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 an environment where startup funding was as fruitful as ever. With personal experience from EchoSign and other high-growth companies, he was spoiled when it came to those companies raising money from exceptional VCs.
What he’s learned on both sides of the VC table is that the bar is really high for most VCs. Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics.
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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:
Adam is an OG in Cloud and SaaS. His first company was Personify and he went on to be a VP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, then hire number 11 at Dropbox, CEO at Heroku, and an investor and on many boards before landing as the current CEO at Vimeo.
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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.
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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent
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They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes.
That means business free domain, business email, website, hosting, address, mail scanning, business phone app, all within minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.
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 deals:
Now, we'll dive into what founders should know before, during, and after the M&A process.
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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent
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They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes.
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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 products, which can make pricing extremely difficult.
So we asked the expert, Sandhya Hegde, General Partner at Unusual Ventures to share her best practices and trends for pricing and packaging AI products. Sandhya has been in the startup ecosystem for about 15 years, with the last two years heavily focused on investing in AI-native startups, primarily on the application and Enterprise software side. Over the past year, people have started to recognize how challenging pricing and packaging are for AI products, as well as the competitive pressure. Why is pricing so tricky?
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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 companies automating the largest sectors of the real economy. They’re trying to figure out what will happen with GenAI and share what they’re observing today so startups and incumbents can take advantage of it to build significant value.
Base10 is interested in mega-trends that change how people live and work in the next ten years. We’re at the beginning of a platform shift, and for the first time, GenAI has become accessible to more than just the mega businesses of the world.
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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent
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They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes.
That means business free domain, business email, website, hosting, address, mail scanning, business phone app, all within minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.
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 the sales and marketing spend in the prior quarter. Previously in SaaS, it was widely seen that anything > 1 was healthy if you were venture-backed, and anything > 1.5 is was seen as perhaps too capital-efficient. If you were well-funded, 0.7 was fine.
But as Rajeev, Karan, and Jane point out to set the stage for this discussion, Go-to-market efficiency in recent years has suffered a significant drop across both public and private SaaS companies.
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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent
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They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes.
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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:
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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.
Join us in 2024 at:
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This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent
Get more when Northwest Registered Agent starts your business.
They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes.
That means business free domain, business email, website, hosting, address, mail scanning, business phone app, all within minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.