[HN Gopher] The SaaS Org Chart
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The SaaS Org Chart
        
       Author : anacleto
       Score  : 195 points
       Date   : 2021-07-25 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sacks.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sacks.substack.com)
        
       | haram_masala wrote:
       | For those of us who want to start an indie one-person SaaS, this
       | is sobering - because it means that for a while, you'll be doing
       | all 50 of these jobs. And, paid far less than any of them.
        
         | dsr_ wrote:
         | Here's the good news: when it's just you, you don't need HR,
         | because there are no interactions between employees, no hiring
         | and no firing. Before you have any income, you barely need a
         | CFO function, and so on and so forth.
         | 
         | Really, you only have about five roles:
         | 
         | - make the service - run the service - market the service -
         | accept money for the service - support the service
         | 
         | and a little later, talk to a pro about taxes.
        
         | TeMPOraL wrote:
         | No, you won't. Most of these jobs are consequences of scale,
         | and exist to support it.
         | 
         | For example, you don't need any of the management jobs until
         | you've hired enough people that you have to manage them. You
         | don't need to do sales and customer management jobs when you
         | have no sales and no customers. Etc.
         | 
         | Of the job titles that remain, these are all specializations.
         | The projection of the work that you'll be doing onto any of the
         | roles will be so small, that there's no point in even
         | identifying it. E.g. you're not really doing "Dev Ops/Infra" if
         | your project is running on a single server in whichever cloud
         | you had the most free credits for.
         | 
         | For a indie one-person SaaS, this list is useful only as an
         | identification of broad areas of concern. I wouldn't even try
         | to read anything from relative number of any type of positions
         | - jobs don't scale at the same rate. E.g. sales workload may
         | grow faster than dev workload in B2C, the opposite in B2B.
        
         | brianwawok wrote:
         | I think the days of being a 1 man show are easier compared
         | current world of ~12 person team. Communication is instant.
         | 
         | Next time may just stay a 1-man show, tempeting for sure.
        
           | rhizome wrote:
           | I think there's room for (i.e. I think I'd read) an
           | IndieHackers type site that focuses on one-man armies! Like
           | IH has done in the past couple years you'd probably have to
           | expand it, but even including <5ppl companies might still
           | place a lot of success stories within arm's reach of OMA
           | ambitions.
        
       | hectormalot wrote:
       | I know it's close to the truth, but it still feels weird that
       | this hypothetical 50 FTE SaaS company has 2x the amount of
       | sales/CSM folks vs technical profile. And that the whole product
       | is in the hands of 6 devs (4x FE and 2x BE).
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | I used to think that as well, but sales doesnt scale like
         | engineering, and their priorities provide a good counterbalance
         | to engineering and even product priorities.
         | 
         | The thing that I thought was broken about it is the bread first
         | strategy. I would think it would be better to focus on a
         | segment of the market until they start getting momentum. Many
         | products we see that are targeted at smaller companies are
         | going to be wholly unacceptable to large enterprises.
        
         | ivraatiems wrote:
         | It's often a much bigger lift to get people to _adopt_ your
         | product than it is to make the product itself, especially now
         | when so many SaaS markets are either captured by large players
         | or, conversely, hypercompetitive.
        
       | rasengan wrote:
       | This is an example of how to cargo cult.
        
       | jwr wrote:
       | This is so fun to read as the solo founder (and the only
       | employee) of a self-funded (bootstrapped) SaaS business :-)
        
         | fighterpilot wrote:
         | Any good learning material you can point me towards that you
         | found useful on your journey? I'd appreciate anything.
        
       | ivraatiems wrote:
       | It's really interesting how AAR scales per employee. The larger
       | you are, better the ratio -- this helps explain why large
       | companies can afford to pay so much more for top-level employees
       | than small ones.
       | 
       | I'm sure this seems obvious to some, but I'm not enough of a
       | business/finance person to have really thought about this before.
       | It helps crystallize some dynamics between, for example, my
       | current employer and my immediately former employer; the former
       | is able to pay dramatically more (around 150% on salary, plus
       | equity) for essentially the same work, and gets more and higher
       | quality talent as a result.
       | 
       | I wonder how a smaller org can escape this problem, if at all.
        
         | ec109685 wrote:
         | A growing company doesn't need to be profitable, so there's no
         | reason an engineer shouldn't be compensated at market rate
         | ever.
        
           | Silhouette wrote:
           | A growing company with investors happy to throw away large
           | amounts of money for years in case they end up with a unicorn
           | doesn't need to be profitable.
           | 
           | A growing company that was bootstrapped and is trying to make
           | something actually worth selling in order to fund further
           | growth is an entirely different situation.
        
           | ivraatiems wrote:
           | That might be true for startups, but my former employer is a
           | 20+ year old established company with a specific niche.
           | Growth is limited, but business is stable and profitable.
           | It's a different mindset.
        
             | pm90 wrote:
             | In that case it sounds like they have found product market
             | fit and are mostly content with the way the business is
             | growing and likely don't need the kind of "top talent" that
             | you offer. They're ok with "mediocre talent" since talent
             | isn't enabling growth or survival.
             | 
             | The market is pretty brutal but I've seen many extremely
             | talented folks work at mediocre organizations because of
             | reasons other than financial. I guess everyone is happy
             | with the arrangement.
        
               | ivraatiems wrote:
               | You'd think and hope so. To be honest, I think they're
               | trying to have their cake and eat it too - that's part of
               | why I left. They wanted to grow and had all these
               | strategies for doing so, but not nearly the resources to
               | do it, and were unwilling to invest in getting more of
               | them. We got a lot done with a little, but there were
               | clear limitations.
               | 
               | It was an outlook I never quite understood. The core
               | business was and is strong, reliably profitable and has
               | made plenty of people quite wealthy and employed dozens
               | more gainfully. Why mess with that success? What's in it
               | for them? What's the point of (fake numbers) $100m in
               | sales vs $50m when it comes to our 70-person company and
               | small number of private, non-institutional owners?
               | 
               | But I am, of course, not the one who makes such
               | decisions.
        
       | cm2012 wrote:
       | So, most people reading this aren't looking for the marketing
       | section. But I wanted to point something out I see all the time.
       | Take a look at the roles under CMO at a 125 person company:
       | 
       | --
       | 
       |  _CMO (15)_
       | 
       | Director, Product Marketing, plus 3 PMMs (4)
       | 
       | Director, Demand Gen, plus 3 marketers (4)
       | 
       | Director, Sales Enablement, plus 2 marketers (3)
       | 
       | Director, Brand Marketing (3)
       | 
       | PR & Analyst Relations (1-2)
       | 
       | Events/Community (1)
       | 
       | --
       | 
       | What I posit is that Product Marketing is useless as a position
       | and should be eliminated most of the time.
       | 
       | The role ends up being: - Jane Doe is the Product Marketer for
       | product X. She's responsible for growing it as much as possible.
       | - She works with Anne X. in demand gen to make ads to promote the
       | product to new customers. - She works with Hillary Y. in email
       | marketing to cross promote to existing customers - She works with
       | tech to do landing page/funnel testing.
       | 
       | However what I find is that the role just adds friction and
       | useless tests to show value. Let the subject matter experts (in
       | demand gen, email, website testing) create the plan for each
       | product holistically. Product Marketers are dead weight 80% of
       | the time.
       | 
       | I would only say this anonymously but its true. Source: I'm a
       | marketing consultant that has worked with dozens of fast growing
       | SaaS companies.
        
         | jollybean wrote:
         | I'm sorry I think you've confused the Product Marketing role
         | with something else.
         | 
         | PM's role is not to run campaigns, either brand or 'demand
         | gen'.
         | 
         | That's regular operational marketing.
         | 
         | Product Marketing's job is to define the Product for the
         | appropriate segments in terms of messaging, features, pricing.
         | Then, outbound, they will provide the overall strategy for the
         | various campaigns.
         | 
         | So part 1: They know the market well. Who uses it, why, what
         | their needs are. They'll sit in on sales calls i.e. should be
         | one of the primary conduits into the company from them. They'll
         | do market research, understanding pricing trends. They'll
         | generally do some kind of segmentation, even if crude.
         | 
         | Part 2: Direct product activities in this regard i.e. 'Each
         | nation has different regulatory apparatus re: this feature so
         | we need to break it down'. Or, even though our software has
         | nothing to do with security, this specific issue is a problem
         | and we need to have XYZ feature even if it's perfunctory.
         | 
         | Part 3: For everything outbound, they'll be setting the
         | messaging and the strategy. 'What groups are we targeting' and
         | 'What those groups need to hear'. Probably putting together the
         | 'baseline copy' and materials.
         | 
         | The 'Marketing Ops' shouldn't be making a whole lot of those
         | decisions on their own. They should be taking that from the PM
         | and then deciding which channels to push their budget into.
         | 
         | There's quite a lot of overlap in terms of customer
         | relationship and product features, as the Product Manager also
         | does this, but I usually think of PM's as satisfying satisfying
         | specific customer requests, having a broader vision for the
         | architecture that goes beyond any segment needs.
         | 
         | The Product Marketing team is the one that says 'We'll be
         | selling in 5 tranches with these features at this price'. The
         | Product Manager cares less about that deliniation and more
         | about the product as whole including internal architecture.
        
           | redwood wrote:
           | The line between product management and product marketing is
           | definitely a gray zone and really depends on the
           | organization, but rather than saying product managers are
           | more focused in the architecture I think a fundamental
           | difference is that they tend to be working much more closely
           | with the engineers via a constant back-and-forth developing a
           | shared understanding of what's possible, trade-offs, roadmap
           | planning etc. Pricing is another one that in some
           | organizations is product management led and in others product
           | marketing.
        
         | kchl wrote:
         | I see in your profile that you focus on Facebook and Google
         | ads. If this is your context for product marketing, it's
         | totally understandable to see them as dead weight. If you're
         | meeting with B2B product marketers for paid display ads, you're
         | already dealing with a dysfunctional marketing org (perhaps
         | part of why they brought you in as a consultant!).
         | 
         | In an ideal world, demand gen and content already have
         | messaging guidance, target segments and titles and their pain
         | points from product marketing (and field marketing for regional
         | guidance), and can just run with it except for perhaps a once
         | over from product marketing on some initial copy for accuracy
         | or tone. Otherwise, product marketing has their hands full
         | researching customers along side PMs, writing more specialized
         | content that's harder to outsource, or building and delivering
         | sales enablement. Essentially, they're making sure you're
         | targeting the right folks at the right time, prepping sales dev
         | to receive those folks, and working with sales on scalable
         | motions to close them. There's no reason product marketing
         | should be weighing in on the nuances of how demand gen is being
         | executed.
         | 
         | Short version: there's lots of facets to marketing, a good org
         | keeps people focused where they're needed based on their
         | expertise.
        
         | redwood wrote:
         | Product marketing is an essential role for centralizing
         | outbound go-to-market strategy, not only in terms of
         | positioning for the outside world but also in terms of keeping
         | sellers, marketers, and execs aligned.
         | 
         | I suspect these particular areas in which you feel they are at
         | deadweight may be missing much of their focus or you've
         | experienced an organization that is misusing this role.
        
       | catillac wrote:
       | What does this look pike for an org that is primarily providing
       | SaaS products via ML? i.e. how much to r&d, model dev, data
       | cleaning, etc.
        
         | hectormalot wrote:
         | I suppose it is similar, but you'll likely need more people per
         | client to make it work. In my experience SaaS software is much
         | easier to scale than SaaS ML. (See also:
         | https://a16z.com/2020/02/16/the-new-business-of-ai-and-how-i...
         | )
         | 
         | On the ML side you probably have more people working on data
         | gathering/cleaning/client specific tweaks than actual modeling.
         | (Practically, I'd say is 80%-20% at best in the projects we do
         | at work).
        
           | catillac wrote:
           | How much time realistically can go into client agnostic work
           | versus client specific work?
        
       | TenJack wrote:
       | So only two back end devs for 50 person series A?
        
       | deanCommie wrote:
       | This is silly. Of course I understand that because of scaling a
       | 50-person org will have one "technical leader" who is, by
       | definition, the CTO, and they might only have 12 reports.
       | 
       | But you don't now need to introduce additional abstractions when
       | you go from 50 to 125. Why introduce a VP of engineering? Can the
       | CTO not handle 3 extra director reports (4 if you add a
       | "director" of QA with 2 reports?) Come on. Who is going to come
       | on to be the "VP of engineering" for a startup, yet not have/want
       | oversight for Security, Analytics, and Infrastructure?
       | 
       | Also in the 50 person startup, the product lead with 5 reports is
       | a "Director" but a product lead with 11 reports is a "VP"? Get
       | outta here, this is silly. It's the exact same role. It is NOT
       | more scope or oversight.
       | 
       | There should be orders of magnitude size growths before you start
       | overthinking the difference between a director and a VP, or
       | introducing new layers.
        
         | jollybean wrote:
         | A 40 person Eng. Org. is not going to be led by one person with
         | a bunch of direct reports.
         | 
         | IT and Eng. roles will probably be sub divided.
         | 
         | Instead of a VP it might be possible to have just a manager or
         | director, but it depends on the seniority of the people you're
         | bringing in.
         | 
         | The CTO's job is not just downward focus, they have strategic
         | things to to.
         | 
         | A few titles could be mushed around but it's just about right.
         | 
         | For the VP product with only 11 reports - that's a staff
         | position, it doesn't have to imply a lot of headcount.
         | 
         | You might have a Colonel in charge of an entire Regiment of
         | Soldiers, but another Colonel in charge of a much smaller
         | detachment of Medics, or Intel, Communications, or even just a
         | Chief of Staff etc..
         | 
         | Aside from handing out VP roles to possibly people that are too
         | young or inexperienced, the 'tree' itself is just about right.
        
         | formatjam wrote:
         | Maybe?
         | 
         | "technical leader" for a 0-50 org is VERY different job than
         | >100 org.
         | 
         | The CTO is probably very good at 0-1 type of start up work, and
         | probably a cofounder and inexperienced eng leader.
         | 
         | But a experienced VP of eng is required to build teams and
         | process later on. But usually those VP of eng are not good at
         | building startups from the ground up.
         | 
         | So the solution here is either: - fire the CTO co-founder and
         | replace them with a VP of eng type of talents - hire VP of eng
         | and let the cofounder CTO focus on other works
         | 
         | I have seen both happened before.
        
       | thinkingkong wrote:
       | Another way to think about this is ratios of budgets to
       | departments, ratios of "core" vs "experimental" spend, and ratios
       | of IC's to managers. If you map those constraints out for the
       | system that you're building you can tailor things a little more
       | to your business while making intelligent trade-offs.
        
       | keewee7 wrote:
       | Is it typical for a 50 employee SaaS organization to only have 2
       | backend developers?
        
         | burlesona wrote:
         | Not in my experience. But it varies a _lot_ depending on the
         | product.
        
       | motohagiography wrote:
       | Gem of an article. Question/opinion though:
       | 
       | The CEO seems to manage the CPO & CTO relationship in these
       | models as well, which seems like a risk given a CEO's value is
       | investor and market / key customer facing, and any time they
       | spend on managing the peers in the CPO/CTO relationship is
       | opportunity cost against that value.
       | 
       | It also means the CPO & CTO as peers will be jockying for the
       | CEO's attention as a deciding factor, which seems like
       | unnecessary friction. The CPO's key relationships are to the
       | board and supporting the CEO activities and sales key accounts
       | with strategic feature alignment that may include M&A.
       | 
       | The CTO's key relationships are outward with technology partners,
       | suppliers, vendors, etc. and downward in the org. A CTO should be
       | a partnership with a COO role, as they are solving scale and
       | optimization problems together.
       | 
       | All that is to say, depending on org maturity, I don't think
       | CTO/CPO should be peers under the CEO. IMO one of the CPO/CTO
       | should report to the other, as otherwise you're going to get
       | unproductive running battles between them that cost CEO time. If
       | you have this model and are wondering why your staff aren't
       | working well together, it's you.
       | 
       | This is why it can be useful to keep a founder around as a
       | facilitator with convening power, provided they aren't too
       | marginalized or a loose cannon. That said, I've only consulted to
       | orgs like this and see it across them, and this is not the view
       | of a CEO.
        
       | ryanSrich wrote:
       | Series A feels top heavy to me. Having a director or VP of
       | Product at that point feels like a mistake. I also think you
       | could do more delegating under the CTO. 12 reports is too much.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | synergy20 wrote:
       | very insightful, would like a version for before-round-A
       | startups.
       | 
       | By the point when you got round-A, you have already passed the
       | most difficult time for a startup: to survive from bootstrap or
       | angel-fund to round-A.
       | 
       | the key is actually how to get angel-fund or bootstrap so you can
       | reach to round-A, instead of being those 95% failed to launch
       | ones and never saw the light.
        
       | alberth wrote:
       | It should be noted this was authored by David Sacks, of
       | PayPal/Yammer/etc fame.
        
       | daigoba66 wrote:
       | Can some explain to me what 25-50+ engineers do all day at these
       | startups?
       | 
       | My experience is probably skewed, mostly working for SaaS
       | companies providing enterprise B2B software, but the product and
       | engineering team represents only 15-20% of the headcount - the
       | customer success team is often 2-3x larger.
        
         | abcdememomi wrote:
         | They will spend time overengineering things because they will
         | get bored due to lack of meaningful work required from them, or
         | have 7 hours per day of meetings
        
       | JaggerFoo wrote:
       | I would of liked to see series X funding ranges and period ranges
       | along with the charts to make more sense of the org charts.
        
       | IgorPartola wrote:
       | I fully expected this to be satire. Surely this is all subject to
       | change based on the backgrounds of founders and early employees,
       | industry, funding goals and sources, etc.
        
       | xondono wrote:
       | Interesting examples, but starting at 50 employees sounds a
       | little bit extreme to me.
       | 
       | I also find way more insightful how you get from x founders to 50
       | employees than from then on.
        
         | monocasa wrote:
         | Yeah, the only way this chart makes sense to me is as "what's
         | your target for using your series X money" rather than "where
         | you should be when you get your series X money".
        
       | zilchers wrote:
       | The terminology around seed vs a vs b is so skewed right now, but
       | a 50 person series a startup, just estimating, is a 5 mil per
       | year burn. Hard to say exactly the raise, but personally I'd be
       | uncomfortable with less than 3 years runway, so let's call it a
       | 12mil raise. 12 mil raise for 25% of the company (again, totally
       | back of the napkin here) puts us at basically 50mil valuation. 50
       | mil valuation on 1mil ARR seems way high to me, basically this
       | all seems sort of shifted left on the headcount side (series b
       | should be 50 people) and right on the revenue side.
        
       | H8crilA wrote:
       | It's so funny when a CEO or a CTO or a VP has 20-50 people
       | reporting to him/her :). This is barely getting outside of the
       | "manager" rank in a proper corporation.
        
         | ahtihn wrote:
         | Anyone who has more than 20 direct reports isn't managing them
         | properly. I'd say 15 is already on the high side.
         | 
         | I'd be very surprised if a CEO at any large company has more
         | than 50 direct reports.
        
           | richardwhiuk wrote:
           | Parent comment is taking about total reports including
           | indirect
        
       | smoldesu wrote:
       | It scares me to think that there's some capital-backed, likely
       | nervous 20-something, reading this on their iPhone with shaky
       | hands before screenshotting it and shipping it off to Glassdoor.
       | Your company should be so much more than this, even an example
       | that you find online for guidance.
       | 
       | Cargo-cult leadership might be the demise of the modern SaaS/VC
       | workflow.
        
       | whall6 wrote:
       | I think this is stupid. Building a business shouldn't be about
       | hiring people to fit some platonic form of a company.
       | 
       | You should hire people based on a market need for that role.
       | While I agree that this is the org chart that most often
       | organically arises, it's not because CEOs read this article on
       | sub stack.
       | 
       | This is about as useful of information as telling me how to
       | decorate my office space when I have a 50 person company.
        
       | spoonjim wrote:
       | I know this guy has a track record but not sure why you'd only
       | have 12 engineers and 5 PMs in a 50 person company. Do you really
       | need the Finance stuff? Why not just engineering and sales?
        
         | brianwawok wrote:
         | I don't think you can ignore stuff like marketing at 50 person
         | scale. But I assume you can wiggle some of the team sizes,
         | especially if you outsource some roles that aren't your core
         | business.
        
       | dgudkov wrote:
       | >At IPO (average) $100,000 of ARR per employee
       | 
       | So it's for companies that aren't profitable even at IPO. Not my
       | cup of tea.
        
       | rokkit wrote:
       | Why do the number of front end devs exceed the back end? Does
       | anyone else see a problem here? Front end effort has always been
       | a fraction of back end effort on the systems I've developed. If
       | that's not the case, I can only hypothesize it's because front
       | end toolchains have gotten overly complex for what they
       | accomplish. Not only that, but I would posit that for most SaaS
       | ventures, the back end is where the differentiation and value is
       | delivered, so that is where the bulk of dev resources should be
       | deployed.
        
         | granshaw wrote:
         | The standard of polish that users expect has gone up a lot. The
         | Front end is what users actually interact with, to them it
         | might as well be your entire stack
        
         | matteovh wrote:
         | Backend dev has basically become CRUD API development whereas
         | products end up being differentiated by brand and UX polish.
        
         | gedy wrote:
         | Of the consumer/Enterprise SaaS companies I've worked with,
         | many devs who say they are doing "backend" are just writing
         | controllers and APIs specifically for front end/UI consumption.
         | 
         | A lot of places have combined that work into same stack/JS and
         | call it "frontend".
        
       | jot wrote:
       | I'm not cut out for VC track businesses.
       | 
       | - $25K ARR per person with >40 employees.
       | 
       | - $50K ARR per person with >100 employees.
       | 
       | - $100K ARR per person with >1,000 employees.
       | 
       | There are plenty of independent SaaS businesses that make it past
       | $200K ARR per person with teams of <10.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
         | Well, when we consider that VC funding is usually trending
         | towards a model of hyper growth, it becomes fairly
         | straightforward to see that the model leans towards throwing
         | people at the problem to make it grow faster. I do think it
         | would be interesting to see a study comparing growth rates of
         | companies comparing to number of employees as (educated guess
         | here) operating with that many employees that quickly is going
         | to result in a number of inefficiencies.
        
           | rhizome wrote:
           | I wonder if "VC funding" lives in a space between old-style
           | business development and hierarchy, vs. new-style revenue
           | expectations. We get middle-heavy startups (backbiting
           | optional) trying to cover zillion dollar AWS bills by
           | perpetually pretending they're on the verge of a Google-up.
           | This is why they need $50MM rather than 1/10th that.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | julee04 wrote:
       | If anyone is interested in what a typical SaaS sales org chart
       | looks like, here is a good example: https://www.saasae.com/levels
        
       | exdsq wrote:
       | Is this actually based on anything?
        
         | davidivadavid wrote:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_O._Sacks
        
       | ndr wrote:
       | No one ever needs legal? No one doing privacy & compliance work
       | in-house for a SaaS with hundreds of employees?
        
         | Silhouette wrote:
         | Perhaps even lawyers don't want to deal with that many
         | buzzwords and contrived management positions?
         | 
         | Though the final scenario with hundreds of employees does
         | feature a General Counsel as the final entry in the chart.
        
         | NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
         | I don't get this either, even with 50 you would have a someone
         | with corporate law experience and 400 ?! What am I missing, is
         | one of the top management people at the same time lawyer, or
         | they are on case paid bases?
        
       | abcdememomi wrote:
       | These "blueprint" charts are so harmful.
       | 
       | People that doesn't understand what some position even are trust
       | this kind of things and hire a lot of people for the sake of it.
       | 
       | Measuring growth in headcount is disfunctional and just bad. I've
       | seen many of startups hiring tens on engineers because they can,
       | and to show "growth" to the outside world, not because they added
       | any value
        
       | k__ wrote:
       | _" You need to hire rapidly to seize the opportunity."_
       | 
       | What does this mean? I had the impression employees are a
       | liability.
        
       | devops000 wrote:
       | $20-$100,000 of ARR per employee means profits < 0 until IPO.
       | Does it make sense?
        
       | jxf wrote:
       | Two remarks:
       | 
       | * This feels way too hierarchical for the size -- there's
       | significant distance from many employees and the CEO even at
       | small sizes.
       | 
       | * Could not disagree more with putting HR and Ops under the CFO
       | (even in a 50-person company). That's a surefire way to have a
       | neglected HR/people function.
        
         | burlesona wrote:
         | At 50 people everyone is still within 1 skip-level of the CEO.
         | That doesn't seem overly hierarchical to me.
         | 
         | What does seem a little surprising is how many "chiefs" the CEO
         | has reporting to them. In my experience with companies around
         | 50 people, things actually tend to not be sliced into so many
         | pieces, but rather there are a few larger slices that are
         | functionally heterogeneous.
        
           | ryanSrich wrote:
           | I think the three machines approach works best for companies
           | 0-100 people (depending on the company, for SaaS it makes
           | sense).
           | 
           | Basically have someone own:
           | 
           | 1. The product - CTO
           | 
           | 2. The customer - (Could be a director or VP of
           | marketing/sales/rev)
           | 
           | 3. The company - CEO
           | 
           | Anything beyond those three execs at or around an A round is
           | nuts to me.
           | 
           | I think a lot of people underestimate just how much you can
           | outsource at that size. There almost no reason to have a COO
           | when you're less than 100 people. Same with a CFO. Either of
           | those hires don't become strategic until you're doing $10+m
           | in rev. Until then, use other SaaS services for payroll, book
           | keeping, tax savings (MainStreet), etc. These take little
           | effort use and can be setup by one of the founders in less
           | than a day.
        
             | paulddraper wrote:
             | You're proposing a 100 person SaaS company without any
             | sales or marketing exec?
             | 
             | This is HN I suppose, so not entirely surprising.
        
               | ryanSrich wrote:
               | It's literally the second bullet point in my comment. Did
               | you miss it?
        
               | paulddraper wrote:
               | Oh I misread that as Customer Success, but you meant
               | Sales and Marketing.
               | 
               | I still think you're going to be light with 100 people
               | and no dedicated VP of Product or VP of Customer Success.
               | 
               | But not absurdly so
        
               | ryanSrich wrote:
               | Ah, yeah when I say someone should own the customer, I
               | mean you should have an exec dedicated to finding,
               | closing, and keeping customers.
               | 
               | One slight contention here is who owns the keeping part.
               | I've seen that under both sales and product, and don't
               | have strong convictions either way. I think it mostly
               | depends on the type of product you're selling.
        
         | mberning wrote:
         | Absolutely agree. It feels like the have a C level just to have
         | it. Not only is that not going to be cost effective (C level
         | titles expect C level comp) but it is setting you up for a lot
         | of left hand/right hand issues even at a small size where that
         | definitely should not be happening. Having worked in large orgs
         | with 10+ levels it is a nightmare in the making.
        
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