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So Carta and Crunchbase are two of our favorite data sources at SaaStr, and Crunchbase’s lateste VC funding report is out.

Two data points jumped out at me:

• 51% of all U.S. VC funding ($178 Billion total) went to SF Bay Area companies
• Venture roared back in Q4’24.  Not to ’21 levels, but up +70% over Q4’23.

Now it’s not quite that simple.  Big AI deals in the SF Bay Area and growth rounds were a big part of it. Overall early stage VC wasn’t up much last year — or in Q4. So VC is back, but it’s back for AI (we know this) and fueled by big growth rounds.

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• CEO Monday
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• Head of AI at Dialpad

• CEO Paragon
• Co-Founder and COO, Cursor

VC firm High Alpha and Paddle did a survey of … what keeps founders up at night.

One that surprised me a bit was that founders worry more about competition as they scale.

22% of founders worry about competition in the early days, but the swells to 50% at $50m ARR.

It probably makes sense on many levels.  The bigger you are, the more competition you have. And the more places you have to fight for growth, vs. just staying in your niche or lane. But at the same time, once your brand becomes dominant, the competition can’t really kill you.

In any event, it’s not just Marc Benioff that’s still fighting the competition all the time.  It’s everyone at scale, apparently.

So some folks are going to disagree with me on this post, but I’m close to 100% right on it, and it will save you a ton of pain and time and money.

Never hire someone who describes themselves as a “Strategist” unless that’s what you really, really want. Especially today.

So many folks want to be strategists, do audits of what you do, and give you ideas. As consultants and fractional execs, for sure. But also as full-time folks.

If you hire a strategist, they won’t do the actual work. They might say they will, but they won’t. Not much of it at least. They might hire a team to do the work under them. They might hire 4-5 folks to do the work. But mostly, they just want to do strategy.

You may be tempted to hire The Strategist. They often know a lot, and come from good companies. Their ideas often aren’t super deep, because they usually don’t really dig in, but they usually sound smart and thoughtful.

They just won’t do the work.

So does being a solo founder … work in SaaS?

We’ve dug into this topic several times at SaaStr.

Of the post ~40 SaaS IPOs, only 5 or so had solo co-founders. So let’s call that 10%-12% or so. Still, they are some good ones: Zoom, Scaler, New Relic, Elastic, etc.

But that’s of SaaS and Cloud companies that IPO’d. What about across all start-ups, and what about bootstrapped start-ups that have to be scrappier for longer?

The data is interesting. Overall, 17% have a solo founder, vs. 12% or so of public SaaS companies. But 38% of bootstrapped start-ups have a solo founder.

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I’m not a social media expert, but we ended last year with about the same views (40,000,000) and followers (250,000) on both.

#1. X and LinkedIn perform about the same for us in terms of driving traffic to SaaStr.com itself

It used to be different, but in 2024, they both drive about the same amount of traffic to SaaStr.com (about 15% total) and about the same amount of attendees to events.

#2. Yes, you can re-use content across both, and they perform differently

The audiences are distinct enough that there appears to be little downside to cross-posting to X and LinkedIn. Posts that take off on one often do not take off on the other. But a post that is not popular on one rarely is popular on the other.

So we’ve talked a ton on SaaStr over the years on the risks and benefits of hiring your various VPs and C-level execs. We’ve spend the most time on hiring a great first VP of Sales, but all the VPs are super important.

Now that time has gone by though, I’m 100% sure that the worst mis-hire is CTO / VP Engineer. Because it becomes the death of innovation.

I’ve seen this fact pattern or some variant thereof so many times:

• Founder CEO + CTO
• CTO gets start-up to $5m, $10m, $20m but just “can’t scale”
• VP of Engineering or CTO from Big Tech Company hired
• Everyone chooses the Nice Candidate
• The Nice Candidate never codes, never learns the code base, never gets the magic
• The Nice Candidate hires a bunch of engineers under them that aren’t that great

At first, things seem better with Mr. Nice Guy CTO / VP of Engineering.

At SaaStr Annual’s AI Summit, we gathered an all-star panel of product leaders who have built some of the most widely-used AI features in production today. The speakers included Mario Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at GitHub at GitHub, Diego Zaks, VP of Design at Ramp, Dane Knecht, SVP of Emerging Technologies at Cloudflare, and Vincent van der Meulen, Design Engineer at Figma, and Dani Grant, CEO at Jam.dev.

• SaaStr 786: Adding AI to SaaS: Inside the AI Product Strategies of Figma, Cloudflare, GitHub and Ramp

• SaaStr 785: Usage-Based Revenue Models: Successes and Pitfalls from Checkr COO Lindsey Scrase on CRO Confidential

• SaaStr 784: What Really Works When Hiring VPs and Executive Teams with HubSpot Co-Founder and Chairman Brian Halligan and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

Listen on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Podcasts

Sometimes hard for founders to understand:

Easier for most VCs to pay a crazy price for crazy growth,

or even the potential for crazy growth

Than a very fair price for merely very fair growth

A seed round at $10m post can seem too high

A YC round at $25m post can seem too high

Anduril's seed at $97.5m probably seemed too high

And yet,

The outliers still make it all work

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