Why Q1 is Your Last Chance for 2022 Hires; Plus Weekly SaaS News and Updates

Hey SaaStr Community,

A ways back at SaaStr, we did a post “If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days”.   A great VP can’t always double sales in a month or two.  But they can improve things.  For real.  And just improving things quickly, in the first 30 days, has a big impact in SaaS.

So I just have one tip here, a variant of the 30 Day Test, but trust me, it will save you a lot of time and stress:

You’ll Know if That New VP is Going to Fail at the First Board Meeting

This edition of the SaaStr weekly is sponsored in part by Owl Labs

This is a pretty basic post, but one so many busy CEOs and founders just miss:

It’s already almost too late to make the hires you need for 2022!

And in sales it’s even worse.  It’s already almost too late to make the hires you need to hit the plan for 2022.  

We launched in SaaStr U in Dec 2019 as a set of 3 initial courses organizing and updating some of the top SaaStr content by stage — Idea, Early, Growth. 

We’ve since doubled the course content, added 3 more courses, and added a deep daily dive on one great discussion a day, with tons of group sharings and learnings.

This edition of the SaaStr weekly is sponsored in part by Snowflake

Anything you do that handicaps a VC getting to a decision in less than 20 minutes dramatically harms your odds of getting funded.

A few things have changed since covid. But still, founders make the same mistakes again and again. Here are a few that are easy to fix:

Growing a startup is just as challenging as starting one. There are many things to think through and steps to take when scaling from $20M to $500M in ARR, and getting ready for that much-anticipated exit.

Join this panel featuring leading Partners to hear about the steps you need to take in order to grow your business and ensure success for the long term.

FullStory is seekinxg a Vice President, Professional Services who will be responsible for driving a strategy to enable customers to realize maximum value from FullStory’s digital experience platform.

OneTrust is looking for a Demand Gen Manager to partner closely with Product Marketing, Solution Leaders, Regional and Content teams to develop fully integrated, omni-channel global campaigns that meet business goals and lead the strategy, development and execution of full-funnel campaigns that drive pipeline for the business.

VCs don’t get >that< many bargains in a down market

Many of the best startups with cash in the bank just choose to pass on raising right now rather than raise at a lower valuation

Prices do come down somewhat, but not as much as Twitter thinks they should or will

 How well does a VC fund have to do?

One simple way to think about it is:

PE needs to do 20%+ better than Nasdaq to account for risk

VC needs to do 20%+ better than PE to account for illiquidity + timing

So ideally 40%+ better than Nasdaq

Did you do that last year?

Seed VCs:

Forget about mark-ups, MOICs, paper multiples, and all that 

Your fund probably isn't really in the money, roughly speaking, until your portfolio is doing at least $100m ARR collectively

Zero evidence the stock market tumult is impacting SaaS growth rates

As a founder, potential fundraising impacts aside, you can basically ignore it

520

10 Learnings Scaling from Consumer to SMB to Enterprise with Grammarly Head of Organizations Revenue Dorian Stone

521

5 Strategies for Driving Peak Performance Through Reimagined Management with Hootsuite CRO Melissa Murray Bailey

522

Scaling Your Startup 10x From $20M to $200M with Sapphire, Lightspeed, TripActions, and 6Sense

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

Join us in Wynwood on Thursday March 3rd! Speaking will be SaaStr CEO, Jason Lemkin, SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter, and Brex CRO Sam Blond. Plus, we'll have a fun evening of networking with the best CEOs. Tickets here.

If you're having a bit of FOMO for SaaStr Annual, now's your chance to grab tickets and join 10,000 SaaS and Cloud professionals this September. 
Prices go up 2/1. 

© SaaStr 2022

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