SaaStr 791: CRO Confidential: How Codeium Built A Billion-Dollar AI Company and a Winning Sales Machine with VP of Worldwide Sales, Graham Moreno

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: How did Fred come to found Rainforest QA? What was his origin story to YC? How did Fred look to establish the pricing model with Rainforest? Why does Fred believe most software companies undervalue their software? What are the challenges of going upstream? How does it affect product? Sales cycle? Does Fred agree with Mark Organ that in a new category, the company CEO must be the category CMO? How much of a role does content play in Rainforest QA’s education funnel for customers? Why does Fred believe you should spend the most time with your best people? Similarly, the least amount of time with your worst people? How has Fred gone about building out the sales team? What did Fred look for in sales reps and Heads of Sales? 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 Fred Stevens-Smith

11 Jul 201630min

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: How did Quang come to found Birdly? What was the a-ha moment? What did Quang learn from pivoting to Birdly? What is it important for founders to consider before a pivot? How does Quang approach the challenging topic of a business model for bots? Why does Quang believe that the whole pricing model for SaaS will change? What were the main benefits of the YC experience and how did it impact his fundraising? When is the right time for European startups to make the move to SF? How important is it to be close to your customers? 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 Quang Hoang

8 Jul 201621min

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: How did Christoph make his way into the world of early stage SaaS investing? When should startups consider making the move to the US? Is it always necessary? How important is it for SaaS startups to have a local US investor? What are the benefits? Where are there talent gaps in European SaaS? What can European founders do to find those experienced VPs of Sales and Marketing? Question from Jason: What made Zendesk seem like such a winner and what did that teach you? Where does Christoph see the next wave of the consumerisation of SaaS? Is it harder to get funded as a SaaS startup in today’s environment than in previous years? 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 Christoph Janz

4 Jul 201627min

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: How Matt made his entry into the world of VC and came to run Salesforce Ventures? What did Salesforce do right to give Matt the ability to formalise the fund? What did Matt learn in the less formal stages of investing? What are the benefits that startups receive from being portfolio companies of Salesforce Ventures? How does matt view Salesforce Ventures in the early stage investing landscape? Does Matt like to co-invest with other prominent funds? How does M&A work within Salesforce Ventures? Are you willing to sell to your competitors? 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 Matt Garratt

1 Jul 201622min

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: How did Cailen come to be the first Sales hire @ Dropbox? What was it about Front that enticed him? What were Cailen’s biggest takeaways from his time at Dropbox and Box? How does the Sales process differ when selling a freemium product like Dropbox, compared to an enterprise product like Front? What does Cailen look for when hiring sales reps? What are Cailen’s sourcing strategies for new sales reps? How does Cailen incentivise the best talent to choose Front over other options? With the rise of data and it’s role in sales, to what extent does Cailen still believe sales to be an art and not a science? 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 Cailen D’sa

27 Jun 201626min

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: How Villi made the transition from the world of operations to investing with August? What were Villi’s biggest takeaways from working with titans of SaaS; Box, Salesforce? What was the M&A environment like back in the 2000s? What was the driver behind mass consolidation? What did the on premise perpetual license business model enable companies? Where did customer success lie in this environment? Multiple Clouds: What is the challenges of this? How will this evolve over time? What are the current solutions? Customer success lies with the vendor: What do you think caused this pivotal transition? How central should customer success be to an early stage SaaS company’s strategy? What are the main benefits of customer success to you? SaaS distribution: Why do reseller arrangements not work? How would you like to see this evolve in the future? Sales productivity: What is the productivity effect of giving another product to sales? What happens to aggregate sales? 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 Villi Itchev

24 Jun 201624min

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: How Luke came to found his first SaaS business in PatientPop? What is Luke’s criteria for selecting a potential business idea? What does the idea need to have? What elements of an idea will concern Luke? How did Luke go about validating the idea for PatientPop? What are the most common methods founders get product validation wrong? Why did Luke build a fake product, a fake website and fake business cards to validate the idea? PatientPop has grown from 10 to 130, so how did they scale so fast? What are the inherent challenges of company culture maintenance with such hyper-growth.  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

20 Jun 201622min

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: Why Blake decided to invest in SaaS over other sectors? Whether the rise of the bottoms up SaaS sales model means customer fickleness for SaaS products will increase? Does product led growth contradict tradition SaaS sales beliefs? How can they work in unison? Is product market fit and customer value a binary result? Are there varying degrees of customer value? How important is time to customer value? How can startups look to pull product-led growth off? What were Blake’s biggest takeaways from watching the likes of Optimizely and Expensify? 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 Blake Bartlett

17 Jun 201625min