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Should We Still Do 1-on-1s in 2025? 93% of You Say “Yes”

By Jason Lemkin
Tuesday, December 3, 2024 | Blog Posts

Should We Still Do 1-on-1s in 2025? 93% of You Say “Yes”

So 1-on-1 meetings with your team certainly seem to have gone out of fashion, at least on social media.

The great waste of time, many hard driven founders seem to be saying.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia has 30+ direct reports and apparently no 1-on-1s. I get it.

But Nvidia was founded in 1993, is doing $140B in revenue a year, dominates its market, and has 29,600 employees.

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How to Leverage Pricing and Packaging to Drive Growth, Revenue, and Profit with Miro, Loom, OpenAI, and Splunk

By Amelia Ibarra
Wednesday, December 4, 2024 | Product, SaaS Product Pricing, Sales

Pricing is more than just a number on a contract — when used thoughtfully, it can become a strategic tool for your SaaS product that can drive product adoption, customer satisfaction, and business growth.

At this year’s SaaStr Annual AI Summit, Akshay Sharma, Head of Pricing and Monetization at Miro, chats with a panel of experts, including Janie Lee, Head of Product at Loom, Alison Harmon, Head of Growth at OpenAI, and Carsten Holm, VP of Pricing and Monetization at Splunk, about their nuanced approach to pricing and monetization.

HOW TO LEVERAGE PRICING

Snowflake Signs Massive 800,000 Sq Ft Office in Menlo Park

By Jason Lemkin
Tuesday, December 3, 2024 | Blog Posts

Snowflake Signs Massive 800,000 Sq Ft Office in Menlo Park

After going virtual and hybrid during the 2021 era, and moving its HQ to Bozeman Montana when ex-CEO Frank Slootman moved there… and officially leaving the SF Bay (albeit keeping its office in San Mateo) in 2021 … Snowflake is quadrupling down on the SF Bay Area in 2025.

It’s taking over almost 800,000 square feet from Facebook in Menlo Park, the largest lease of the year, per the SF Chronicle.

You can build something great in B2B anywhere today.

But the SF Bay is back in force.

44% of VC funding for SaaS is there now, too.

SNOWFLAKE'S NEW OFFICES

5 Interesting Learnings from Twilio at $4.5 Billion in ARR

By Jason Lemkin
Wednesday, December 4, 2024 | 5 Interesting Things, Scale

5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom at $4.7 Billion in ARR

So Twilio has been on a crazy rollercoaster journey since IPO. It started off with hyper growth, then had a Covid Boost, and then growth radically slowed thereafter.

And now? Growth at Twilio is re-accelerating again. And the stock is up a super impressive 51% this year!

It’s not the Go-Go Days of years past, but Twilio is back. SaaS is back.

5 INTERESTING LEARNINGS

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by G2

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Dear SaaStr: When Should a Bootstrapped Startup Hire a CFO, COO, CMO, etc.?

By Jason Lemkin
Wednesday, December 4, 2024 | Q&A

Dear SaaStr: When Should a Bootstrapped Startup Hire a CFO, COO, CMO, etc.?

Here are some rough rules:

You want a VP of Everything (Sales, Marketing, Product, Eng) by about $5m ARR, and ideally, Sales and Marketing well before that. Not all at once, but you can benefit from all of them by then.
You want to start adding CXOs around $15m-$20m ARR. The CFO is often the last, the CMO often the first “C” level officer.
Now how does bootstrapping change this? Importantly: not that much in the end, although a lot at first.

Certainly, bootstrapping slows down how many VPs you can hire until and after $1m-$2m ARR.

You probably have to hire them one at a time, a bit slowly. You may only be able to afford one VP at first, even at $2m-$3m ARR or so. But after that, if you are growing 50%+ and have 100%+ NRR … you’ve built an engine. Even if you don’t have quite as much fuel as if you’d raised venture capital.

MORE HERE

My Top Financial Mistakes as an Entrepreneur. That Cost Me Millions.

By Jason Lemkin
Tuesday, December 2, 2024 | Q&A

I’ll share a few of mine:

First, the big, meta financial mistakes:

In the first start-up where I was a VP, we as a team voted to sell our company to a company about to IPO for $1 Billion — instead of to Amazon for about $250m. The thing is, the company we sold to went bankrupt and I made nothing.
I sold my second start-up to Adobe, left after a year — and the stock went up 10x after I left. Worked out great for my CTO who stayed (proud of him), but if things were structured differently, I would have made nine figures just staying.
I had another chance to sell my start-up a company that IPO’d a few years later. Saying No made sense at the time, but in the end, we would have owned $2 Billion of that company, and I owned 20%, so $2B x 20% = well, a lot.

The list is actually longer than this :). These are just the Top 3.

TOP FINANCIAL MISTAKES

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Should You Still Do 1-on-1s in 2025?