2016 is finally coming to an end, and what a year it was. We’re taking a look back at the top six SaaStr posts from 2016. What were the biggest lessons learned? Best SaaS tips and advice? Find out below. 6. I Was Wrong. NPS is A Great Core Metric. “Track NPS as a...
Welcome to Episode 85! David Hassell is the founder and CEO of 15Five, the leading web-based employee feedback and alignment solution that is transforming the way employees and managers communicate. They have backing from the likes of Matrix Partners, Point Nine...
Everyone is a bit different, but let me give you one piece of advice that always works: Lead with your strength. Cut to your best metric, your best logos, the best part of your product. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t talk for 10 minutes about the industry. Skip the...
Almost. Let me step back — of course 27 isn’t “too old” to pursue your passion. If you really are insanely passionate about VC, do it. I started at rather older than that 🙂 But it takes about 16–22 years to get anywhere in VC from an associate position: Let’s break...
Welcome to Episode 84! Alex MacCaw is the Founder & CEO of Clearbit, the startup that is building a suite of business intelligence APIs to help companies find more information on their customers in order to increase sales and reduce fraud. They have backing from...
The definition of “success” in Silicon Valley is kind of brutal. As a personal example, I sold my first start-up for $50m — just 12.5 months after founding. Not too shabby, right? But not a single one of my VC investors (who 5x’d their money in a year) even bothered...
What he made at has last company (unless it was abnormally or structurally low). You’re too big, and too middle-stage, and too well funded, to be expecting anyone to take a salary cut anymore. By the same token, you’re still sort of a start-up at ~100 employees....
We’ve finished the second great speaker series at the new 15,000+ sq ft. SaaStr CoSelling Space with Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Tiago Paiva, CEO of Talkdesk — and have the next great one set up in January with Nick Mehta of Gainsight and Byron Deeter...
No one cares if you were “part of an exit”. They care if you were an important part of a success story. If the exit was a good one, and you played an important role, it doesn’t matter if you were there at the end. View original question on...
Today, there’s usually a pretty big difference. Every revenue-related function has gotten more specialized over the last few years: Customer Success is usually charged with Retention. This can be a gross metric, a net metric (net of both upsells or churn), both, etc....
SAFEs are great — until they aren’t. There is one huge benefit to using a YC SAFE that many gloss over. Unlike almost any form of convertible debt, the YC SAFE is a known entity. For that reason alone, I prefer a YC SAFE to anything else like it, to any form of...
As the other answers have illustrated, it’s almost never worth it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. You should do the right thing IMHO. Just understand it likely will fall on deaf ears. First, VCs are almost always going to back the CEO. So if you try to...
Yes, period, if you want to raise significant sums. I’m only Bay Area-centric because I work here. Qualtrics, Atlassian, and many others prove you can crush it in SaaS without being based in SF. But notice the non-Bay Area ones generally had to get further to raise a...
I’ve found that in SaaS at least, every founder gets pretty good at public speaking at some point. Maybe by $20m ARR, $40m ARR, maybe it takes a while. But eventually. They all get pretty good. I’ve put 200+ CEOs on stage at the various SaaStr Annual 2017 conferences....
Welcome to Episode 83! Ryan Smith is the Founder & CEO of Qualtrics, an online survey company with 1,200 employees and a valuation of more than $1bn. They have backing from some of the world’s best investors including the likes of Sequoia, Accel, and Insight...
