, so they’re in the 10x ARR Club. When the average public SaaS company is still stuck at 6x. Braze is a top leader in enterprise mobile marketing and communications.  The logos are strong, and the NRR is good.  They sent a stunning 37 Billion messages...

As we gear up for  SaaStr Europa 2024 in London on 4-5 June  and  SaaStr Annual 2024 in the SF Bay Area on September 10-12,  we wanted to take a look back at some of our most iconic speakers and sessions. Ben Chestnut CEO of Mailchimp joined us for a very open and honest discussion of the top challenges really building the #1 100% bootstrapped SaaS of all time.  At least so far. Just after this, M...

In this latest episode of CRO Confidential , Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM). Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG.  Before joining Zapier, Giancarlo was at Atlassian as a technical sales lead before moving...

The journey for a company to move upmarket can be daunting and varies widely depending on the internal and external factors that inspire a shift in go-to-market strategy. Join these incredible sales leaders are they share their experiences in the evolution from SMB to Enterprise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, vis...

In today's SaaStr insider episode SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin shares 10 Simple Steps To Help Any Sales Exec Close More. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

Learn how Flodesk bootstrapped to $5M in ARR by focusing on customer-driven growth: from kickstarting growth by empowering new customers to share, to creating product viral loops that amplify and optimize these customer-led funnels. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

Randy Rayess is the Co-Founder @ Outgrow , a growth marketing platform that enables marketers to build interactive content/tools to increase customer engagement and boost demand generation. Prior to founding Outgrow, Randy co-founded VenturePact, an invite-only marketplace that connects companies with trusted software development firms. Before VenturePact Randy held roles at Ampush and then on the...

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

Ryan Carlson is the CMO @ Okta , the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise. Prior to their incredibly successful IPO in April of 2017, they raised funding from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, a16z, Greylock, Khosla and Floodgate to name a few. As for Ryan, he has spent an incredible 9 years at Okta in numerous different roles starting with running the prod...

In this CEO to CEO catch up, Nick Mehta and Jason Lemkin discuss how to do product extensions, how to sell a second product, and where product development overall is heading.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

How do you compete in a tough marketplace with thousands of other competitors? Join Adam Blitzer as he shares insights from launching a company in an already crowded marketing automation space and zig-zagged the way to market leadership. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

Paul Rosania is the Founder & CEO @ Balsa , the company that recognises that builders move the world forward and so they are building the best second screen for builders, integrating tools you already use like Jira, GitHub, and Figma. Coming out of stealth today with their seed round being led by Andrew Chen @ a16z and joined by former CPO @ Slack, April Underwood, Chapter One’s Jeff Morris Jr and...

We caught up with one of the SaaStr community’s favorite speakers, Dharmesh Shah CTO and co-founder of Hubspot on lessons learnings launching a second product.  Hubspot recently expanded its Sales products and the learnings were top of mind. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

Nick Caldwell has built and grown product and engineering organizations at PowerBI (0 to 300 engineers), Reddit (500M MAU) and Looker ($2.7B sale to Google). Nick will share 5 big lessons he's learned along the way that you can use as you build your company's product and engineering functions from its earliest days to its largest successes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss th...

In today's SaaStr Insider, SaaStr SVP & GM, Amelia Ibarra, sits down with Alon Alroy, Co-Founder & CMO at Bizzabo on What's Next For the Future of B2B Events.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

There are a lot of problems with calculating churn rates. Moreover, public companies don't generally release churn rates. Learn what they are and how to calculate them correctly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com

Ryan Sandler is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Truework , the company that gives employees control over employment, income and other identity data. To date, Ryan has raised over $44M with Truework from the likes of Sequoia, Khosla, Menlo and from the founders of companies such as Plaid, Seatgeek, Mino Games and Checkr. Prior to founding Truework, Ryan spent 3 years as a Senior Product Manager @ LinkedIn...

From how many reps to hire, to compensation models, here are the top 10 mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales teams and how to avoid them.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com