The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 341: Leading Indicators Individuals Can/Can Not Scale with the Company, What Radical Transparency Truly Means and How To Implement It & Enterprise Adoption Of Cloud During COVID Times with David Politis, Founder & CEO @ BetterCloud

Jun 9, 2020

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.

33:44

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Episode guests

David Politis

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

The slower enterprise adoption of SaaS is influenced by factors like inertia and security concerns, but recent events like COVID-19 have accelerated the transition to cloud-based solutions.

Radical transparency in organizations involves sharing wins, challenges, and updates through tools like Slack channels, Google Forms for questions, and weekly all-hands meetings for open discussions.

Deep dives

Challenges of Enterprise Cloud Adoption

David Politis discusses the slower-than-expected adoption of SaaS by enterprises, attributing this delay to factors like inertia, security concerns, and fear of change. He highlights how recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated SaaS adoption, leading to a quicker transition to cloud-based solutions among companies.

Introduction

2min

Navigating the SaaS Landscape and Organizational Scalability

14min

Embracing Radical Transparency for Organizational Growth

9min

Navigating Patience and Fundraising Challenges Amidst a Pandemic

3min

Challenges of Predicting Budgets, Work-Life Integration, and API Standardization

2min

Insights on SaaS Adoption Speed and Investment Decisions

3min

David Politis is the Founder & CEO @ BetterCloud, the company that helps IT discover, manage and secure the digital workplace. To date, David has raised over $186M in funding with BetterCloud from the likes of Accel, Warburg Pincus, Greycroft, Flybridge and Dropbox to name a few. Before founding BetterCloud, David was an early employee of Cloud Sherpas (acquired by Accenture), where he led the company to become the leading cloud services partner to SMB worldwide. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, David was a founding employee and General Manager of Vocalocity (acquired by Vonage), which he grew into one of the top providers of cloud PBX technology.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

How David made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found BetterCloud? How has David seen the rate of cloud adoption within enterprise over the last 5 years? Has it been faster or slower than he thought?
People often suggest operators are suited to certain stages of a company lifecycle, does David agree with this? What are the leading indicators an individual is struggling to scale? How does one communicate that to them effectively? How does David think about the decision to move an individual to another role vs release them?
What does radical transparency really mean to David? How does the ability to have radical transparency within your org change when the org is 10 people vs 100 people? What are the biggest challenges of scaling transparency? From a meeting structure view, what can leaders do to encourage transparency?
How does David feel about the method of OKR setting? How has his mindset changed towards OKRs? What does the decision-making process look like for deciding which OKRs to focus on? What OKRs do they focus on at BetterCloud? How does one know when they need to change their OKRs?

David’s 60 Second SaaStr:

What would David most like to change in the world of SaaS?
How has David seen himself emerge and develop as a leader?
What is the biggest challenge of David’s role within BetterCloud today?

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-341-with-bettercloud-founder-ceo-david-politis/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

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