The Latest from SaaStr: Layoffs Are At Recent Highs But The Great Resignation Appears Over

Hey SaaStr Community,

As you read this on a Saturday (and Holiday) morning,

we just wanted to take a minute to say thank you for being apart of the global SaaStr community and wish you a Happy Holiday from all of us at team SaaStr.

So Carta has some great hiring (and firing) data above to give us a sense of what’s really happening. 

Well, other than perhaps the most important metrics of all IMHO — hiring freezes. 

For every article you read about layoffs, far more startups are just freezing or way slowing down hiring.  And that’s harder to see in the data.

Still, what does the data above show us?

First, layoffs are, in fact, pretty bad.  While November didn’t hit the lockdown-fueled peak of April 2020, it was close, and that’s brutal.  The 2H’22 are the biggest layoffs of the last decade.  And it will continue into 2023.

Samsara makes telematic and safety devices for physical operations (i.e., tools that measure and monitor what’s happening in a vehicle.) In achieving over $724M in ARR and growing to 2,000+ employees since its founding in 2015, they have learned a thing or two about developing a business. 

Sarah Patterson, Samsara’s Chief Marketing Officer, has been there to learn these lessons along with them. Sarah joined us on SaaStr at Scale and shared three lessons to help businesses scale their revenue.

With three live events, two digital events, and our two special series, Workshop Wednesdays and CRO Confidential, we have 200+ videos just from 2022 for you!

Our top videos alone cover a wide range of topics important to SaaS Founders and CEOs: scaling, fundraising, building and retaining a high-performing team, PLG, and more.

Today, we’re giving you #12-#1 of our top videos of 2022!

So in the Boom Years of late 2020 to early 2021, a lot of best practices working with VCs fell apart. 

Founders stopped caring. 

VCs did so many deals, they stopped caring. 

Everything was Up, Up and Up!!

Now, it’s tougher times for almost everyone. 

If nothing else, it’s dramatically harder to get funded at the Series A and B stages, and almost impossible at C and D unless you are executing to perfection. 

With that, it’s time to get back to working with and managing your VCs and board better. 

I’m going to share a list of things most venture-backed startups did … through about 2020.  And then just stopped doing.

SaaStr events couldn’t happen without our partners, and we wanted to give a special shout-out to some of our newest sponsors for SaaStr Annual 2023. At the 9th ever SaaStr Annual, ~200 of the best and hottest companies on earth will go BIG as partners/sponsors. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr!

Tip the payment scales in your favor by being one of the first to unlock exclusive early access to BlueSnap's 2023 Payment Predictions eBook.

Your sales and customer success teams are losing deals and customers due to backlogged integration requests.

But can you really justify spending months of development on each integration, when an embedded iPaaS can help offload 70% of the work?

There are a lot of factors to consider in this build vs. buy decision, and it's all outlined in this guide.

© SaaStr 2022

255 Kansas, Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94103

If you'd like to stop receiving the SaaStr Daily, click here