The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

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/

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: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Kurt Muehmel

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/

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/

Julie Herendeen, CMO of PagerDuty, shares her journey from consumer to enterprise marketing. She discusses the importance of accountability in marketing and its alignment with revenue goals. Julie highlights how sales and marketing must collaborate closely, particularly in generating leads and optimizing handoffs. She emphasizes the evolving relationship between marketing and customer success, advocating for shared efforts in enhancing customer engagement. Throughout, she explores how effective teamwork and data-driven strategies can significantly benefit product decisions.

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/

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

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/

David Politis, CEO of BetterCloud, discusses cloud adoption in enterprises, indicators of individual scaling struggles, and radical transparency. Topics include decision-making on role changes, challenges of scaling transparency, and growth strategies in a SaaS landscape. They also touch on fundraising challenges during the pandemic, work-life integration, and investment decisions in the SaaS industry.

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/