Episodes
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...
Published 03/29/24
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...
Published 03/22/24
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...
Published 03/20/24
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...
Published 03/15/24
SaaStr 729: 6 Questions Founders Should Ask Themselves to Drive Value from Generative AI with Base10 Partners
Generative AI is a platform shift where models can take inputs such as text, image, audio, video, and code and generate new content into any of the modalities mentioned. TJ Nahigian, co-founder and Managing Partner of Base10 Partners, and Luci Fonseca, Partner, deep dive into the current GenAI landscape, incumbents vs. startups, and the six questions founders should ask themselves to...
Published 03/13/24
SaaStr 728: How to Double Your Magic Number and Increase Your Go-to-Market Efficiency with Sapphire Ventures
Go-to-market (GTM) design and efficiency are sometimes overlooked, but they’re a critical driver of any SaaS business. Rajeev Dham and Karan Singh, Partners at Sapphire Ventures, and Jane Lee, Vice President at Sapphire walk us through how to double your “Magic Number,” a shorthand for your sales and marketing efficiency.
Magic Number is your growth in ARR over a quarter divided by...
Published 03/06/24
SaaStr 727: High-Velocity Techniques to Maximize Sales with Gusto’s CRO and Head of Go-to-Market
Tolithia Kornweibel, CRO, and Jamie Edwards, Head of Go-to-Market Operations and Tools, share how Gusto maximizes revenue so that you can do the same.
Together they share the high-velocity techniques they use to maximize sales, including:
Sell to SMBs Use round-robin to assign accounts, but you’re not sure if it’s optimal Are stuck in a world of geographic territories Spend a lot of time...
Published 03/01/24
SaaStr 726: How to Build Out Your SDR Function in 2024 with Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and Host of SaaStr CRO Confidential
How do you build out a Sales Development (SDR) function at your SaaS company? Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and host of SaaStr’s CRO Confidential shares his advice for building an SDR function in 2024 based on his experience as CRO at Brex.
We’ll cover everything from setup to efficiencies in setting up an SDR function, including:
The benefits of SDR...
Published 02/23/24
SaaStr 725: Mastering High-Volume, Low-CAC Marketing: Strategies from Gorgias, Vercel, and Hypergrowth Partners
In today’s world, there’s a clear shift in what founders, boards, and investors are all after — scalable, low-CAC (customer-acquisition cost) growth strategies.
In a panel, Guillaume Cabane (G) and Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto), co-founders of HyperGrowth Partners, Axelle Heems, Senior Director of Growth Operations at Gorgias, and Morgane Palomares, VP of Marketing at Vercel, share...
Published 02/20/24
SaaStr 724: CRO Confidential: Bringing Product-Led and Sales-Led Growth Together For Go-To-Market Success with Giancarlo Lionetti, CRO of Zapier. Hosted by Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund
In this latest episode of CRO Confidential, Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM). Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into...
Published 02/16/24
SaaStr 723: Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, and Jason Lemkin, CEO and Founder of SaaStr: Answer Your Top 10 2024 Customer Success Questions
In 2024, for customer success in SaaS, what’s “good” NRR? What’s a “good” NPS? Who should Customer Success report into?
Questions like this and many others are the most common questions asked of SaaStr Fan Fave and expert on Customer Success, Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta, and SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin.
While we recently published an episode on...
Published 02/13/24
SaaStr 722: 2024 State of SaaS: Trends and Predictions with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
At Pavilion's CEO Summit, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin, took the stage to do something .. a little bit different. Typically on SaaStr.com, we try to focus our content on mistakes to avoid, lessons learned and how to scale faster, but for the CEO Summit, Jason addressed the audience with what's most top of mind for him at the start of 2024.
...
Published 02/09/24
SaaStr 721: How Revenue Leaders at Box, Calendly, and Lattice Scaled From $0 to $100M+ and Beyond
Mark Roberge, SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies.
Dini Mehta, former CRO at Lattice, Kate Ahlering, CRO at Calendly, and Mark Wayland, CRO at Box, share their stories and offer...
Published 02/06/24
SaaStr 720: CRO Confidential: What It Really Takes to Be Successful in Enterprise SaaS Sales with Christian Smith, CRO of Splunk. Hosted by Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund
In this week’s episode of CRO Confidential, Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Splunk, Christian Smith. Splunk is a 20-year-old Enterprise software giant that has accomplished many things — a 2012 IPO, a $28B+ Cisco acquisition in 2023, and $3.7 billion of ARR last...
Published 02/02/24
This is SaaStr's What's New series where our very own CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, sits down with the top CEOs and leaders in SaaS to discuss What's New, what's top of mind, and what every SaaS founder should be thinking about.
In today's episode, Jason sits down with Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automatic and Co-Founder of WordPress on what's new at WordPress.
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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community...
Published 01/26/24
SaaStr 718: Predictions for Venture, IPOs, and the State of SaaS in 2024 with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin and Harry Stebbings, Founder and Host of the 20 Minute VC
Harry Stebbings, Host of the 20VC, recently hosted SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin for one of the first podcasts of the year. Together, they talk about the best of SaaS from 2023, the state of SaaS in 2024, and their predictions for Venture and IPOs for the year ahead.
...
Published 01/23/24
SaaStr 717: How Enterprise SaaS Companies are Buying AI (or Not) with ContextualAI, Anthropic, and Glean
While AI seems to have gone mainstream for consumers and smaller SaaS companies, but what about the big guys?
While the first generation of Generative AI is great, it’s not quite ready to solve Enterprise problems. So, where are we now in the adoption cycle for the Enterprise world?
We brought together an Enterprise SaaS panel with:
Douwe Kiela, CEO of ContextualAI Benjamin Mann,...
Published 01/17/24
SaaStr 716: The Future of Customer Success in 2024: Insights and Predictions from Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
Is it the end of an era in SaaS customer success?
It seems like some of the biggest changes to the human side of SaaS are happening right now. What does the AI revolution and SaaS spending cuts mean for the future of Customer Success and support?
In this episode, SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, and SaaStr fan-favorite, Nick Mehta, CEO of...
Published 01/12/24
SaaStr 715: The 7 Biggest Mistakes CMOs Make (And How to Avoid Them) with the CMOs of Databricks, Zoom, and Okta
In this CMO panel, Rick Schultz, CMO at Databricks, Janine Pelosi, Former CMO at Zoom, and Ryan Carlson, Former CMO at Okta, joined Carilu Dietrich, Advisor at Hypergrowth B2B Startups to talk about the seven biggest mistakes CMOs make. These CMOs have all taken their companies from the early stages through IPOs and have been apart of multi-billion dollar organizations. Here are...
Published 01/10/24
SaaStr 714: From Zero to Hero: How to Dominate Outbound SaaS Sales with Rippling and Founders Fund on CRO Confidential. Hosted by Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund. With Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling.
In the latest episode of SaaStr's CRO Confidential series, host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling. For context - Ashley had previously helped Sam scale Brex's outbound...
Published 01/05/24
SaaStr 713: Why the Future of Customer Success, Sales and Marketing Has Changed: Ask-Me-Anything Part 2 with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
In part one of this Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) with SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, he answered the community’s questions about whether all anyone cares about is AI anymore, investor appetites going into 2024, vertical SaaS, and thriving as a solo founder.
In part two we head into IPO waters, how to incorporate AI into your products, the best way...
Published 01/02/24
SaaStr 712: Is AI the Only Thing in SaaS that Anyone Cares About Anymore? Ask-Me-Anything Part 1 with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
Ask Me Anything with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Part One.
In the first part of this open AMA, Jason shares his thoughts on the current state of sales and marketing, if anyone really cares about anything other than AI anymore, how to hire great partners, and breaking out of a crowded ecosystem.
...
Published 12/28/23
SaaStr 711: 5 Lessons from Scaling Six Products to $100M+ with Samsara's Chief Strategy Officer Kiren Sekar
For any Cloud and SaaS Founders or execs seeking practical strategies and inspiration to stay ahead of the curve, this episode's for you. At the SaaStr Annual, Kiren Sekar, Samsara’s Chief Strategy Officer and founding chief Product Officer shared five lessons he learned along the way from scaling six products to $100M+.
The six products/companies Kiren helped scale to $100M that...
Published 12/27/23
Welcome to the Official SaaStr Podcast Episode 710:
Running a PLG and Sales-Led Motion at the Same Time: What’s New at ZoomInfo with CEO Henry Schuck and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo, Henry Schuck.
So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?
In this episode, Jason and...
Published 12/21/23
SaaStr 709: 15 Signs You Have A SaaS Metrics Problem (and How to Fix it) with Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital
In this episode of the SaaStr Podcast, SaaStr OG and fan fave, Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital, walks you through the complexities of SaaS metrics.
With a wealth of experience leading major SaaS and enterprise software firms, Dave delves into the art of leveraging metrics for strategic advantage and the potential pitfalls of their misinterpretation. This episode will...
Published 12/19/23