Founder to Founder: 10 Toughest Lessons Getting to the First $100m ARR (Video + Transcript)
What’s it really like to scale a business from a few users to $100m ARR and 7 million users? Michelle Zatlyn, co‑founder and COO of Cloudflare, sits down with Laura Bilazarian, CEO, co‑founder of Teamable, to share her 10 toughest lessons that she learned while scaling Cloudflare into the business it is today. Cloudflare provides a content […]
My SaaStr 2018 Presentation: Ten Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS
Below please find the slides from the presentation I gave today at SaaStr 2018, about which I wrote a teaser blog last week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. I hope to see everyone next year at SaaStr — I think it’s the preeminent software, SaaS, and startups conference. (Cross-posted […]
Field Sales: When Domain Expertise Does Matter. Just Don’t Over-index.
Imagine you are selling a $100,000+ product and you yourself as CEO/founders have limited knowledge selling to the customer base. You’ll be very tempted to hire someone with a seemingly magical rolodex. What doesn’t work for sure is hiring someone with (x) no domain expertise who also (y) has also only sold small (e.g, $10k) […]
The Rise of Private Equity in SaaS: A Gift to Founders
So David Cummings beat me to the punch on a piece I’d being meaning to write for a long time on the Rise of Private Equity in SaaS. You can read his piece here on 2 recent Private Equity deals in SaaS in Atlanta, partial/full buyouts of two SaaS companies for $55m and $160m, respectively. […]
The False Choice of Prepaid vs. Monthly Contracts
In scaling the cash-flow side of SaaS, there’s almost nothing more powerful than annual contracts combined with prepaid cash. It’s just such a huge benefit. You get all the cash up-front, and your churn almost by definition goes down. Because the earliest chance the customer has to churn is 12 months hence. So get pre-paid annual deals whenever […]
When to Stop Doing It All Yourself
Perhaps the biggest difference between most first-time founders and most second-time founders is how long they try to do it all themselves. This isn’t a criticism first time you usually sort of have to. You have less capital to hire a team, and less experience building teams. But then after that there are at least […]
Veeva: The Biggest Vertical SaaS Success Story of All Time (Video + Transcript)
Peter Gassner, Founder & CEO of Veeva Systems, sits down with Jason Lemkin to share the story of Veeva and his journey as CEO. From how the seed of an idea got planted to 1,700 employees 10 years later, there are many lessons to be learned. Peter is a huge fan of going against the […]
Big Companies Don’t Churn. They Quit You.
“Churn” is a term we all use in SaaS as a core metric, but its roots, as near as I remember and can tell, come from our B2C colleagues. In a low-end subscription model for a tool, not a solution (e.g., semi-commodity storage, semi-commodity hosting, etc. etc.), individuals and small businesses, often paying on their […]
Claire Hughes-Johnson: Build, Break, Stretch, Repeat Lessons from Scaling Google & Stripe (Video + Transcript)
Jason Lemkin sits down with Stripe COO Claire Hughes-Johnson to discuss what it’s like to scale a fast-growing company and how to manage hypergrowth. Having over 10 years of experience with Google and being intrinsically motivated by Stripe’s mission certainly helps. When you’re the COO of a global company that only continues to expand across […]
What You Want to Hit: 50 and 20 at 10 (million in ARR)
The first SaaStr post that got widespread distribution was this one — “Want to Understand SaaS? If Nothing Else — Understand That It Compounds.” The excerpt here: “What does this mean, that SaaS compounds? It means it’s really, really hard to get revenues going. You close a customer for $120 in annualized revenue, you only […]
