Inc - Expect 60% of Your VPs to Work Out

So few things are more disruptive than when a VP doesn’t work out.  Especially if they’ve hired a ton of folks under them that didn’t work out either. Millions are spent, so many mistakes must be undone, and so, so much time is lost.

So:

• When in doubt, don’t make the hire. Push on.
• If they don’t have anyone great to bring with them, don’t make the hire.  Push on.  Don’t just assume they have a few great folks ready to join.  Ask.  And go talk to them.
• If they don’t have one boss that says they were epic, don’t make the hire.  Push on.  It’s fine if one boss says they didn’t crush it.  But you need one you respect say they were an A.

Especially if you are tired. That’s when we all sort of settle.

I was reminded of this from the great SaaStr Annual interview that Jyoti Bansal did with MongoDB’s CEO Dev Ittycheria. When I re-watched it the other day, this quote really stuck with me:

You are lucky if 60% of your VPs work out.

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Customer requests for integrations won't slow down in 2025. Learn how you can sanely fulfill those requests.

Ironclad CEO and co-founder Jason Boehmig joined Seema Amble, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz at SaaStr Annual to share their observations on what’s currently working – and what’s not quite there yet – for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in SaaS. With Ironclad’s journey from an AI-first concept in 2014 to a Series E+ company and a16z’s extensive portfolio view, their insights offer a valuable perspective on the current state of AI in SaaS.

In a perfect world, you’d learn something about marketing first before you hire someone to take it over. I.e., you’d experiment and at least make some progress in:

• Content Marketing. Can you get even 1 or 2 customers from blogging and writing?
• Growth Hacking. Can you get even a couple of customers by emailing to a small list you’ve built?
• Event Marketing. Can you get any good leads by going to an industry event?  Some founders end up very good at this.  Many are terrible.
• Drip Marketing. Can you set up HubSpot or Mailchimp or Activecampaign or something similar to reach out programmatically to your leads, and see them convert at a higher rate?
• PR. Can you get some great PR for your company that leads to customers — any customers?
• Adwords and paid media. Can you prove this works at all, even just to get a few customers?

You can hire someone without any indications any of these channels work. But you’ll likely have a lot more success if you have a tiny bit of data to suggest what will work best for your app.

I’d at least try all of the above first before you hire a marketer, just to learn.

Then hire someone immediately after you’ve seen any traction, even just a time bit, in any of the above.

Once any channel works even a tiny bit, you’re probably ready to hire a strong full-time marketer.

So one of the quiet SaaS leaders that has just crushed it in 2024 is Doximity:

• At $550m in ARR, it’s worth a cool $10.4 Billion (!) — or 20x ARR.
• And its stock it up a stunning +90% this year.

What’s going on? A combination of:

• Growth re-accelerating. Doximity is growing 20% now, vs. 18% at $450m ARR.
• Insane profitability.  53% EBITDA. That’s crazy.  It rains cash at Doximity.

To oversimplify’s Doximity’s business model, it’s “LinkedIn for Doctors” has almost every U.S. physician on its platform. And in turn, it can charge pharma and other companies $100k+ to reach them.

For me, both times, it was to find my co-founder.

In my first start-up, arguably I invented the idea of the company, but my co-founder invented the technology.

It was really all her. Step 1 was seeing if we wanted to do this crazy idea together.

The second time, my first co-founder and I started working together before the idea came together. This time, it was his idea.

In fact, we worked on several ideas before picking Adobe Sign / EchoSign.

In either case, I did two things that added real value:

• I made the decision, pre-validation, the idea would work. Someone has to have the conviction at Day 0 it really will work, is worth all the pain and effort just to get to the first customer, the first $5 in revenue.
• I made sure I had a great co-founder. I never had any interest in starting without one.

If you have both, you can find a way.

If you haven’t attended one, almost every Wednesday we do a Free, Live SaaStr Workshop Wedneday at 10am PST with the best of SaaS and Cloud. 

A partial line-up for the coming weeks:

• 12/18: Dennis Lyandres, Former CRO @ Procore
• 12/25: Skipping for Christmas
• 1/1: Skipping for New Year’s Day
• 1/8: AMA with Jason and More
• 1/15:  Kathleen Lord, CRO @ Zensai
• 1/22: Rajan Sheth, CMO @ Together AI & GP – Hypergrowth Partners and former VP of Marketing @ Cohere
• 1/29: Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner @ Theory Ventures
• 2/5: Maria Thomas, CPO @ Rebrandly

They are free and live and we do a fix of content and open questions and AMAs at the end.

They are great so join us live and just sign up here.

Selling to developers and technical audiences requires a different approach than traditional B2B SaaS sales. In a recent SaaStr Workshop Wednesday, Komodor CRO Jim Hunnewell who also previously led sales at companies like GitHub, shared his first-hand experience and insights for successfully selling to engineering teams.

The days of pure top-down enterprise sales are over when it comes to technical products. As software continues to “eat the world” (as Marc Andreessen famously predicted), developers have gained significant influence in purchasing decisions. While CFOs have regained some control post-2020, one thing remains clear: if you don’t have buy-in from the technical developers and engineers actually using your product, you won’t get the deal done.

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