In this session, Sean Wester, VP Product Marketing at Salesloft, moderates an in-depth discussion with Rob Forman, Co-founder at Salesloft, and David Cancel, CEO at Drift, about how you can get the absolute most out of your engineering team. As the leader of your...
I think you can use it to pounce. I’ve gotten less lazy as I’ve gone from service provider -> startup exec -> startup founder -> whateveritisIdoatSaaStr. It’s not all good. I can no longer pounce. When I founded my first start-up, I took months to decide if...
Most bigger funds do, but with smaller funds, it’s murkier. A VC fund of > $100m-$150m or so will typically keep 60%+ of the fund in “reserve”. Some of these reservers are used to double-down on their winners. But some are also used to support the portfolio...
How do you successfully transition from a freemium model to serving enterprise clients? For Karl Sun, CEO of Lucid Chart, and Dan Cook, VP Sales of Lucid Chart, they had to build an extremely successful freemium business (with 10 million users!) first as it provided...
There are many root causes, but one thing I can tell you when I entered venture capital in 2013, is that I felt like I had gone back in time. All-male partnerships were everywhere. Inappropriate jokes and sexist comments were laughed at, and commonplace. And VCs made...
I actually don’t think this is THAT big of a deal if it’s relatively early. Quite a few startups I’ve worked with have flipped who the CEO is, among the cofounders, as the company migrates from idea -> first 10 customers -> first real revenues. In SaaS, as you...
Let’s step back for a minute … why is it hard to “switch” partners in most (not all but most) venture firms? Yes it’s ego — but actually, it’s much more than that. Ego is just one piece: Ego. Of course, being told by a founder they’d rather work with a different...
I say yes. Just by asking the question, I’m fairly certain: You’re a startup person, and you want to grow. This is probably worth a short term salary cut for that type of person — if the role is the right one. If it can help accelerate your career and/or...
Welcome to Episode 154! 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...
SaaStr is coming to Miami! Tech meetup Waffle Wednesday will be hosting SaaStr in Miami on December 20 at Kairos’ super cool HQ. We’ll take about all our favorite topics (hiring a great VP of Sales, scaling, NPS, and much more), together with Brian...
Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, is joined by Sudheesh Nair, President at Nutanix, on the Strategy Stage to talk about the incredible journey of going from $0 to $4 billion in such a short amount of time. From starting out as a few lines of...
It has converged. When I started investing in European startups in ‘13-’14 (Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Front, etc.), most European VCs had very different models than U.S. VCs. Specifically — for many Euro funds, the model was $50m exits. Vs. U.S. VCs had $1b+...
No. But maybe $9 or $19/month might be better. You usually will learn a lot more from paid customers than free users, so when in doubt, charge. But $1? I dunno about that idea. Pricing is so confusing in SaaS. Why is Salesforce $200 a seat for Unlimited Edition...
