Jon Herstein is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Box where Jon works to ensure that all of Box's Enterprise and Business customers are phenomenally successful. Jon has worked with some of the biggest names in the tech world, including Accenture, Informatica and most recently NetSuite, where he served as VP of Professional Services for North America and EMEA. Before NetSuite, Jon led the turnaround of Informatica's European consulting practice during a multi-year expatriate assignment, which eventually led to a 65% jump in revenue.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
60 Second SaaStr:
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Kristen Koh Goldstein is the Co-Founder @ HireAthena, the on demand workforce specialising in accounting, HR and payroll. Prior to Hire Athena, Kristen was the Co-Founder @ Scalus, where she raised millions of dollars in venture capital from top VCs including Google Ventures and Sherpa Capital. Before that Kristen was the Co-Founder @ BackOps, the world’s fastest growing back office solution. If you enjoy the show with Kristen today and would like to join Jason and I @ SaaStr Annual 2017 next year, then all you have to do is checkout SaaStr and buy your tickets for SaaStr Annual 2017.
In Today’s Episode Kristin Discusses:
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Matthew Bellows is the Founder @ Yesware and a specialist in helping sales people close more deals faster. Yesware serves more than 750,000 salespeople at companies like IBM, Groupon, Salesforce, Twilio, Yelp, VMWare, and Zendesk. Prior to Yesware, Matthew was the VP of Sales at Vivox. Before that, he was GM at Floodgate (acquired by Zynga) and Founder/CEO of WGR Media (acquired by CNET Networks).
In Today’s Episode with Matthew We Discuss:
60 Second SaaStr:
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Ryan Fyfe is the Founder & CEO @ Humanity, the employee scheduling software that allows you to value your employees. Ryan has built Humanity to serve more than half a million users across 87 countries, with a team exceeding 100 people and continually growing across 3 continents. They have raised funding from our friends at Point Nine and a huge thank you to Christoph @ Point Nine for making the introduction today.
In Today’s Episode with Ryan We Discuss:
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Michael Litt is the Founder & CEO @ Vidyard the video intelligence platform that allows you to create, measure and strengthen engagement of your video content. Vidyard are based in Canada and have raised over $60m in VC funding from the likes of Battery Ventures, Bessemer, SoftTech, Salesforce Ventures, some incredible names there and the list goes on but I would like to say a huge thanks to Matt Garrett @ Salesforce Ventures for making the intro.
In Today's Show with Michael We Discuss
In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:
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Today’s episode is taken from SaaStr Annual 2016, featuring Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at MongoDB and former VP Demand Gen at DocuSign, sharing her playbook for optimizing the funnel at every stage and converting leads into real, paying customers. If you want to join me and Jason @ SaaStr 2017 then head to saastr.com where you can buy tickets.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
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Aaron Ross is the author of the best selling book, Predictable Revenue, providing the framework for the outbound process & sales team Aaron created for Salesforce.com. During his time at Salesforce as Director of Corporate Development and Acquisitions, he added an extra $100 million in revenue in just a few years. In today’s show we discuss his and Jason Lemkin’s fantastic new book, From Impossible To Inevitable, which outlines how hyper growth companies create predictable revenue? If you are a founder asking why aren’t we growing faster, how do we go into hyper-growth mode and then how do you sustain growth then this book really is for you.
In Today’s Episode with Aaron You Will Learn:
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As VP of Sales and Marketing at Atlassian for three years before becoming President, Jay Simons has a broad perspective on what it takes to build a successful company. Sometimes, ignoring conventional wisdom is what will differentiate you from the competition. Bootstrapping from day one, launching and supporting multiple products, and doing it all without traditional Sales team - Atlassian's approach (and wild success) has always been a curious anomaly in SaaS. After 13 years of being an exception to every rule, Atlassian went public in late 2015 with a total market capitalization of $4.37B at the time of the IPO.
In this session, Jay answers our burning questions:
1.) Why does Jay believe in most cases the best run companies are public companies? What does being public bring to the organizational structure of a firm?
2.) How important is it for early stage startups to have board members and outside perspectives? How should they select those inputs?
3.) How important a role does customer support and success play in the conversion of customers from trial to paid versions?
4.) How does Jay focus on 4 products with such a differentiated suite of products? Does this not contradict the often cited fundamental, focus.
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Andy Sparks is the Co-Founder and Head of Sales @ Mattermark. He was previously the Technology Editor at Referly before the company pivoted to become Mattermark. Andy joined the Referly team via an acqui-hire of his company, LaunchGram, by Referly in February of 2013. Now I am going to leave the bio there as Andy does a much better job of it in the show than I do!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
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Today we bring you one of the highlights from SaaStr Annual 2016 with Jason Lemkin talking to Kirsten Helvey, COO of Cornerstone Ondemand, a cloud-based learning and talent management solutions provider. in the episode Kirsten discusses her 11 years of experience with rising up in the ranks from employee #30 to her current position in the company, which is now 1500-strong, it is a phenomenal scaling story and so many insights nuggets of wisdom from Kirsten here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
Why you should always be thinking about building, no matter the scale?
Why we should all stop talking about company culture?
Why you should forget the MBA and take a psychology degree?
How to give direct and consistent feedback with employees in order to get the most out of them?
Why we should focus more on upsell and less on customer acquisition?
How to build, integrate and scale a customer success team into a 1,500 person organisation?
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David Yuan is a General Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, where he has enjoyed no less than 4 IPOs and 5 acquisitions. Some of David’s investments include the likes of Facebook, Linkedin, Exact Target (acq by Salesforce), Splunk and many more incredible companies. He also sits on the board at Act On, App Nexus, Merkle and Site Minder and is an advisor to Pinterest. Pior to TCV, David had stints at JP Morgan and Bain & Company.
In Today’s Episode with David You Will Learn:
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Today we bring you a highlight from SaaStr Annual 2016 featuring a conversation between Hubspot's Dharmesh Shah and SaaStr's own Jason Lemkin. Prior to founding HubSpot in 2006, Dharmesh was founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions, which was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 2005. In addition to co-authoring “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs”,Dharmesh published HubSpot’s Culture Code, which has garnered over 2.5 million views on SlideShare. Named an Inc. Founders 40 in 2016, he is an active member of the Boston-area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over 60 startups, and a frequent speaker on startups and inbound marketing.
In Today's Episode wth Dharmesh You Will Learn:
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Allison Pickens carries the customer success torch as the VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at the category leaders, Gainsight. Allison’s organization @ Gainsight includes all post-sales functions: CSMs, Support, Onboarding, Services, and Operations. Prior to Gainsight, she started her career in management consulting for Fortune 500 companies while at Boston Consulting Group and later worked in private equity investing at Bain Capital. Allison decided that she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work at Gainsight when Bain Capital led the Series B.
In Today’s Episode With Allison You Will Learn:
1.) So let’s start with managing customer churn and I think the first and most important thing is assessing what is regrettable vs non-regrettable. How do you approach this?
2.) To do the above we need to have a great customer success team so iw ant to talk about the process of building this out and with CS being a new category this is an aspect a lot of founders are addressing at this time. So starting with the obvious?
60 Second Saastr produced by Nick Mehta:
What surprises you most about customer success now vs a year ago?
Importance of fast iterating team?
Fave SaaS material, book, blog, podcast?
What element of the journey have you found most challenging?
Carrying the CS torch? What is it like do you feel the pressure?
3.) Now I want to finish today by discussing the segmentation of your customer base, so at what point in the company's life do you begin segmenting the customers?
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Cindy Padnos is the Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures where she focuses on all things Enterprise/B2B cloud and mobile computing sectors. Prior to founding Illuminate in 2009, she was one of three investment professionals at Outlook Ventures responsible for committing the firm’s $140 million fund. Cindy also has extensive experience in the world of operations, where she founded and sold one of SaaS’ first on demand startups in the form of Vivant.
In Today’s Episode with Cindy We Discuss:
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Fred Stevens-Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Rainforest QA, which if you listened to 20VC with Byron Deeter, you will remember he discussed them and their amazing trajectory. So for QA first, it is essentially QA as a service making it fast and easy to test your webapp in multiple browsers and they are backed by some of the best as we said there Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, our own Jason Lemkin, Y Combinator, previous guest Kris Duggan @ Betterworks and Marc Benioff just to name a few. As for Fred he is the man at the helm as Co-Founder & CEO and absolutely smashing it I might add. In the show Fred mentions his favourite reading material to be Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross’s new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!
In Our Discussion with Fred You Will Learn:
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Quang Hoang is the Co- Founder @ Birdly, Birdly are convinced by the power of messaging within organizations, they decided to build a broader service that connects your favorite business softwares to messaging apps. It is this vision that has led to them being named one of the hottest startups from YC Winter 2016 batch and has led to funding from some of the best in the industry including our own Jason lemkin, Slack, previous guest Nicolas Dessaigne and prestigious french investors Alven Capital and Partech Ventures.
In Today’s Episode with Quang We Discuss:
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Christoph Janz is the Co-Founder and the Managing Partner @ Point Nine Capital, one of Europe’s best early stage venture funds and Christoph himself specializes in all things SaaS at Point Nine and has made more than 20 SaaS startup investments. Prior to Point Nine, Christoph co-founded two Internet startups and in 2008, became an angel investor and discovered Zendesk, which was his first angel investment. Also if you would like to congratulate Jason for the raising of the incredible new SaaStr Fund then you can click here to send him a congratulations tweet.
In Today’s Episode with Christoph We Discuss:
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Matt Garratt currently runs Salesforce Ventures with the mandate to build out salesforce’s ecosystem of partners with equity investments. Matt has led key strategic investments at Salesforce in companies such as former guests Gainsight, and Invoca as well as Anaplan and Insidesales.com just to name a few. Prior to salesforce Matt was a VP at the prestigious SaaS investor Battery Ventures. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!
In This Episode With Matt You Will Learn:
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I am delighted to welcome the new Head of Sales @ Front App, Cailen D’sa, to The Official SaaStr Podcast today. Cailen might just be the Head of Sales every SaaS startup founder is dreaming of having previously been the first sales hire @ Dropbox where he launched Dropbox’s first B2B product, prior to that he was a director at Box where he helped pioneer and operationalize the freemium land-and-expand sales model, which is now a core SaaS sales methodology. Now if you enjoy the episode with Cailen today and want to hear more from him then you must headover to Front’s blog where you can find Mathilde’s written interview with Cailen.
In This Episode With Cailen You Will Learn:
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Villi Iltchev is a Partner @ August Capital and prior to joining August Villi was a member of the leadership teams at Box and Lifelock. Before that Villi was a Vice President @ Salesforce where he led the strategy and acquisitions teams; being directly responsible for over 30 investments in the likes of Hubspot, Box, Mulesoft and many more amazing companies.
In Today’s Show with Villi We Discuss:
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Luke Kervin is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ PatientPop, where he has scaled the team from 10 to over 130 in just 12 months. As a result, PatientPop recently raised their Series A led by Toba Capital, allowing them to further ramp up their customer base and expand the employee ranks to over 200 people.
In Today’s Show with Luke We Discuss:
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Blake Bartlett is a Partner @ Openview Ventures where he helps identify value and lead investments in product-led businesses driving market dislocation. Prior to joining OpenView, he was a Vice President at Battery Ventures, where he focused on growth-stage software and Internet businesses. Blake joined Battery in 2009 and helped lead 10 investments including the likes of Wayfair, Optimizely, Sprinklr, and Glassdoor.
In Today’s Show We Discuss:
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I am delighted to welcome my first ever Harry to the show today in the form of Harry Glaser, Co-Founder & CEO @ Periscope Data, the worlds fast analysis suite providing data analysts with the tools they need to improve their analysis by over 150X and an astonishing fact here they have doubled their revenue every 3 months ever since launch. Periscope’s investors include Ellen Pao, Matt Ocko @ Data Collective, Chad Byers @ Susa Ventures, Wes Chan @ Felicis, Benjamin Ling at Khosla and many more. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!
In Today’s Episode with Harry We Discuss
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Andy Wilson is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Logikcull, where he really is the visionary behind Logikcull’s product and marketing strategy focusing on simplifying and democratizing the discovery process into three simple steps: upload > search > download. Andy leads the company it its mission to put an end to eDiscovery with the use of Discovery Automation.
In Today’s Episode with Andy We Discuss:
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Super excited to welcome a heavy weight of the SaaS industry today as we have Mark Organ, Founder & CEO at Influitive. Influitive helps B2B companies mobilize their army of advocates for more rapid and profitable revenue growth. Prior to Influitive, Mark was the founding CEO of Eloqua, growing the business to over 150 people, hundreds of clients and a major presence around the world in 7 years. Eloqua was eventually bought by Oracle in 2012 for a reported $810m.
In Today’s Episode with Mark We Discuss:
In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear:
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