The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Aaref Hilaly is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most successful VC funds with investments in the likes of Apple, Google, Paypal, Whatsapp and LinkedIn just to name a few. As for Aaref he came to the valley with 2 suitcases and the ambition to start a company. That he did and had 2 companies that were Sequoia backed, first CenterRun and then ClearWell Systems where Aaref was instrumental in the company's growth from 0 to a $100m revenue run rate in just 4 years, prior to their $410m acquisition by Symantec. Today Aaref draws on this incredible operational success to illustrate how to manage up and have a very happy board.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

• Why does Aaref advocate for founders not to manage the board but to engage them? How can this be done effectively?
• What does Aaref state are the dangers of focussing on metrics with your board? Why should you focus on product instead? How does this shift change the dialogue with the board?
• When things do go wrong and the company misses a quarter, how should the founder react? Why does Aaref suggest that founders need to own the miss? How should they structure these conversations? What should they not do when they miss a quarter?
• How can founders most effectively put their board to work? How should this be communicated and then followed up on by the founder? Where has Aaref found the board can provide the most value?

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

Aaref Hilaly

Aaref Hilaly is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s most successful VC funds with investments in the likes of Apple, Google, Paypal, Whatsapp and LinkedIn just to name a few. As for Aaref he came to the valley with 2 suitcases and the ambition to start a company. That he did and had 2 companies that were Sequoia backed, first CenterRun and then ClearWell Systems where Aaref was instrumental in the company’s growth from 0 to a $100m revenue run rate in just 4 years, prior to their $410m acquisition by Symantec. Today Aaref draws on this incredible operational success to illustrate how to manage up and have a very happy board.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• Why does Aaref advocate for founders not to manage the board but to engage them? How can this be done effectively?
• What does Aaref state are the dangers of focussing on metrics with your board? Why should you focus on product instead? How does this shift change the dialogue with the board?
• When things do go wrong and the company misses a quarter, how should the founder react? Why does Aaref suggest that founders need to own the miss? How should they structure these conversations? What should they not do when they miss a quarter?
• How can founders most effectively put their board to work? How should this be communicated and then followed up on by the founder? Where has Aaref found the board can provide the most value?

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

Aaref Hilaly

Mark Roberge is a Senior Lecturer @ Harvard Business School where he teaches entrepreneurial sales and marketing. Prior to his role with HBS, Mark was the Chief Revenue Officer @ Hubspot where he increased revenue over 6,000% and expanded the team from 1 to 450 employees. As a result, Mark has been named Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World and awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year by MIT.

Michele Law is an investor and advisor specialising in building and executing on go to market strategies, creating new revenue models and the operations to support them. Michelle has sat on both sides of the table having been a Principal at Greylock for 8 years before moving to be COO at OpenDNS where she led the sales and customer success team growing enterprise revenue from $0 to $20M ARR in 4 years, prior to the company's acquisition by Cisco for $635m. Michele then moved to Castlight Health where she grew revenue from $13 to $75m.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

• Why it is fundamentally dangerous to prematurely focus on growth? How can founders know when is the right time to focus on growth? What does the path to growth phase look like?
• How should founders assess and structure the core components: customer success, unit economics and growth? In which order should they be prioritised? What does the funnel look like?
• What should the profile of your first sales hire be? How can founders understand who and when to hire? From Hubspot days, when has Mark seen the transition from generalist to specialist?
• What should your sales compensation plan look like in the early days of the company? Why does Mark believe that churn is rooted in the sales compensation plan?

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

Mark Roberge is a Senior Lecturer @ Harvard Business School where he teaches entrepreneurial sales and marketing. Prior to his role with HBS, Mark was the Chief Revenue Officer @ Hubspot where he increased revenue over 6,000% and expanded the team from 1 to 450 employees. As a result, Mark has been named Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World and awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year by MIT.

Michele Law is an investor and advisor specialising in building and executing on go to market strategies, creating new revenue models and the operations to support them. Michelle has sat on both sides of the table having been a Principal at Greylock for 8 years before moving to be COO at OpenDNS where she led the sales and customer success team growing enterprise revenue from $0 to $20M ARR in 4 years, prior to the company’s acquisition by Cisco for $635m. Michele then moved to Castlight Health where she grew revenue from $13 to $75m.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• Why it is fundamentally dangerous to prematurely focus on growth? How can founders know when is the right time to focus on growth? What does the path to growth phase look like?
• How should founders assess and structure the core components: customer success, unit economics and growth? In which order should they be prioritised? What does the funnel look like?
• What should the profile of your first sales hire be? How can founders understand who and when to hire? From Hubspot days, when has Mark seen the transition from generalist to specialist?
• What should your sales compensation plan look like in the early days of the company? Why does Mark believe that churn is rooted in the sales compensation plan?

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

Todd Olson is the Founder & CEO @ Pendo, the startup that allows you to capture all user behaviour, gather feedback and then provide contextual support. They have raised over $30m in VC funding from some of the very best in the business including Neeraj @ Battery Ventures, Megan @ Spark and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures just to name a few. As for Todd, prior to Pendo he held various different roles in product as well as co-founding 2 prior startups.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Todd make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found Pendo?
• Why does Todd believe that there is inherent tension between customer success and product teams? How has this changed from sales and marketing team tension? What does Todd suggest to mitigate this tension?
• How does Todd evaluate his hiring process? At what stage does one become a specialist vs a jack of all trades? Why does Todd always believe that you should hire ahead of where you are?
• Todd has previously said that 'money is not all the same'. How does Todd look to select his investors? What value adds are most desired for Todd? What do the best investors do that make them so?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Todd know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
2. What is Todd's favourite SaaS reading material: Mattermark Daily, Tom Tunguz
3. Creating a startup culture for adults?

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

Todd Olson

Todd Olson is the Founder & CEO @ Pendo, the startup that allows you to capture all user behaviour, gather feedback and then provide contextual support.  They have raised over $30m in VC funding from some of the very best in the business including Neeraj @ Battery Ventures, Megan @ Spark and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures just to name a few. As for Todd, prior to Pendo he held various different roles in product as well as co-founding 2 prior startups.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Todd make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found Pendo?
• Why does Todd believe that there is inherent tension between customer success and product teams? How has this changed from sales and marketing team tension? What does Todd suggest to mitigate this tension?
• How does Todd evaluate his hiring process? At what stage does one become a specialist vs a jack of all trades? Why does Todd always believe that you should hire ahead of where you are?
• Todd has previously said that ‘money is not all the same’. How does Todd look to select his investors? What value adds are most desired for Todd? What do the best investors do that make them so?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Todd know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
2. What is Todd’s favourite SaaS reading material: Mattermark Daily, Tom Tunguz
3. Creating a startup culture for adults?

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

Todd Olson

Amit Agarwal is the Chief Product Officer @ Datadog, the startup that provides cloud scale monitoring that tracks your dynamic infrastructure and applications. They have raised over $140m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, IA Ventures, OpenView and RRE just to name a few. As for Amit, before Datadog, Amit was the Director of Product Management at Quest Software (now Dell), where he led the team responsible for application performance monitoring. Previously, Amit held product management roles at Datamirror (now IBM) and Embarcadero Technologies.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Amit make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Chief Product Officer @ Datadog?
• Why did Datadog not have a marketing strategy for the early days? What would Amit advise early stage founders with regards to optimising their marketing in the early days?
• Obviously a multi-product line is crucial for a SaaS startup to be successful, what is Amit's take on how, when and why to launch a second product? What have been his big learnings on this from Datadog?
• Amit has said before that it is tough to sell to large enterprises in the early days, does that mean startups should always start with SME's? At what price point does it become a challenge? Does Amit agree that if you are between 25K-100K you are in the valley of death price wise?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Amit know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
2. What is Amit's favourite SaaS reading material?
3. When is the right time to hire a CPO and why?

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

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal is the Chief Product Officer @ Datadog, the startup that provides cloud scale monitoring that tracks your dynamic infrastructure and applications. They have raised over $140m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, IA Ventures, OpenView and RRE just to name a few. As for Amit, before Datadog, Amit was the Director of Product Management at Quest Software (now Dell), where he led the team responsible for application performance monitoring. Previously, Amit held product management roles at Datamirror (now IBM) and Embarcadero Technologies.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Amit make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Chief Product Officer @ Datadog?
• Why did Datadog not have a marketing strategy for the early days? What would Amit advise early stage founders with regards to optimising their marketing in the early days?
• Obviously a multi-product line is crucial for a SaaS startup to be successful, what is Amit’s take on how, when and why to launch a second product? What have been his big learnings on this from Datadog?
• Amit has said before that it is tough to sell to large enterprises in the early days, does that mean startups should always start with SME’s? At what price point does it become a challenge? Does Amit agree that if you are between 25K-100K you are in the valley of death price wise?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Amit know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
2. What is Amit’s favourite SaaS reading material?
3. When is the right time to hire a CPO and why?

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

Amit Agarwal

Tim Eades is the CEO @ at vArmour, the industry's first distributed security system that provides application-aware micro-segmentation. Tim joined vArmour as CEO in October, 2013. Prior to that, he was the CEO at Silver Tail Systems until the company was acquired by RSA, the security division of EMC in late 2012. Prior to leading Silver Tail Systems, Tim was CEO of Everyone.net, an SMB focused SaaS company that was acquired by Proofpoint. Tim has also held sales and marketing executive leadership positions at BEA Systems, Sana Security, Phoenix Technologies and IBM.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Tim make his way from punk rock fan in the UK to leading Silicon Valley CEO?
• Why does Tim believe Incremental Account Opportunity (IAO) is one of the most important metrics for a growing startup?
• Why does Tim believe that most founders are far too late to ship their second product? How can they identify adjacent markets? When exactly is the right time to know when to ship your second product?
• What does it take in terms of sales team structure to successfully orchestrate the 7 figure deals that Tim does? What does that look like in terms of sales team compensation?

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

Tim Eades

Tim Eades is the CEO @ at vArmour, the industry's first distributed security system that provides application-aware micro-segmentation. Tim joined vArmour as CEO in October, 2013. Prior to that, he was the CEO at Silver Tail Systems until the company was acquired by RSA, the security division of EMC in late 2012. Prior to leading Silver Tail Systems, Tim was CEO of Everyone.net, an SMB focused SaaS company that was acquired by Proofpoint. Tim has also held sales and marketing executive leadership positions at BEA Systems, Sana Security, Phoenix Technologies and IBM.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Tim make his way from punk rock fan in the UK to leading Silicon Valley CEO?
• Why does Tim believe Incremental Account Opportunity (IAO) is one of the most important metrics for a growing startup?
• Why does Tim believe that most founders are far too late to ship their second product? How can they identify adjacent markets? When exactly is the right time to know when to ship your second product?
• What does it take in terms of sales team structure to successfully orchestrate the 7 figure deals that Tim does? What does that look like in terms of sales team compensation?

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

Tim Eades