SaaStr 753: Unveiling the 2024 CRO Playbook, How to Navigate A Shifting Sales Environment with Salesloft's CRO Mark Niemiec In this insightful podcast, Mark Niemiec, the CRO of SalesLoft, shares his strategic approach and key lessons learned since joining the company in February. Drawing from his extensive experience at Salesforce and Cisco, Mark discusses the challenges and opportunities that come with onboarding as a new CRO, especially in dynamic market conditions. He emphasizes the...

SaaStr 752: 9 Signs a Startup Isn’t Going to Make It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin SaaStr Founder and CEO, Jason Lemkin sat down to discuss 9 signs a startup isn’t going to make it. We all know, we’re living in strange times. A lot of AI companies are growing 500% a year and exploding A lot of public leaders are struggling Some unicorns are doing incredibly well, while others have stalled and are growing at zero Founders are struggling with how to deal with these changes, and...

SaaStr 751: How to Use AI-Powered Marketing to Get More Leads and Customers with Guillaume Cabane of HyperGrowth Partners As a marketing leader, how do you use today’s AI platforms and tools to become more efficient?  Guillaume Cabane, Co-Founder and General Partner at HyperGrowth Partners and ex-head of marketing at Drift, Gorgias and Segment, shares how you can win with AI in outbound, SEO, and paid.  AI was good a year or two ago, but its quality was less than that of a human. There was...

SaaStr 750: What it Takes to Get Funded in 2024 with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin What it really takes to raise venture capital today, in 2024 Stress in System Why Everyone Seems to be Chasing AI Where the Decacorns Are Databricks and Canva What a "Fund Returner" is in Venture Capital How a $2B and a $100m VC Fund Make Money What a Top Decile Startup Looks Like and Much More!! SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet. Join us in 2024 at: SaaStr Annual: Sept....

SaaStr 749: The Lost Podcast Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, and Jason Lemkin, CEO of SaaStr, in 2013:  "Thinking About $1 Billion in ARR" Hey, everybody at SaaStr, we didn't realize until a Twitter exchange the other day that we have a lost SaaStr podcast for real. Just when SaaStr was getting going in January 2013, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin went out and went to Box's offices and interviewed Aaron Levie CEO and Co-founder of Box. This was over a decade ago now and it was lost.  We...

SaaStr 748: Fundraising During A Downturn, Advice for Hiring in 2024 and Much More with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin  To close out SaaStr Europa 2024, Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder took the stage to answer the audience's most burning questions. AMA’s with Jason are wildly popular for his expertise and no-holds-barred delivery. Jason give his advice on the following topics: Hiring in 2024 Running PLG and Enterprise GTM at the same time How to Categorize Revenue for VCs Are...

SaaStr 747: Top 10 GTM Mistakes Founders Make Again … and Again with SaaStr’s CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin What are the biggest GTM mistakes founders make? SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin shares The Top 10 Mistakes Founders Make Again and Again. Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. Let’s jump right in. Hire a VP of Sales that can sell or demo the product Hire a VP of Marketing who can do demand generation As a Founder or CEO, stay in...

SaaStr 746: What’s Really Happening in Venture Capital Today with Redpoint Ventures Managing Director Logan Bartlett There are a lot of haves and have-nots in the software industry today. Some companies have more people throwing money at them than they know what to do with, and others are struggling to raise any money at all. Logan Bartlett, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, shares their yearly “State of the Market” report to understand what is and isn’t happening in venture capital...

SaaStr 745: Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC Dominic Grill, Head of Technical Success at OpenAI, and Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Sales at Retool, answer some of the most pressing questions from Harry Stebbings, Founder at 20VC, about mastering the customer lifecycle, how roles and motions in sales and post-sales have changed, the role of AI in sales, and some of the biggest lessons learned at these hyper-growth companies. ...

SaaStr 744: A Tale of 3 Worlds: Where SaaS, Cloud, and AI are in 2024 with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin What's the theme and current trends in SaaS, Cloud and AI now that we're midway through 2024? SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin reflects on the SaaS industry's journey over the past several years, particularly focusing on the challenges and growth seen in 2022 and 2023. Despite economic ups and downs and the gloom and doom on social media, companies like Canva and Netskope are...

SaaStr 743: 9 Easy Sales Concepts So Many Get Wrong with Sam Blond, Former CRO Brex Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin’s company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams: Don’t Outsource...

SaaStr 742: The Top 5 Secrets for Building Great Products with Leaders at Slack, Rubrik, and Grammarly As Product leaders, you have to build trust with CEOs and founders, align on vision and strategy, stay focused on the customer’s problem, and effectively navigate misalignment to ensure your product has the greatest chances of success right out of the gate.  But how do you tactically achieve all of that? Tamar Yehoshua, former CPO at Slack and Partner at IVP, Anneka Gupta, CPO of Rubrik,...

Gong’s CEO and Co-Founder Amit Bendov sat down with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin at SaaStr Europa 2024 last week to talk about all things AI in Sales and the lessons learned while scaling to billions.  Back in 2015, Google AI beat the world chess champion easily. AI was starting to diagnose diseases better than doctors. Amit asked himself, “How hard would it be to understand customers better than salespeople?” That was the idea for Gong, an early vision of an autonomous customer...

SaaStr 740: The Top 10 GTM Mistakes I See Founders Making Today with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin If you’ve read SaaStr or have been around for the last decade, you might be familiar with some of the repeated GTM mistakes founders tend to make, but the world of hiring, people, scaling, and workplace expectations are significantly different today than they were before March 2020. SaaStr Founder and CEO, Jason Lemkin, shares the top GTM mistakes founders make today and some cheat codes...

SaaStr 739: The Three SaaS Metrics That Matter in 2024 and Will IPOs Be Back? with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin What are the three most under-discussed metrics on social media, with VCs, and especially with founders? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares his top three SaaS metrics that matter in 2024: Net new customer count Growth vs. efficiency The bar to IPO -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SaaStr hosts the...

SaaStr 738: How Shopify Implements AI Across Sales and Product with Mike Tamir, Head of AI at Shopify, and Rudina Seseri, Managing Partner at Glasswing Ventures At SaaStr AI Day, Mike Tamir, Head of AI at Shopify, and Rudina Seseri, founder and Managing Partner at Glasswing Ventures, level-set about where we are in the cycle for Enterprises adopting AI and the critical work being done at Shopify to leverage AI and solve real problems. Mike and Rudina do a great job of explaining the complex...

SaaStr 737: How to Build Go-to-Market Efficiency in SMB Sales with Owner.com CRO Kyle Norton How do you build GTM efficiency in SMB sales? The CRO at Owner.com, Kyle Norton, shares his learnings and strategies for building better efficiency into your GTM motion. While this title is SMB-oriented, the advice applies to Mid-Market and Enterprise, too. The three topics we’ll cover in today's podcast are:  The importance of staying focused and how to say no. Ways to scale that don’t include...

Harry Glaser was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which raised a seed round before finding customers, yet didn’t run out of money before becoming an overnight success 3-4 years later. They grew like crazy when they found product-market-fit and raised a big Series A and B.  When you’re growing fast, everything can feel like it’s breaking constantly, and you’re hiring and rehiring people fast. During those rapid growth years, someone would reach out every once in a while and ask if...

Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, discusses the influence of AI on business workflows, focusing on automating operations, maintaining customer trust, and navigating generative AI challenges. Together with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin, they addresses the role of AI in managing incidents, improving efficiency, and changing decision-making in enterprises. Lastly, we delve into how AI and human roles can coexist, foreseeing a shift towards high-value work as automation increases, with a...

SaaStr 734: The Latest in Series A Rounds, AI Growth Rates and More with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin  So Redpoint Ventures published some of the slides they recently presented to their Limited Partners (their own investors) here. There’s a ton of good data there, but this one slide stood out to me, because it was put together in a really clear fashion, better than other data sources I’ve seen. And what it says is that even though Seed stage investing remains arguably as strong as...

SaaStr 733: Advice Every SaaS Founder Needs to Know in 2024 with Sam Blond and Jason Lemkin At SaaStr Miami, former Founder’s Fund Partner and CRO of Brex Sam Blond — host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast — sat down with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin for a fireside chat about finding success as a SaaS company in 2024. They discuss Sam’s learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions.  Sam just...

SaaStr 732: What It’s Like Running a Profitable $400M Public SaaS Company with Vimeo CEO Adam Gross and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Vimeo CEO and SaaS veteran Adam Gross and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr founder and CEO, recently hosted a fireside chat at SaaStr Miami, talking about running a profitable public company with $400M in revenue, including themes around:  Using a combination of self-serve and sales-led motions How to juggle and manage several different ICPs  How to avoid...

SaaStr 731: 10 Things Founders Should Know About Getting Acquired with Brett Goldstein, Former M&A at Google Former member of the M&A team at Google, Brett Goldstein, now Founder at Micro and Co-Founder & CEO of Launch House Ventures, shares the nine things founders should know about getting acquired. It’s a common dream for founders to hope their startup be acquired one day, but what is a company, like Google, really looking for in their acquisitions? And what should all...

SaaStr 730: How to Price and Package AI SaaS Products with Sandhya Hegde, General Partner at Unusual Ventures With everything in AI moving so rapidly, what’s the best way to price Artificial Intelligence products or SaaS tools with custom AI features and integrations? Should it be subscriptions, usage, solutions, or something entirely different? While companies are scrambling to roll out these new tools, they also want reliability and predictability in the value they’re getting from your...