Have we lost interest in investing in the human side of sales? Not in hiring sales execs themselves, but in giving them more tools to be more “efficient”. It sort of seems like it. AI has hardly rendered the sales professional obsolete. Not yet, at least....
Dear SaaStr: What was your first meeting with a VC like? My first meeting with a VC … It went really well. In fact the very first VC I ever pitched as a founder offered to fund us tentatively with $5m — by the end of the first meeting! Yes, it was a strong pitch...
2025 should be a good year for almost all leading public SaaS companies: 1️⃣ Overall, any “downturn” ended in Q3’24, if there was one at all in their segment. 2️⃣ Most SaaS leaders are now in market with an AI offering, and even if early and minor, it’s leading to a...
So it’s in the air. Not everywhere, not at every start-up or scale-up. But in general, overall, a sense that SaaS is back. It’s not just AI, although that’s part of it. It’s not just the big run-up in many SaaS stocks recently, although...
Dear SaaStr: Will the Failure on Bench Make VCs Reconsidering Replacing Founders as CEOs? I don’t think so. I don’t know all the details, but what I can tell you is 95%+ of the VCs I know and work with do not want to replace the founder CEO ever. Only as a very last...
So I caught up the other day with the CTO of a leading SaaS company with tens of thousands of customers, growing quickly. AI is all over their homepage and website and comms. I asked him about a particular use case for AI, and his answer shocked me a bit: “Honestly,...
It’s been a great year for SaaStr videos and podcasts. We’re on the top 1% on Spotify overall and just added video there, and our YouTube has become a great stream of the best of the best in SaaS, Cloud and AI. So to catch-up over the holidays, here are...
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Evaluate Startups for Seed Investments? Here are our criteria for SaaStrFund.com: Are both the CEO and CTO insanely good? Better than I was as a founder? Are they committed to this market and journey for a decade or more? It takes being a bit...
So many of the big winners of the 2021 Era — Slack, Zoom, Calendly, etc. — seem so simple today In actuality, the products are and were fairly complicated, feature-rich, powerful, etc. Still it seems almost quaint in 2025 that single, seemingly simple PLG-led products...
Dear SaaStr: What is it like to be pitched by startups as an investor? There are really three modes from a VC perspective during a fundraising pitch: You Almost immediately want to do the investment. You go into the pitch already very interested, and within 15–20...
