Dear SaaStr: How Many Options Should I Give to the First Non-Founder Employees of they are making below market but non-zero salaries? Here’s the tough part. It’s really hard. What you should do is give them say 3x their forgone salary in stock — 3x to account for...
Dear SaaStr: Our VC Is Encouraging Us to Hire Aggressively and Increase the Burn Rate. Should We Listen to Them? In my experience, about 66-70% of the time this is bad advice, especially if it is coming from a Very Large VC. Not always — but more often than...
61% of Founders Think They’re Fundable. The Data Says Otherwise. We’ve now processed over 2,000 pitch decks through SaaStr.ai VC’s FREE AI-powered analysis engine. Try it here. And the data tells a story that every founder needs to hear. Only 12.1%...
Dear SaaStr: What Were the Biggest Mistakes You Made Getting Your Startups Going? The biggest two mistakes I made, I made twice, maybe thrice. They were: One, starting with too incomplete a management team. In my first start-up, while the core 3 co-founders were...
The other day I presented at Replit on 125 days of building 10+ production apps through vibe coding. Apps that have now been used over 750,000 times. I went in thinking I’d share what I’d learned. I came out with something bigger. The Replit AI agent...
HappyFox is an AI-powered support platform that serves over 12,000 companies globally – all without raising a single dollar of venture capital. And come meet them live, in person at SaaStr AI London on Dec 1-2!! If you’re running a B2B SaaS company and still...
Dear SaaStr: What Do Founders Need to Know to Navigate a Merger/Acquisition? My #1 tip: Get Zen. Once you sell it, it is not yours anymore. And both your upside and your downside are now capped. You can no longer fail or run out of money, but really, you can no longer...
We’re back! Harry, Rory and Jason! The venture capital playbook is broken. Not bent — broken. In the latest 20VC x SaaStr episode, Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll dissect why even Sequoia is making dramatic leadership changes, why seed...
I see it every single day in my portfolio. CEOs convinced they just need to hire that one rep who will magically turn everything around. And later, that one VP of Sales who will turn things around on their own. The person who can sell ice to Eskimos. The rep who...
Dear SaaStr: Is It Ridiculous To Call Yourself the CEO When Your Startup is Tiny? I used to feel that way, at least a bit. I used to look at tiny little startups and wince when a founder went around talking about himself as “CEO”. But then I had to learn how to Sell...
