The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Liat Bycel is VP of Customer Engagement @ Airtable, the startup that works like a spreadsheet but gives you the power to organise anything. To date, Airtable has raised over $170m in funding from some of the best in the business including Thrive, Coatue, Founder Collective, CRV and individuals like Patrick Collison, Ashton Kutcher and Raymond Tonsing to name a few. As for Liat, prior to Airtable, she was the Chief Revenue Officer @ Assist. Before Assist, Liat spent 6 years at Twitter where she first hand saw their hyper-growth, managing a team of 40 across New York and SF and also Liat achieved 102% to quota on average every year. Finally before Twitter, Liat was VP of Sales @ Revolution Prep where she led and managed 7 offices.   In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Liat made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be VP of Customer Engagement at one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups in Airtable?  What were Liat’s biggest lessons from Twitter on how to hire successfully? What were some of the key takeaways from that experience on how, why and when to fire? Is there ever a right way to do it? How does Liat think about aligning both the personal ambitions of the person with the wider objectives of the company? Why does Liat reject the notion of “hands off leadership?”   Companies often worry about whether to go horizontal or vertical, how does Liat personally think about this choice? What does she advise founders as a result? What are the core questions they should ask to determine their strategy? What are the biggest challenges of having such a vertical product? How does it impact messaging and brand? Product roadmap? Pricing? How does Liat think about challenging the traditional sales model? How does that challenge the structure of the conventional AE and SDR structure? How does Liat think Airtable is pushing up against the traditional customer success model? How has having children impacted how Liat thinks about operating today? What changes with children?  Liat’s 60 Second SaaStr: What does Liat know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning of her time with Airtable? What are Liat’s biggest strengths and weaknesses? What are the challenges of prioritization? Read the full transcript on our blog. 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 Liat Bycel

SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin sits down with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta to discuss what it means to be a SaaS leader. What are the day-to-day struggles? The fears and the worries and what it means to be "crushing it" today. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin SaaStr Nick Mehta This episode is sponsored by Owl Labs.

Robert Vis is the Founder & CEO @ MessageBird, the company that allows you to talk to your customers via Voice, SMS and Whatsapp. The company raised a monster $60M Series A from Accel and Atomico with only one prior investor being Y Combinator. As for Robert, prior to MessageBird, he was co-founder and CEO of Zaypay.com which focused on driving mobile payments into 50+ countries, enabling 1.5bln users to pay for virtual goods through their phones (sold to Mobile Interactive Group (MIG).  In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Robert made his way into the world of startups and SaaS and came to found Messagebird? What was the a-ha moment for him?  Why does Robert believe the most important element of being a founder is “thinking big”? How as a founder do you balance between thinking big with investors and then the day to day in the weeds with the team? How does Robert as Europe’s mentality of thinking big today? Have our ambitions exceeded what they have been before? How does being in Benelux change how Robert thinks about global ambitions and growth ambitions?   What does Robert mean when he tells founders, “don’t try to scale”? How does Robert think about knowing when a business is ready to scale? Where do many founders go wrong in the preparation for scale phase? What does one need to get in place before scaling? Why did Robert wait 6 years before raising any VC money? Why did he decide then was the right time? Once the raise was in, did he feel the pressure of suddenly having a lot of VC funding? How did his mindset to capital allocation change post-raise? How did he see his decision-making process change post raise? How did raising from the US differ from raising in the UK?  Robert’s 60 Second SaaStr: What does Robert know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his time with Messagebird? What keeps Robert up at night?  What are Robert’s strengths and weaknesses?  What advice in SaaS does Robert most often hear that he disagrees with? Read the transcript on our blog. 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 Robert Vis 

David Cummings is the co-founder of the Atlanta Tech Village, Pardot which sold to ExactTarget/Salesforce.com, Hannon Hill,  Rigor, SalesLoft (raised over $75M in capital), Terminus (raised over $25M in capital), and several more. Hear his lessons learned over the years from Pardot to Calendly.   Missed the session? Here’s what David talks about: How large a role does funding play? Matching pricing to value How to continuously level up talent Find the video and full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin SaaStr Remote and hybrid teams aren't the future of work-- they're the present. Owl Labs is embracing this revolution, and is here to provide remote workers with a virtual seat at the table with the Meeting Owl. Their 360° smart video conferencing camera can recognize and highlight any speaker at the table using an array of 8 microphones. Check it out for yourself at owllabs.com!

Dave King is the Head of Marketing at Asana, the work management platform that teams use to stay focused on the goals that grow their business. To date, Asana has raised over $210m from some of the biggest names in tech including Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, Benchmark, Founders Fund and more incredible names. As for Dave, prior to joining Asana, he led the marketing teams at Percolate, Highfive, and Salesforce Community Cloud. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How did Dave make his way into the world of SaaS and startups? When did he realise his love of marketing SaaS companies? What does Dave mean when he says, “we are entering the 3rd wave of marketing”? What were the 1st and 2nd chapters? What does the “3rd wave” of marketing mean for marketers today? How does it change what marketing should be focusing on? How does it change how marketing works with sales and customer success?  What does Dave mean when he says, “offsites serve as a crutch for 2 core elements of the marketer's role”? How does Dave advise marketers on crafting their playbook? What are the core questions to ask? Where does Dave see many going wrong here? How does one turn a playbook into a repeatable, measurable process? With channel volatility being so high, is it possible to have a repeatable and predictable process?   What are Dave’s biggest observations on what B2B marketers can learn from B2C? How does that change how Dave thinks about new campaigns and community building with Asana today? Who does Dave think has done this particularly well in the world of enterprise? Are there any challenges to trying to carry over B2C into the world of B2B?  Dave’s 60 Second SaaStr: What does Dave know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his career in marketing?  Biggest breakdown in the working of an efficient funnel? A moment in Dave’s life that has served as an inflection point and changed the way he thinks?  Read the transcript on our blog. 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 Dave King

Talkdesk SVP of Client Services Gillian Heltai oversees Talkdesk's Customer Success and Technical Support teams, partnering closely with customers to achieve their CX vision. In this session, Gillian will walk you through how to build a high performing CSM Team.   Missed the session? Here’s what Gillian talks about: How to build a CSM team Avoiding the mistake of over defining the candidate profile How to divide responsibilities across roles Find the video and full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin SaaStr Remote and hybrid teams aren't the future of work-- they're the present. Owl Labs is embracing this revolution, and is here to provide remote workers with a virtual seat at the table with the Meeting Owl. Their 360° smart video conferencing camera can recognize and highlight any speaker at the table using an array of 8 microphones. Check it out for yourself at owllabs.com!

Jeppe Rindom is the Founder & CEO @ Pleo, the simple spending solution for your company automating expense reports and simplifying company expenses. To date, Jeppe has raised over $78m in funding for Pleo from some European favourites of mine in the form of Creandum and Vaestfonden and then also their most recent round led by Stripes Group in NYC. As for Jeppe, prior to founding Pleo he was the CEO @ Nodes, a design and development house that worked with brands including Loreal, BMW and Lego. Before that, Jeppe was the CFO @ Tradeshift where he first hand saw their scaling to 190 countries with offices in 6 different locations.  In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How did Jeppe make his way into the world of startups and SaaS with his becoming CFO @ Tradeshift? What were his biggest learnings from Tradeshift and how did that impact his operating mentality? What was that a-ha moment for him with Pleo? Why did Jeppe decide to focus on SMBs from Day 1? How does the product build in the early days differ when building for SMB vs enterprise? Why does Jeppe believe that building for SMB makes it easier to build a great culture internally? How does Jeppe think about when is the right time to move into enterprise? What changes? How does Jeppe respond to 3 common concerns VCs have with SMBs: The price points are so low that it takes huge volume to scale to meaningful revenue? The mortality rate of SMBs is so high that you are going to always have high churn due to the customer segment? Serving SMBs in the way that Pleo does is an intensely competitive space, is this a winner-take-all market? How does Jeppe think about competition?  How does Jeppe think about NPS today? How does Jeppe approach the problem of agency when the buyer is not the user? How does Jeppe think about being customer informed but not customer-driven? Pleo has a part-remote work structure, why does Jeppe advocate for this structure in the face of many saying it either has to be remote or not? What has Pleo done to make it work? What tool stack do they have to ensure seamless communication between remote and non-remote? Where are the challenges? What must one always do? How does leadership change for Jesse in the face of scale? How does Jesse think about scaling humanity and the personal touch with the scaling of his leadership? What are the challenges? When do they start to arise? How has raising in the US compared to raising in Europe? What are the core differences?  Jeppe’s 60 Second SaaStr: What does Jeppe know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? How did raising from the US differ from raising with European investors? What would Jeppe most like to change about the world of SaaS today? Read the transcript on our blog. 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 Jeppe Rindom

Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre discusses automating customer support using data insights, building a data-driven growth machine for SaaS companies, and tailoring onboarding to customers.

Ryan Bonnici is the CMO @ G2, the company that allows you to get the right software and services for your business with over 897,000 user reviews to help you make smarter buying decisions. As for Ryan, prior to G2 he was Senior Director of Global Marketing at Hubspot where among many other achievements, he scaled HubSpot's marketing-generated sales revenue by 330% year-over-year. Before Hubspot, Ryan was Head of Marketing @ Salesforce (APAC) where he led his team to achieve 227% YoY net-new sales sourced through marketing. Due to his success, Ryan has been named to Forbes’ List of World’s Most Influential CMOs. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Ryan made his way into the world of SaaS from Sydney, Australia and came to be one of the world’s leading CMOs with G2 today? What were Ryan’s biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce? How did it change his mindset? What are the core differences when comparing marketing functions at the likes of Salesforce to smaller companies like G2? What can they learn from each other? Where does Ryan sit on whether marketing is an art or a science today? How did Ryan turn a $6,000 initiative at Hubspot into a product that generated $64m net revs? What have been Ryan’s biggest lessons in what it takes to acquire the best talent? How does Ryan build candidate pipe? What works most effectively? How does Ryan structure and run the process? What core questions does Ryan ask and find most revealing of the individual’s character? What does Ryan love to see in a candidate?  Does Ryan agree that marketing teams should always be held directly accountable to a number tied to revenue? What type of CMO would Ryan bucket himself as; demand gen or brand? How does Ryan think about the relationship between the two?  Ryan’s 60 Second SaaStr: What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his career in marketing?  What is the biggest BS that Ryan often hears in the world of marketing? Which marketing leader does Ryan most respect and admire and why? Read the full transcript on our blog. 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 Ryan Bonnici

Naomi Ionita, a Partner at Menlo Ventures and a seasoned expert in SaaS monetization, shares invaluable insights into pricing strategies. She emphasizes the importance of matching product value with pricing to avoid underpricing. Naomi discusses how understanding target audiences and user segmentation can dramatically enhance sales, using ride-sharing as a compelling example. She also highlights the need for structured pricing processes and cross-functional engagement to optimize pricing based on customer feedback.