The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders

Latest Episodes:

SaaStr 349: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup Into an Army with David Sacks, General Partner at Craft Ventures Jul 02, 2020

Show notes

Startups can get messy. Especially in growth. David Sacks (Yammer, PayPal) shares how to navigate from 50-500 employees.

This episode is an excerpt from David's session at SaaStr Summit: The New New in Venture.

Full video: https://youtu.be/G0sMviH3G24

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-349-with-craft-ventures-general-partner-david-sacks-how-to-turn-your-saas-startup-into-an-army/

SaaStr 348: How To Align Your Pricing To The Success of Your Customers, What Does Great Change Management Look Like and The Right Balance Between Software vs Services Revenue with Kurt Muehmel, Chief Customer Officer @ Dataiku Jul 01, 2020

Show notes

Kurt Muehmel is the Chief Customer Officer @ Dataiku, the platform democratizing access to data and enabling enterprises to build their own path to AI in a human-centric way. To date, the company has raised over $146M in funding from some of the best in the business including ICONIQ, Firstmark, Battery Ventures and CapitalG to name a few. As for Kurt, he joined the company over 5 years ago and has risen from AE to VP EMEA to VP Sales Engineering to today as Chief Customer Officer. Before Dataiku, Kurt spent 5 years at Deloitte as a Manager advising primarily European public authorities on sustainable development policies.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

How Kurt made his way into the world of enterprise SaaS with Dataiku having started his career at Deloitte in Paris?
What does it take to go from 0-1 in implementing both AI and data science disciplines in 20th-century companies? Where do many go wrong with their first steps? How can one assist them in the right way? How does Kurt feel about services revenue? At what stage or ratio does it become too much?
How does Kurt approach the challenge of change management? What does great change management look like? Where do so many go wrong? How can content be used to efficiently scale change management practices? How does one need to engage different teams for effective change management?
How does Kurt think about the right pricing mechanism for the customer today? How does one find a mechanism that does not disincentivize the customer with usage? How does Kurt feel about discounting? To what extent is Kurt and Dataiku willing to engage with pilots and POCs? Where do many go wrong here?

Kurt's 60 Second SaaStr:

Biggest challenge of Kurt's role with Dataiku today?
What does Kurt know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of SaaS?
Who does Kurt look up to in the world of customer experience? Why?

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-348-with-dataiku-chief-customer-officer-kurt-muehmel/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

SaaStr 347: Top 10 Questions to Ask a VP of Sales with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin Jun 26, 2020

Show notes

Ready to hire your first VP Sales? But haven't done it before? SaaStr CEO, Jason Lemkin shares his interview checklist.

Video and blog post: https://www.saastr.com/10-great-questions-to-ask-a-vp-sales-during-an-interview-2/

SaaStr 346: What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing, The Inside Scoop with Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures and Jason Lemkin of SaaStr Jun 25, 2020

Show notes

Aileen Lee is a U.S. seed investor. A venture capital investor, she is the founder of Cowboy Ventures. Lee coined the often-used Silicon Valley term unicorn in a TechCrunch article "Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups."

In this episode of the SaaStr podcast, Aileen and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin take a deep dive on how Aileen finds deals, her tips for a winning pitch, and the state of VC in 2020.

This episode is an excerpt from Aileen and Jason's session at SaaStr Summit: The New New in Venture.

Full video: https://youtu.be/J5bhChbqcLU

Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcasts-for-the-week-with-aileen-lee-and-jason-lemkin/

SaaStr 345: PagerDuty CMO Julie Herendeen on Attribution and Accountability within Marketing Teams, The Optimal Relationship Between Marketing & Product & Why Customer Success and Marketing Have Never Been Closer Jun 23, 2020

Show notes

Julie Herendeen is the CMO @ PagerDuty, the real-time operations platform ensuring less downtime and fewer outages, meaning happier customers and more productive teams. Prior to their IPO in 2019 PagerDuty raised funding from some of the best in the business including Accel, a16z, Baseline, Bessemer and Harrison Metal to name a few. As for Julie, prior to PagerDuty she was Vice President of Global Marketing @ Dropbox. Before Dropbox Julie was CMO @ Lookout and before Lookout, Julie enjoyed VP roles at both Yahoo and Shutterfly. If that was not enough, alongside her role at PagerDuty today Julie is also an angel with Broadway Angels and a Board Member @ Hubspot.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

How Julie made her way from the world of consumer into the world of enterprise and came to be CMO @ PagerDuty today? What were some of Julie's biggest lessons from her time as VP Global Marketing at Dropbox?
Does Julie believe that marketing should be held accountable to a number tied directly to revenue? How does Julie believe sales and marketing should work in unison? How can sales be involved in pipeline generation meetings? Should AEs make themselves responsible for sourcing new leads also? What does the ideal handoff look like?
How does Julie see the best marketing and product teams working together? What can marketing do to collect the most valuable data to inform product decisions? In what forum should they be relayed to product teams? How should product and marketing leaders interact most efficiently?
How does Julie think about the relationship of customer success and marketing? Does Julie agree that with the increasing amount of marketing content used post-sale, marketing is doing much of the work of CS? Where does Julie see many going wrong when investing heavily into thought leadership and content marketing?

Julie's 60 Second SaaStr:

Which marketing leader does Julie most respect and why?
What would Julie most like to change about the world of SaaS today?
What is the optimal relationship between the CEO and the CMO?

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-345-with-pagerduty-cmo-julie-herendeen/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

SaaStr 344: 16 Mistakes Founders Make Pitching to VCs with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin Jun 19, 2020

Show notes

Given that so many VC pitches are over Zoom now, we thought it would be worth sharing the things it's easy to get wrong when pitching investors.

Pitching VCs is like anything. You'll get better at it over time. Later, you'll even get great at it. Once you know how it works, it's not even that hard to knock it out of the park.

But until then, so many founders make unforced errors. Rookie errors. Here are 16 that you can easily avoid / fix right now today.

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-344-with-saastr-founder-jason-lemkin/

SaaStr 343: Point Nine Capital Managing Partner, Christoph Janz, On Fundraising During a Pandemic Jun 18, 2020

Show notes

On today's episode, Christoph shares his five tips for fundraising during a pandemic.

Have a clear COVID-19 assessment
Start with an extra-long "long list"
Disqualify ruthlessly
Have a killer deck
Build trust remotely

Christoph has invested in more than 20 SaaS startups and lives and breathes SaaS, everything from "A as in AI-enhanced B2B software" to "Z as in Zendesk". Christoph co-founded Point Nine Capital in 2011.

Before that, he co-founded two Internet startups (DealPilot.com in 1997 and Pageflakes in 2005). In 2008 he became an angel investor and discovered Zendesk, Clio, FreeAgent – and his love for SaaS.

You can find the podcast transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-343-with-point-nine-capital-managing-partner-christoph-janz/

This episode is an excerpt from Christoph's session at SaaStr Summit: The New New in Venture. You can see the full video here: https://youtu.be/2VGglwbl_Gs

SaaStr 342: Zapier CEO, Wade Foster, and SaaStr CEO, Jason Lemkin, on Distributed Teams and Building a Cloud Product Jun 11, 2020

Show notes

On this episode of the SaaStr podcast, our CEO, Jason Lemkin, chats with Zapier CEO, Wade Foster, on Distributed Teams and Building a Cloud Product.

Zapier is a global remote company that allows end-users to integrate the web applications they use. Although Zapier is based in Sunnyvale, California, it employs a workforce of 250 employees located around the United States and in 23 other countries.

This interview was recorded in February 2020.

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-342-with-zapier-ceo-wade-foster/

SaaStr 341: Leading Indicators Individuals Can/Can Not Scale with the Company, What Radical Transparency Truly Means and How To Implement It & Enterprise Adoption Of Cloud During COVID Times with David Politis, Founder & CEO @ BetterCloud Jun 09, 2020

Show notes

David Politis is the Founder & CEO @ BetterCloud, the company that helps IT discover, manage and secure the digital workplace. To date, David has raised over $186M in funding with BetterCloud from the likes of Accel, Warburg Pincus, Greycroft, Flybridge and Dropbox to name a few. Before founding BetterCloud, David was an early employee of Cloud Sherpas (acquired by Accenture), where he led the company to become the leading cloud services partner to SMB worldwide. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, David was a founding employee and General Manager of Vocalocity (acquired by Vonage), which he grew into one of the top providers of cloud PBX technology.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

How David made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found BetterCloud? How has David seen the rate of cloud adoption within enterprise over the last 5 years? Has it been faster or slower than he thought?
People often suggest operators are suited to certain stages of a company lifecycle, does David agree with this? What are the leading indicators an individual is struggling to scale? How does one communicate that to them effectively? How does David think about the decision to move an individual to another role vs release them?
What does radical transparency really mean to David? How does the ability to have radical transparency within your org change when the org is 10 people vs 100 people? What are the biggest challenges of scaling transparency? From a meeting structure view, what can leaders do to encourage transparency?
How does David feel about the method of OKR setting? How has his mindset changed towards OKRs? What does the decision-making process look like for deciding which OKRs to focus on? What OKRs do they focus on at BetterCloud? How does one know when they need to change their OKRs?

David's 60 Second SaaStr:

What would David most like to change in the world of SaaS?
How has David seen himself emerge and develop as a leader?
What is the biggest challenge of David's role within BetterCloud today?

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-341-with-bettercloud-founder-ceo-david-politis/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

SaaStr 340: Mark Suster, Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures, on Funding In the Time of Coronavirus Jun 04, 2020

Show notes

Mark Suster is a managing partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in Los Angeles, and a prominent blogger in the startup venture capital world.

In this episode of the SaaStr podcast, he shares his learnings on the current landscape of funding in the time of Coronavirus, including:

Valuation and compression
Forecasting market trends
The slowdown in VC
His best advice for surviving the downturn and raising a round of funding

You can find the full video and transcript of this talk on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/funding-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-with-mark-suster-video-transcript/

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