SaaStr 161: Brad Feld on Structuring Your SaaS Startup For Scalability, How The Role Of CEO Should Adjust To The Growth Of The Organisation & What Makes The Most Effective Board Members

Brad Feld is one of the world's leading VCs having Co-Founded Foundry Group, Brad has made investments in the likes of Zynga, Makerbot and Fitbit, just to name a few. Brad is also Co-Founder of Techstars, one of the world's most prominent startup accelerators, whose portfolio companies have raised over $1.3bn in funding. If that wasn't enough Brad is also a best selling author having co-authoured Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and VC and Startup Communities: Building An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your Community.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

• How Brad made his way into the world of VC and came to found Foundry Group?
• Brad has previously stated that companies can be segmented into 3 different core components? What does he mean by this? How can startups be structured internally for scalability?
• Why does Brad hate the word culture? How should culture be viewed and approach internally within startups?
• How has Brad seen his personal development with regards to being a board member? What has he got better at? What does he believe makes a great board member?
• Why is CAC the easiest metric to game in SaaS? How should the CAC/LTV ratio be approached? How can entrepreneurs use this to attract VC investment?

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

Brad Feld

If you have a digital product, whether it's mobile or web, Amplitude's product analytics helps you understand what your users are doing, iterate and ship product faster, and drive metrics like engagement and retention. To learn how you can use analytics to build a sticky product that grows your business, get your free copy of the Product Analytics Playbook from Amplitude. This 155-page book (with worksheets) will help you develop a comprehensive retention strategy for your product — just click here to download.

User education is one of the most powerful ways to increase engagement and retention at scale, yet is often put in the too hard basket. Elevio is the platform that removes this burden, empowering your users to self-serve contextually relevant help via their support widget and embeddable elements, increasing retention and engagement, while reducing support load. Elevio even tells you what content to add or fix and why based on usage trends from your users. Preventing content rot, and increasing coverage, which we all know is an ongoing challenge. You can also integrate with your existing support stack for content, access to live-chat, support tickets and more. Use elevio for continuous user education with 20% off your first year at (elev dot I O / saastr) using coupon code GOHARRY