The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors - SaaStr 169: The Secret To Ensure High Conversion On Trials, How To Start and Scale A Remote Team Successfully & Lessons From Amazon and Netflix on A Culture of Achievement and Goal-setting with Kolton Andrus, Founder & CEO @ Gremlin

SaaStr 169: The Secret To Ensure High Conversion On Trials, How To Start and Scale A Remote Team Successfully & Lessons From Amazon and Netflix on A Culture of Achievement and Goal-setting with Kolton Andrus, Founder & CEO @ Gremlin

04/02/18 • 24 min

The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Kolton Andrus is the Founder & CEO @ Gremlin, the failure as a service startup finds weaknesses in your system before they cause problems. To date, they have raised over $8m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including the likes of Mike Volpi @ Index Ventures and Mike Dauber @ Amplify Partners. Prior to Gremlin, Kolton was a Chaos Engineer at Netflix improving streaming reliability and operating the Edge services. Fun fact, Kolton also designed and built Netflix’s failure injection service. Before that he improved the performance and reliability of the Amazon Retail website. At both companies he has served as a ‘Call Leader’, managing the resolution of company-wide incidents.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

How a conversation in the hallway of a conference with a VC gave Kolton the confidence that he could leave the corporate world of Netflix and Amazon and start a startup?
What were Kolton’s biggest takeaways from seeing the first hand scaling of behemoths like Amazon and Netflix? How did they fundamentally alter how he views goal setting today? How does Kolton look to achieve the balance of ambitious goal setting without the team losing motivation if they do not hit the goals?
Why does Kolton believe that a decentralised workforce is merely an evolution in how we do business? What are the core fundamentals to achieving success in creating and scaling a remote workforce? What have been some of the biggest challenges in structuring the team this way?
What is the single biggest tip Kolton has for other founders in ensuring high conversion rates from trials? Where do most founders go wrong with this? Today, is engineering buy in the only necessity to succeed in a bottoms up sales world?

60 Second SaaStr?

What does Kolton know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
If an investor can provide one thing, what is most important for Kolton?
What are Kolton’s favourite SaaS reading materials?
When is a stretch a stretch too far for a team member?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

How a conversation in the hallway of a conference with a VC gave Kolton the confidence that he could leave the corporate world of Netflix and Amazon and start a startup?
What were Kolton’s biggest takeaways from seeing the first hand scaling of behemoths like Amazon and Netflix? How did they fundamentally alter how he views goal setting today? How does Kolton look to achieve the balance of ambitious goal setting without the team losing motivation if they do not hit the goals?
Why does Kolton believe that a decentralised workforce is merely an evolution in how we do business? What are the core fundamentals to achieving success in creating and scaling a remote workforce? What have been some of the biggest challenges in structuring the team this way?
What is the single biggest tip Kolton has for other founders in ensuring high conversion rates from trials? Where do most founders go wrong with this? Today, is engineering buy in the only necessity to succeed in a bottoms up sales world?

60 Second SaaStr?

What does Kolton know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
If an investor can provide one thing, what is most important for Kolton?
What are Kolton’s favourite SaaS reading materials?
When is a stretch a stretch too far for a team member?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Previous Episode

undefined - SaaStr 168: Why 70% of Startup's VPs of Sales Fail, How and When To Hire Your First VP of Sales & The One Question That You Must Always Ask VP of Sales Candidates with Ryan Williams, Founder @ SalesCollider

SaaStr 168: Why 70% of Startup's VPs of Sales Fail, How and When To Hire Your First VP of Sales & The One Question That You Must Always Ask VP of Sales Candidates with Ryan Williams, Founder @ SalesCollider

Ryan Williams is the Founder @ SalesCollider, the organisation that helps technical founders jumpstart sales. Ryan got his start as the first sales manager at Adroll where he grew the team from 3 to 32 reps in just 8 months, a team that was responsible for ARR growing from $4m to $58m in under 2 years. Ryan then became an advisor to the early team at InVision where he coached both CEO and sales reps to close the first dozen enterprise deals. Then his last stop before founding SalesCollider was as VP of Sales at LeadGenius where he grew enterprise sales by over 400% and added clients such as Ebay, IBM and Google, just to name a few. Ryan is also an Entrepreneur in Residence @ 500 Startups and a Mentor with First Round Capital.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

How Ryan made his way into the world of sales as first sales manager at Adroll and how that led to advising the CEO of InVision on gaining their first enterprise clients?
70% of VPs of Sales fail when they join early stage startups, why is this? How can founders know when is the right time to bring in their first VP of Sales? What can they do to maximise the chances of success when bringing them into the organisation?
What is the right profile type for the first VP of Sales? What are the core foundations to assessing the strength of the VP in the interview, especially for engineering minded founders? What is the one question that Ryan loves to ask potential sales candidates? What answer does he look for?
Does Ryan agree with a recent guest, “discounting is now table stakes”? Where do most early stage startups go wrong when thinking about discounts? What framework must startups utilise to analyse the right discount to offer? Why must they know the internal value they are providing to their customer in such a detailed way when discounting?

60 Second SaaStr

What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
SDR’s are the most important function in sales, agree or disagree?
Sales rep productivity, what is good and what is bad?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Next Episode

undefined - SaaStr 170: Intacct's Rob Reid on Scaling Intacct's Team & Culture To An $850m Exit, Why You Must Attack The Process Not The People & Why The Old School CEO Approach Is Upside Down and Backward

SaaStr 170: Intacct's Rob Reid on Scaling Intacct's Team & Culture To An $850m Exit, Why You Must Attack The Process Not The People & Why The Old School CEO Approach Is Upside Down and Backward

Rob Reid is the Executive Vice President & Managing Director @ Sage Intacct, the undisputed global leader serving finance teams of any size. With over 10,000 employees and and over 3m customers, their financial solutions generate over $2Bn in revenue. As for Rob, prior to Sage Intacct, Rob led Intacct over an incredible 8 year journey culminating in their, reported $850m exit to Sage in 2017. Before that he was CEO and President of LucidEra, a market leader for on-demand business intelligence. Prior to LucidEra Rob was group Vice President of industry leading Siebel CRM for Oracle, managing the SMB sector. Fun fact, over his phenomenal 30 year career, Rob has been involved with 8 startups, 7 of which have had successful exits.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

How Rob made his way into the world of SaaS over 30 years ago from wanting to be in advertising and hating computer science?
As a multi-time CEO, how has Rob seen his role and understanding of what it takes to be a great CEO changed over the last 30 years? Does Rob agree that “management upscaling is the most important role a CEO can do”? What does Rob mean when he says, “the old school CEO approach is upside down and backward”? How should it be in that case?
Why does Rob believe that an executive team is like a boat of oarsman? What are the fundamentals to ensuring your executive team are aligned and working in tandem? Why is transparency across the organisation fundamental to both efficiency and culture? How does Rob think about internal promotion vs external hire when it comes to the exec team?
Why is Rob adamant that “cloud companies like never before have to be customer-centric”? What does this mean for thinking about optimising the structure of your organisation? How does one think about such high levels of customer success and touch points when serving the immense SMB landscape? How is this feasible? What have been Rob’s key learnings?

60 Second SaaStr?

Following many successful outcomes, what is Rob’s biggest splurge to date?
Why does Greg Sands call Rob “The Big Fundamental”?
What does Rob know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his career?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: