Building a company for $0-$1M in revenue differs wildly from $1-10M ARR. And scaling from $10M to $100M is wildly different still. Sameer Dholakia, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners with decades of operational experience, shares what you need to change as you...
Dear SaaStr: How Many Board Seats Do VCs Typically Get? Let me try to simplify, generally speaking: 1. Generally, “proportionate” boards are usually seen as fair, and easy to agree to. I.e., if the investors own 20%, and founders 80%, then investors get 1 board seat,...
You’ll never truly understand how to lead a SaaS company until you’ve done it firsthand. But it always helps to get advice from someone with experience. Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap, shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of...
Recently, I met with a great SaaS founder doing about $1.5m in ARR. She was telling me about her VP of Marketing who, in the Bay Area, she was paying $95,000. I was a bit skeptical. Because that’s rather low for a true VP out here in the Bay Area (see typical...
Have a strong M&A offer? Not sure what to do? Look at this pic or a similar one Do you want it? If so, say No If not? Probably just say Yes pic.twitter.com/K483lKnyzd — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) April 21, 2021 So I wrote a version of this post...
At nine figures in revenue and 550 people, the CEO of Lattice, Jack Altman, has seen every stage of building a startup. In this week’s Workshop Wednesday — held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. PST — Altman talks more in-depth about his viral tweet storm, sharing the eight...
Should you join that Successful SaaS start-up? The one that just raised a nice seed round, that has $20k in MRR, and a cool product? Maybe. The key is understanding if it’s merely a pre-success you are meeting with … or one that potentially can be very...
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Overcome “Stage Fright” as a First Time CEO? Don’t worry about stage fright. It’s real. I used to have it. And … you’ll get over it. I remember the very first time I had to present to a Fancy Board Meeting. I wasn’t a...
Dear SaaStr: When Searching for a Co-founder, How Do You Know You Found The Right One? I think it boils down to 2 key factors: Someone that is both very good at, and better than you, in several key functional areas. If you are good at coding, she is good at sales and...
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. At the very...
In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, continues a mini-series on founder-led sales with Colin Zima, founder and CEO of Omni. Omni is trying to build the next-generation business intelligence (BI) platform. In a year’s...
Do you want to avoid the common pitfalls of scaling a startup? Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, shares part two of his 10 top mistakes in 10 years at the company. The first five mistakes many startups make can be found here and include: Not holding leaders to the...
Scaling a company comes with all kinds of hiccups and failures. Sometimes the best way to avoid hard-to-fix mistakes is by hearing how other people flubbed it while they were scaling. In this week’s Workshop Wednesday, held every Weds at 10 a.m. PST, Nick Mehta, the...
“I don’t want to meet [That VC]. I don’t need money now and it’s distracting.” — most founders, post Seed round How much time should you spend meeting VCs when you aren’t fundraising? Or if you don’t need money at all? My advice...
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,...