Salesforce has put together another pretty epic founder / entrepreneur track this year at Dreamforce. You can check out the schedule here.
There are three sessions I wanted to highlight in particular, that I’ll either be at or leading.
First, on Day One, Monday October 13 at 1:30pm, Aaron Ross, my good friend, colleague and co-author of the forthcoming The Predictable Revenue Guide To Tripling Your Sales, will be leading a great session: “Predictable Revenue [The Sequel]: How to Crush Your Sales Goals.” Aaron’s first book, Predictable Revenue, has become a true bible for founders looking to build and scale the sales side of a recurring revenue business. I’m fortunate to be collaborating with him on the sequel and the session will be a great chance to hear about the repeatable processes Aaron has perfecting since building the first outbound sales team at Salesforce.
Next Up, on Day Three, Wednesday October 15 are two sessions I’ll be co/leading. The first is “The Tech Entrepreneurs Survival Guide – The Best of SaaStr” at 1pm. This will be what I hope is an amazing session on all the mistakes, learnings, and things to do better on the journey from $0 to $100m in ARR. I’ll finally tie together the 100+ posts on SaaStr.com and the 1000+ answers on SaaStr-on-Quora into one coherent theme and present it all. It should be pretty great.
Then, later on Wednesday at 3pm, right before Marc Andreessen’s talk, is a session I will co-lead with Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (my other investor in EchoSign besides Storm, and highly recommended) is “Benchmarking Your Startup”. I hope this is the start of a great dialogue on this theme. How well am I doing? I wish I’d known myself along the journey. What does it take to make it? What if I’m behind — what can I do? And if I’m doing just fine, where should I double down? We’ll take both a quantitative approach (how quickly, and with what bumps, do the great SaaS companies scale) and a qualitative approach (what does the journey look like, and when and how do I kick myself in the arse to do better?).
Even better — we’ll bring along 2 case studies. Tiago Paiva, CEO and co-founder of Talkdesk, one of the fastest growing SaaS 3.0 companies, will come and talk about how his built up a rocketship, brick by brick, over its first 2 years. We’ll also have another great case study CEO join us, this one pre-IPO (will update his post to include).
I will see you there!
And no matter what, come to Dreamforce if you haven’t been before. It’s the largest SaaS gathering on the planet. If you can’t afford a full ticket, at least get a free expo pass and come learn. Learn from Salesforce — the first SaaS company to cross $5 billion (and soon, $10 billion) in ARR. Copy what works there, for you. Either now, or down the road. Don’t reinvent the wheel where you don’t need to.
