Money + We Work, Where to HQ, My #1 Hiring Hack, and More!

At this point, we've all read just about enough about WeWork. Is it even a tech company? Does it even matter for SaaS?

To me, there's one lesson I've learned that is relevant to almost all SaaS founders: Assume the Next Round is Going to Be Harder to Raise than The Last One.

We are 11 years into the bull run. Even with a bit of a pullback in Q3, SaaS and Cloud stocks are still basically at all-time highs.

So when that seed round, or A round, or B round goes pretty well. When in the end, it wasn't that hard. You sort of assume it will be the same way next time.

It rarely is. My Top 4 investments are today worth over $5 billion together. And you know what? Even with the Top 4, each of them had an entire year when they were basically unfundable. And each of them also had a year when the funding offers they did get were crummy. And each of them also had rounds where only 1 real VC made an offer. Just 1.

This was WeWork's mistake. They assumed the IPO, the next round, would be as easy as the last ones. And it just wasn't.

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Where should you HQ your office in SaaS?

It's 2019 and I wasn't sure myself. Look at Shopify, Atlassian, Canva, and so many other iconic SaaS companies HQ'd well outside of SF Bay Area. And aren't we all moving to distributed teams?

So I challenged myself and took a quick look. Weighted by market cap, 80% of public SaaS/Cloud companies are still HQ'd in SF Bay Area. Including most of the latest crop -- Slack, Zoom, Pagerduty, Cloudflare, etc.

Does this matter? Maybe not. But if you sell to tech companies. Or if you partner with tech companies, from Salesforce to Twilio to Workday. Or if you really want to hire veterans to help you scale.

Well, 80% of them are still here in the SF Bay Area.

So maybe if you can be here. If at least one of you can be. Maybe try to still do it.

Even in 2019/2020.

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In the end, all that will really matter after $1m-$2m ARR is who you hire. And we've been doing a lot this ourselves at little Team SaaStr, with over 10 open positions.

I love having all VP candidates do a 60-day plan. You just learn so much when do that. But having them do a 60-day plan does take time. It's often hard to make the ask before you go fairly far into an interview process.

You know what isn't a big ask though of every VP candidate, and gets you 80% of the way there? A Top 20 list.

Ask each VP that comes in for a second interview to make a quick list. Just quickly, in a Google Doc or whatnot. Of the Top 15-20 things they think they'd do if they started. They won't know everything about your company by then. By after 1 round of interviews, and a bunch of research, most VP candidates should have a rough idea of the top things they'd do to move the needle.

And then see how they order the Top 15-20, and what they say. Because really, 90%+ of VPs can really only get 4 new things done, max. So whatever they put toward the top of the list is all they will really do.

If that's what you also most want them to do, you're on the same page. If not -- I'd be worried.

More here:

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