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The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

The Official SaaStr Podcast is the latest and greatest from the world of SaaStr, interviewing the most prominent operators and investors to discover their tips, tactics and strategies to attain success in the fiercely competitive world of SaaS. On the side of the operators, we center around getting from $0 to $100m ARR faster, what it takes to scale successfully and what are the core elements of hiring. As for the investors, we learn what metrics they hone in on when examining SaaS business, what type of metrics excites them and what they look for in SaaS founders.
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Now displaying: Category: business
Aug 1, 2016

Andy Sparks is the Co-Founder and Head of Sales @ Mattermark. He was previously the Technology Editor at Referly before the company pivoted to become Mattermark. Andy joined the Referly team via an acqui-hire of his company, LaunchGram, by Referly in February of 2013. Now I am going to leave the bio there as Andy does a much better job of it in the show than I do!

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

  • How Andy came to be a 1st time Head of Sales with Mattermark?
  • What are the requirements for stretch VPs to be successful?
  • How can Head of Sales clearly and efficiently communicate with their reps? What are the 3 things all sales reps have to be trained on?
  • What are the must haves when looking at sales reps? Are there different types of reps for different stages in the business?
  • How to effectively establish a compensation structure for your sales team that is incentivising to them and to the company?

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

 

Jul 29, 2016

Today we bring you one of the highlights from SaaStr Annual 2016 with Jason Lemkin talking to Kirsten Helvey,  COO of Cornerstone Ondemand, a cloud-based learning and talent management solutions provider. in the episode Kirsten discusses her 11 years of experience with rising up in the ranks from employee #30 to her current position in the company, which is now 1500-strong, it is a phenomenal scaling story and so many insights nuggets of wisdom from Kirsten here.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

Why you should always be thinking about building, no matter the scale?

Why we should all stop talking about company culture?

Why you should forget the MBA and take a psychology degree?

How to give direct and consistent feedback with employees in order to get the most out of them?

Why we should focus more on upsell and less on customer acquisition?

How to build, integrate and scale a customer success team into a 1,500 person organisation?

You can follow us on Twitter here:

Jul 25, 2016

David Yuan is a General Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, where he has enjoyed no less than 4 IPOs and 5 acquisitions. Some of David’s investments include the likes of Facebook, Linkedin, Exact Target (acq by Salesforce), Splunk and many more incredible companies. He also sits on the board at Act On, App Nexus, Merkle and Site Minder and is an advisor to Pinterest. Pior to TCV, David had stints at JP Morgan and Bain & Company.

In Today’s Episode with David You Will Learn:

  1. How did David make his way into the investing world in 2000?
  2. How has David seen the evolution of SaaS revenue multiples over the last decade?
  3. How can VCs balance the drive for profitability with their need for big wins over a short 5-7 year investment cycle?
  4. How does David approach investing cadence in correlation to market cycles? Does his strategy alter according to down-turns and booms?
  5. Why does David find the monetisation models of the consumerisation of SaaS to be the most exciting?
  6. Does David agree that the original hires might not be the hires as the stages progress? How can founders transition them out without a lack of respect and gratitude?

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

Jul 22, 2016

Today we bring you a highlight from SaaStr Annual 2016 featuring a conversation between Hubspot's Dharmesh Shah and SaaStr's own Jason Lemkin. Prior to founding HubSpot in 2006, Dharmesh was founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions, which was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 2005. In addition to co-authoring “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs”,Dharmesh published HubSpot’s Culture Code, which has garnered over 2.5 million views on SlideShare. Named an Inc. Founders 40 in 2016, he is an active member of the Boston-area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over 60 startups, and a frequent speaker on startups and inbound marketing.

In Today's Episode wth Dharmesh You Will Learn:

  • What were the biggest growth catalysts in the scaling of Hubspot from Day 1 to IPO?
  • What were the biggest mistakes made and lessons learnt by Dharmesh and the team throughout the journey?
  • How does Dharmesh think about churn? How does he define pre-churn?
  • What is the customer happiness index and how can it be implemented?
  • How can founders inform prospects their product is a must have not a nice to have?
  • Why has the SMB space been so difficult for so long? Why is that changing now?
  • Why Dharmesh and Hubspot focus on consumer behaviour not consumer feedback?

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

Jul 18, 2016

Allison Pickens carries the customer success torch as the VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at the category leaders, Gainsight. Allison’s organization @ Gainsight includes all post-sales functions: CSMs, Support, Onboarding, Services, and Operations. Prior to Gainsight, she started her career in management consulting for Fortune 500 companies while at Boston Consulting Group and later worked in private equity investing at Bain Capital.  Allison decided that she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work at Gainsight when Bain Capital led the Series B.

In Today’s Episode With Allison You Will Learn:

1.) So let’s start with managing customer churn and I think the first and most important thing is assessing what is regrettable vs non-regrettable. How do you approach this?

  • What is the internal post mortem?
  • How do you identify why they churned?
  • Is there a blame game that follows? How do you instill ramifications but not fear?
  • How do you then look to fix the original problem that caused the churn?

2.) To do the above we need to have a great customer success team so iw ant to talk about the process of building this out and with CS being a new category this is an aspect a lot of founders are addressing at this time. So starting with the obvious?

  • When do you need a customer success team?
  • Where in the organization should the team sit?
  • What's the playbook for rolling it out?
  • How big does the team need to be? Does this vary on sector or funding availability?
  • What are the levels of seniority within the team?
  • What's your budget? How do you account for the costs of your team?
  • What teams sit within the customer success umbrella?

60 Second Saastr produced by Nick Mehta:

What surprises you most about customer success now vs a year ago?

Importance of fast iterating team?

Fave SaaS material, book, blog, podcast?

What element of the journey have you found most challenging?

Carrying the CS torch? What is it like do you feel the pressure?

3.) Now I want to finish today by discussing the segmentation of your customer base, so at what point in the company's life do you begin segmenting the customers?

  • Why is it important to segment customers?
  • How do you decide the best way to segment them?
  • Should these segments align with the sales team?

 

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

Jul 15, 2016

Cindy Padnos is the Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures where she focuses on all things Enterprise/B2B cloud and mobile computing sectors. Prior to founding Illuminate in 2009, she was one of three investment professionals at Outlook Ventures responsible for committing the firm’s $140 million fund. Cindy also has extensive experience in the world of operations, where she founded and sold one of SaaS’ first on demand startups in the form of Vivant.

In Today’s Episode with Cindy We Discuss:

  • How Cindy made her way into the world of SaaS and later SaaS investing?
  • Why does Cindy think SaaS is a democratiser for entrepreneurship?
  • Is the proliferation of Sales and Marketing tools not a challenge for startups in terms of competing for the same VC dollars?
  • Is it easier or more challenging for startups to raise VC funding today than in previous years? If so, why?
  • How does Cindy assess product market fit with her portfolio companies? When is the right time to put pedal to the metal?
  • What does Cindy make of the Micro VC market at the moment? How prominent are party rounds? Will we see consolidation?

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

Jul 11, 2016

Fred Stevens-Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Rainforest QA, which if you listened to 20VC with Byron Deeter, you will remember he discussed them and their amazing trajectory. So for QA first, it is essentially QA as a service making it fast and easy to test your webapp in multiple browsers and they are backed by some of the best as we said there Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, our own Jason Lemkin, Y Combinator, previous guest Kris Duggan @ Betterworks and Marc Benioff just to name a few. As for Fred he is the man at the helm as Co-Founder & CEO and absolutely smashing it I might add. In the show Fred mentions his favourite reading material to be Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross’s new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!

In Our Discussion with Fred You Will Learn:

  • How did Fred come to found Rainforest QA? What was his origin story to YC?
  • How did Fred look to establish the pricing model with Rainforest? Why does Fred believe most software companies undervalue their software?
  • What are the challenges of going upstream? How does it affect product? Sales cycle?
  • Does Fred agree with Mark Organ that in a new category, the company CEO must be the category CMO? How much of a role does content play in Rainforest QA’s education funnel for customers?
  • Why does Fred believe you should spend the most time with your best people? Similarly, the least amount of time with your worst people?
  • How has Fred gone about building out the sales team? What did Fred look for in sales reps and Heads of Sales?

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

Jul 8, 2016

Quang Hoang is the Co- Founder @ Birdly, Birdly are convinced by the power of messaging within organizations, they decided to build a broader service that connects your favorite business softwares to messaging apps. It is this vision that has led to them being named one of the hottest startups from YC Winter 2016 batch and has led to funding from some of the best in the industry including our own Jason lemkin, Slack, previous guest Nicolas Dessaigne and prestigious french investors Alven Capital and Partech Ventures.

In Today’s Episode with Quang We Discuss:

  • How did Quang come to found Birdly? What was the a-ha moment?
  • What did Quang learn from pivoting to Birdly? What is it important for founders to consider before a pivot?
  • How does Quang approach the challenging topic of a business model for bots?
  • Why does Quang believe that the whole pricing model for SaaS will change?
  • What were the main benefits of the YC experience and how did it impact his fundraising?
  • When is the right time for European startups to make the move to SF? How important is it to be close to your customers?

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

Jul 4, 2016

Christoph Janz is the Co-Founder and the Managing Partner @ Point Nine Capital, one of Europe’s best early stage venture funds and Christoph himself specializes in all things SaaS at Point Nine and has made more than 20 SaaS startup investments. Prior to Point Nine, Christoph co-founded two Internet startups and in 2008, became an angel investor and discovered Zendesk, which was his first angel investment. Also if you would like to congratulate Jason for the raising of the incredible new SaaStr Fund then you can click here to send him a congratulations tweet.

In Today’s Episode with Christoph We Discuss:

  • How did Christoph make his way into the world of early stage SaaS investing?
  • When should startups consider making the move to the US? Is it always necessary?
  • How important is it for SaaS startups to have a local US investor? What are the benefits?
  • Where are there talent gaps in European SaaS? What can European founders do to find those experienced VPs of Sales and Marketing?
  • Question from Jason: What made Zendesk seem like such a winner and what did that teach you?
  • Where does Christoph see the next wave of the consumerisation of SaaS?
  • Is it harder to get funded as a SaaS startup in today’s environment than in previous years?

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

Jul 1, 2016

Matt Garratt currently runs Salesforce Ventures with the mandate to build out salesforce’s ecosystem of partners with equity investments. Matt has led key strategic investments at Salesforce in companies such as former guests Gainsight, and Invoca as well as Anaplan and Insidesales.com just to name a few. Prior to salesforce Matt was a VP at the prestigious SaaS investor Battery Ventures. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!

In This Episode With Matt You Will Learn:

  • How Matt made his entry into the world of VC and came to run Salesforce Ventures?
  • What did Salesforce do right to give Matt the ability to formalise the fund? What did Matt learn in the less formal stages of investing?
  • What are the benefits that startups receive from being portfolio companies of Salesforce Ventures?
  • How does matt view Salesforce Ventures in the early stage investing landscape? Does Matt like to co-invest with other prominent funds?
  • How does M&A work within Salesforce Ventures? Are you willing to sell to your competitors?

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

Jun 27, 2016

I am delighted to welcome the new Head of Sales @ Front App, Cailen D’sa, to The Official SaaStr Podcast today. Cailen might just be the Head of Sales every SaaS startup founder is dreaming of having previously been the first sales hire @ Dropbox where he launched Dropbox’s first B2B product, prior to that he was a director at Box where he helped pioneer and operationalize the freemium land-and-expand sales model, which is now a core SaaS sales methodology. Now if you enjoy the episode with Cailen today and want to hear more from him then you must headover to Front’s blog where you can find Mathilde’s written interview with Cailen.

In This Episode With Cailen You Will Learn:

  • How did Cailen come to be the first Sales hire @ Dropbox? What was it about Front that enticed him?
  • What were Cailen’s biggest takeaways from his time at Dropbox and Box?
  • How does the Sales process differ when selling a freemium product like Dropbox, compared to an enterprise product like Front?
  • What does Cailen look for when hiring sales reps? What are Cailen’s sourcing strategies for new sales reps? How does Cailen incentivise the best talent to choose Front over other options?
  • With the rise of data and it’s role in sales, to what extent does Cailen still believe sales to be an art and not a science?

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

Jun 24, 2016

Villi Iltchev is a Partner @ August Capital and prior to joining August Villi was a member of the leadership teams at Box and Lifelock. Before that Villi was a Vice President @ Salesforce where he led the strategy and acquisitions teams; being directly responsible for over 30 investments in the likes of Hubspot, Box, Mulesoft and many more amazing companies.

In Today’s Show with Villi We Discuss:

  • How Villi made the transition from the world of operations to investing with August?
  • What were Villi’s biggest takeaways from working with titans of SaaS; Box, Salesforce?
  • What was the M&A environment like back in the 2000s? What was the driver behind mass consolidation? What did the on premise perpetual license business model enable companies? Where did customer success lie in this environment?
  • Multiple Clouds: What is the challenges of this? How will this evolve over time? What are the current solutions?
  • Customer success lies with the vendor: What do you think caused this pivotal transition? How central should customer success be to an early stage SaaS company’s strategy? What are the main benefits of customer success to you?
  • SaaS distribution: Why do reseller arrangements not work? How would you like to see this evolve in the future?
  • Sales productivity: What is the productivity effect of giving another product to sales? What happens to aggregate sales?

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

Jun 20, 2016

Luke Kervin is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ PatientPop, where he has scaled the team from 10 to over 130 in just 12 months. As a result, PatientPop recently raised their Series A led by Toba Capital, allowing them to further ramp up their customer base and expand the employee ranks to over 200 people.

In Today’s Show with Luke We Discuss:

  • How Luke came to found his first SaaS business in PatientPop?
  • What is Luke’s criteria for selecting a potential business idea? What does the idea need to have? What elements of an idea will concern Luke?
  • How did Luke go about validating the idea for PatientPop? What are the most common methods founders get product validation wrong?
  • Why did Luke build a fake product, a fake website and fake business cards to validate the idea?
  • PatientPop has grown from 10 to 130, so how did they scale so fast? What are the inherent challenges of company culture maintenance with such hyper-growth. 

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

Jun 17, 2016

Blake Bartlett is a Partner @ Openview Ventures where he helps identify value and lead investments in product-led businesses driving market dislocation. Prior to joining OpenView, he was a Vice President at Battery Ventures, where he focused on growth-stage software and Internet businesses. Blake joined Battery in 2009 and helped lead 10 investments including  the likes of Wayfair, Optimizely, Sprinklr, and Glassdoor.

In Today’s Show We Discuss:

  • Why Blake decided to invest in SaaS over other sectors?
  • Whether the rise of the bottoms up SaaS sales model means customer fickleness for SaaS products will increase?
  • Does product led growth contradict tradition SaaS sales beliefs? How can they work in unison?
  • Is product market fit and customer value a binary result? Are there varying degrees of customer value? How important is time to customer value?
  • How can startups look to pull product-led growth off? What were Blake’s biggest takeaways from watching the likes of Optimizely and Expensify?

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

 

Jun 13, 2016

I am delighted to welcome my first ever Harry to the show today in the form of Harry Glaser, Co-Founder & CEO @ Periscope Data, the worlds fast analysis suite providing data analysts with the tools they need to improve their analysis by over 150X and an astonishing fact here they have doubled their revenue every 3 months ever since launch. Periscope’s investors include Ellen Pao, Matt Ocko @ Data Collective, Chad Byers @ Susa Ventures, Wes Chan @ Felicis, Benjamin Ling at Khosla and many more. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!

In Today’s Episode with Harry We Discuss

  • How Harry came to be the founder of Persicope Data and what the a-ha moment was for him?
  • How did Harry look to establish a pricing model with Periscope Data as a first time SaaS founder?
  • What are Harry’s learnings of hiring and building out the initial sales team?
  • How did Harry build out the institutonal training program to allow non technical people to sell a very non technical product?
  • What are the inherent pros of having an inbound heavy model and what are the fundamental problems?
  • Why are companies suddenly seeing the need for data analysts and what are the opportunites that data analysts present?

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

Jun 10, 2016

Andy Wilson is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Logikcull, where he really is the visionary behind Logikcull’s product and marketing strategy focusing on simplifying and democratizing the discovery process into three simple steps: upload > search > download. Andy leads the company it its mission to put an end to eDiscovery with the use of Discovery Automation.

In Today’s Episode with Andy We Discuss:

  • The origin story of Logikcull for Andy and what a-ha moment was for him?
  • How did Andy approach the transition from service based business to SaaS business?
  • Does the increase of customer success not transition the customer into the client?
  • What was the effect of having Jason as a investor and what are the biggest value adds that Jason provides?
  • On outbound vs inbound, how did Andy increase outbound in such an established space? Where did he find the major breakthroughs?

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

Jun 6, 2016

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:

Jun 3, 2016

Laura Roeder is the Founder & CEO @ Edgar, the social media automation tool that essentially allows your social media queue to fill itself up. Now Edgar is not the usual startup story we are all familiar with as Edgar has taken some unusual steps, they have not raised VC funding, they do not have a sales team, their founder, Laura, was pregnant on launch and after all this, Edgar is a startup that actually makes money at 2.9m ARR.

In Today’s Episode with Laura We Reveal:

  • How did Laura come to found Edgar? What was the a-ha moment for Laura?
  • How did Laura assemble and build the team, with te restraint of being pregnant during launch? How did this hiring mindset benefit the process?
  • Why does Laura deliberately not have a sales team?
  • How does the SaaS math differ for bootstrapped vs venture funded SaaS startups? HOw does the exit strategy change when bootstrapped?
  • Why should SMs approach social media platforms one at a time? How can startups measure their social media performance and engagement?

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

  • Fave SaaS resource and reading material?
  • Hardest hire in the Edgar process?
  • Going up the enterprise funnel: Potential or not going to happen?

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

 

May 30, 2016

Bill Binch is a leader and expert in the SaaS sales industry. Bill was the senior vice president of worldwide sales at marketo for 8 years and he joined when it was a small venture backed startup with a mission to reinvent marketing automation, it was his sales leadership and expertise that formed a critical component in building Marketo into one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in the world. Recognized through his being awarded worldwide VP of sales in 2011.

In today's show with Bill we discuss:

  • What were Bill’s biggest takeaways from his time scaling the sales organisation at Marketo??
  • Why did Bill find it enticing selling to sales and marketers with Marketo?
  • How can startups go about approaching the topic of the sales cycle? What does the right cadence look like?
  • How can sales leaders look to establish a quota that is achievable and confident? Why is it about deal frequency not dollar size?
  • How can we optimise the hiring process for sales professionals? What are the benefits to over hiring? Is this sustainable in a downturn?
  • Does Bill agree that customer success will be the new sales, as Nick Mehta stated?

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

  • SaaS tools that Bill could not live without?
  • Creating your own scorecard?
  • What does Bill know now that he wished he had known at the beggining

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

May 27, 2016

I am delighted to present Part 2 of our feature of Gainsight. Joining me today I have Anthony Kennada, the founding VP Marketing at Gainsight where he is responsible for managing the company’s global marketing strategy, from demand generation to brand marketing, and is credited with creating the “Pulse” community of Customer Success leaders. Anthony began his career as an early employee at Box. He later joined LiveOffice and managed their OEM partnership with Symantec from contract signature to acquisition for $115M. Prior to joining Gainsight, Anthony led the Emerging Cloud Products division at Symantec, and was responsible for the first organic product development effort that spanned both consumer and enterprise market segments.

In today's show with Anthony we discuss:

  • How Anthony came to be VP of Marketing at one of the hottest startups in the valley?
  • Being the founding VP of Marketing, how did Anthony look to grow the team? What were the actual steps Anthony used to scale the marketing at Gainsight?
  • How has B2B marketing changed, from Box to today? With this evolution, what are Anthony’s marketing learnings in creating new categories vs. new players in existing categories?
  • How should we be thinking about marketing, both Demand Gen and Corporate, differently in crowded spaces? ?
  • How can marketing help support going up market and driving ACVs up?  Both Box and Gainsight did this.
  • How should CEOs and VPMs think about, and budget events?  What if they don't have all the capital Gainsight does?

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

  1. Billboards: Stupid or effective?
  2. Fave SaaS resource and why?
  3. 3 Biggest Tips For Running a Successful Event?

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

May 23, 2016

This week on SaaStr we are celebrating the rise of GainSight with a special feature week dedicated to Gainsight and joining me today we have Gainsight CEO, Nick Mehta. Since Nick has been at the helm of Gainsight, it has experienced a meteoric rise to the top of the world of SaaS having practically created the category of customer success and revolutionising business work processes in doing so. Due to this, Gainsight has raised funding from the likes of Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

In today's show with Nick we discuss:

  • What were the solutions before Gainsight? Why were these inefficient and what the market opportunity for Gainsight?
  • Why has the power shifted from the hands of the vendor to the hands of the customer? What can vendors to do optimise this shift?
  • Is the proliferation of available tools and the resulting competition not dangerous as there is only so low prices can go?
  • To what extent does Gainsight have a monopoly over the customer success market?
  • How much should startups spend on customer success in the early days? How can one measure that success and return on investment?
  • What does the hiring of a customer success officer look like for Nick? How can we optimise this process?

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

  • ACV is everything: Explain?
  • Being a specialised CEO: Right or wrong?
  • On again, off again hiring in sales?

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

May 20, 2016

Joining us today on The Official Saastr Podcast is Nakul Mandan, Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he focuses on early stage SaaS investments. At Lightspeed, Nakul led the firm’s investments in Gainsight and Reflektive. Previously, Nakul worked at Battery Ventures, where he helped lead the firm’s investments in category defining companies such as Marketo, BlueJeans Networks, Gainsight, Intacct, 6Sense and Yesware. Prior to Battery, Nakul worked at Blue River Capital, a growth stage investor focused on India.

In today's show with Nakul we discuss:

  • How Nakul came to be one of the leading SaaS investors in the US?
  • What will the 2nd phase of the consumerization of the enterprise entail? What innovation will we see in business model?
  • How important is predictable revenue for early stage startups? Hoe can they mitigate the circumstances of losing it?
  • What more needs to be done to ensure the continuation of consumerising traditional enterprise software?
  • What does Nakul hone in on when considering investing in a SaaS startup for Series A? What are the metrics and requirements that matter? At this stage are there large data sets and metrics to rely on?

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

  • Fave SaaS reading material?
  • Greenfield Opportunities in SaaS?
  • SaaS Founder Nakul most respects and admires?

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

May 16, 2016

I am so excited to welcome Russ Hearl, Head of Sales @ Datahug. Datahug is a pipeline management and forecasting solution within Salesforce and backed by the likes of DFJ and Salesforce Ventures. Prior to Datahug, Russ was the VP of Sales at DoubleDutch where he built a sales machine that delivered over 1,500 new customer wins and took the business from $0 to over $20 million ARR in less than three years.  A true thought leader in sales optimization and selling velocity.

In Today’s Episode You Will Discover:

  • What makes a great SaaS sales leader? How can you spot the BS and the façade of someone who does not have what it takes?
  • How do the best leaders run 1 on 1’s with their reps? How can leaders optimise this time and interaction? Is there anything they should avoid in the process? ?
  • How can sales leaders go about introducing elements of competition into sales without disincentivising the loser? What is the buddy system and how does that work?
  • Why do SaaS founders need to make pipeline velocity optimization a priority today? What are the biggest opportunities in improving pipeline velocity?

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

  1. Biggest opportunities in improving pipeline velocity?
  2. Fave SaaS resources and reading materials?
  3. What are the biggest mistakes people make in pipeline velocity?

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

May 13, 2016

I am so excited to welcome Johnny Chin, Founder & CEO @ Bannerman to The Official SaaStr Podcast today. Bannerman is the company that provides on demand security staff and bouncers to some of the world’s biggest companies including Spotify, Y Combinator, Weebly, Optimizely and many more incredible firms. Bannerman are also an alum of YC having been in their YC S14 Class.

In Today’s Episode You Will Discover:

  • Why did Johnny decide to transition Bannerman from B2C to B2B? WHat metrics suggested to Johnny that product market fit had not been achieved with the B2C model?
  • How did the transition affect the product? What does Johnny mean when he discusses ‘Wizard Of Oz’ moments?
  • How did Johnny go about developing and establishing a sales process? What were the inherent challenges and how did JOhnny combat them?
  • At what stage did Bannerman reach profitability and what does this allow Bannerman to now do and focus on? SHould it be a priority over growth for other SaaS businesses?
  • How Johnny approaches brand building at Bannerman? Why brand is so important for B2B companies? What are the must do’s and the must not’s when it comes to B2B branding?

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

  1. Most challenging element of the journey?
  2. Fave SaaS resources and reading materials?
  3. Competitive landscape for on demand security?

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

May 9, 2016

To Commemorate the 3 month anniversary of the best conference ever, SaaStr Annual 2016. We thought we would take a trip back to the conference with one of our favourite discussions featuring Jason Lemkin, Founder @ SaaStr and John Somorjai, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development & Salesforce Ventures. Salesforce Ventures invests in the next generation of enterprise technology. The Salesforce Ventures portfolio includes companies such as Box, DocuSign, Dropbox, Evernote, GainSight, MongoDB, MuleSoft, Stripe, SurveyMonkey, Twilio, and Xactly. Salesforce.com has invested in more than 150 enterprise cloud startups in 11 countries since 2009.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

  • What have been the fundamental determinants for the growth and acceleration of Salesforce in the last few years?
  • What gave Salesforce the conviction to deploy $500m back into startup investing?
  • With the success of Salesforce Ventures, how have John’s investing goals changed since 2009?
  • Why should founders raise with Salesforce, what is the value add?
  • What is John attitude to the recent pessimism in the valley? How does John approach the dichotomy of growth and reducing burn?

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

 

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