SaaStr 173: Lemkin's Lesson on What To Look For In Your First Sales Reps, How to Approach Variable Compensation, The Right Way To Acquire Customers When Starting Paid Marketing and more with Jason Lemkin, Founder @ SaaStr
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
Release Date: 04/30/2018
SaaStr 736: What I Learned Selling My Company for $130M with Harry Glaser Founder of Periscope Data and ModelBit
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 Harry would consider selling. He always said no. But then growth flatlined for a couple of...
info_outline
SaaStr 735: How to Navigate the Shift to Generative AI with PagerDuty’s CEO Jennifer Tejada
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 call for leaders to embrace AI's potential while adapting to technological advancements. --------------...
info_outline
SaaStr 734: The Latest in Series A Rounds, AI Growth Rates and More with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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) . 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 ever … Series A hasn’t bounced back. Not at all. ...
info_outline
SaaStr 733: Advice Every SaaS Founder Needs to Know in 2024 with Sam Blond and Jason Lemkin
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022. We were coming off...
info_outline
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
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 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 over-monetization during tough times Who owns “free” What to expect from AI in the near future ...
info_outline
SaaStr 731: 10 Things Founders Should Know About Getting Acquired with Brett Goldstein, Former M&A at Google
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 founders know about the process if the time comes? First, there are three types of acquisition...
info_outline
SaaStr 730: How to Price and Package AI SaaS Products with Sandhya Hegde, General Partner at Unusual Ventures
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 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 products, which can make pricing extremely difficult. So we asked the expert, Sandhya Hegde, General Partner...
info_outline
SaaStr 729: 6 Questions Founders Should Ask Themselves to Drive Value from Generative AI with Base10 Partners
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 drive value from GenAI. For some context, Base10 is a research-driven investment firm focusing on...
info_outline
SaaStr 728: How to Double Your Magic Number and Increase Your Go-to-Market Efficiency with Sapphire Ventures
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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. is your growth in ARR over a quarter divided by the sales and marketing spend in the prior quarter. Previously in SaaS, it was widely seen that...
info_outline
SaaStr 727: High-Velocity Techniques to Maximize Sales with Gusto’s CRO and Head of Go-to-Market
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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 manually building territories ...
info_outlineJason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS event with over 20,000 of the world’s best SaaS founders and investors attending every year. Jason also invests from SaaStr’s debut $70m fund and has made prior investments in the likes of Algolia, TalkDesk, MixMax, Rainforest QA and many more incredible companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
- When is the right time to hire your first sales rep? What characteristics must those sales have? Why does Jason believe it is impossible to poach a rockstar from another fast scaling startup? Should you then hire the stretch VP or the more experienced, potentially burnt out exec?
- How does Jason think about aligning compensation to company objectives? Within the company, which functions serve as the best test areas for variable compensation? What must you be wary of when installing a system of variable compensation?
- When is a stretch VP a stretch too far? What must a stretch Head of Sales have done to make him ready? What must a VP of Product done before to make him ready? What resources can you build around stretch VPs to provide them with additional support?
- How does Jason think about the first time you spend to acquire customers? Why does Jason suggest just trying to make $1 for every $1 you spend? Why is it crucial to think of your marketing spend on a blended basis? How can you create alignment between the marketing teams number and the cadence of sales?
Read the full transcript on our blog.
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: