The Wall Street Journal asked me to write about a topic which I think is critical to all scaling SaaS companies:  talent, and talent outside the U.S.

The reality is almost every SaaS company I’ve worked with, including my own, just can’t get enough engineering talent in the SF Bay Area, or NYC, or even just across the U.S.  Even if you don’t start with a distributed team, you’re going to end up with one, once you need to scale beyond a pizza-box team or two.

Probably, you should plan for it and make it a strategic competence and competitive differentiator.  We added great teams in Israel and Vietnam which worked well for us prior to our acquisition.  We also had “on shore” teams across the U.S. of individual contributors who could work on defined projects or features that could be implemented at the API level or otherwise and not have to touch the core code base in most cases.

Whatever it is, it’s going to take a village for you once you hit $3-$4m in ARR or so, I suspect.  There will just be too many customer demands, too much to do, once you hit this zone between Initial Traction and Initial Scale.  Plan for it …

The piece is here and in part below.

Screen Shot 2013-09-05 at 1.47.24 PM

Again, read the rest here.

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