The very best hires in SaaS cost you nothing. You can always afford them. Who should you hire, with limited budget? A VP of Sales? A Director of Demand Gen? Or A Head of Product? The answer is Yes. A truly great hire is >always< accretive. At least within just...
Dear SaaStr: What Percentage of Shares Should Be Set Aside for Employee Equity? Nuanced answer: A lot. But, the precise number today doesn’t matter. At a practical level, if you are growing quickly, you’ll typically grant 6-8% a year in additional grants (and...
Dear SaaStr: How does a First Time Founder Identify 10x Hires? How do you hire a great CTO, a great VP of Product, a great VP of Sales … if you’ve never worked with one? It’s hard. There’s a reason almost every founder you talk to had a...
Dear SaaStr: At what stage should SaaS founders fully stop being individual contributors? I’ve come up with 2 rough rules here to avoid stalling out: Try to have a complete 1.0 management team by $4m ARR at least. Earlier is better, of course. And try to hire at...
There’s nothing wrong with hiring folks from the competition It’s just, when you do, you’ll overlook too many of their weakness, and give them too much credit for their competitive experience Only hire them if you still would if they worked somewhere else —...
You can be a bit slow in recruiting in the early days, a few great hires mask it You can still be a bit slow in recruiting up to $2m-$3m ARR, great growth masks it But after $4m-$5m, you just have to get great at recruiting — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk)...
Dear SaaStr: Do VCs Want To Talk To Senior Execs That Quit a Portfolio Company? Generally, if the issues are around: harassment or any inappropriate conduct, or fraud or misleading financials, etc, or something else that is wrong legally, ethically, morally,...
Dear SaaStr: What’s the #1 Way I Can Accelerate My Career Growth? My uber-learnings: Find the best boss you can; and Take on every initiative, project, task, and endeavor you possibly can from her. And work for them for a while. Long enough to get promoted once,...
If someone is looking for another job in Year 1, Even if they don’t take it … You’ve already basically lost them. Do more 1-on-1sGet more 360 feedbackTalk more I know you don’t have time Make it — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) October 11, 2020 So...
We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about not screwing up that VP of Sales hire. Done right, it will accelerate your company to the next level. Done wrong — you can lose the better part of a year, and half of your last round of capital. And we’ve talked a...
https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1321210631198887936 Hiring too junior a resource to own product is almost always a huge mistake — 9 times out of 10. You can take a lot of “stretch” risk in sales. Sales breeds leadership. But what I’ve seen time and time again is...
As we gear up for SaaStr Europa 2023 in London on 6-7 June and SaaStr Annual 2023 in the SF Bay Area on 6-7 September, we wanted to take a look back at some of our most iconic speakers and sessions from over the year, that we can still learn from today. Asana today...
I was curious a while back how many of the recent Cloud and SaaS IPOs had founders that were equal co-founders from an equity perspective. That was how I was brought up (the first start-up job I had, the founders were equal shareholders). And I generally thought...
A little while back I was walking on the streets of San Francisco and bumped into a terrific public company CEO. A beloved CEO of a beloved SaaS company several years post-IPO. We caught up briefly, and I asked if there was any way I could help. He said,...
Q: How do you deal with bus factor in a startup? We are losing an employee which had a cornerstone role but he was tackling this area alone. Goodness, this is one of the toughest parts of scaling. I remember Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, and I discussed this at one of the...