The Top Sessions of SaaStr Scale: CEOs of Okta, Airtable, Safegraph, Blackline and More!!

SaaStrScale.com 2020 was a big hit!  Thank you to the 20,000+ that attended and tuned in!

We’ll dribble out the sessions on our podcast, the blog and YouTube, but for now let’s also highlight the Top 5 most upvoted session.  There are so many good ones, but these should keep you busy watching for the next few days!

#1:  Todd McKinnon, CEO Okta:  “Building a Higher Performance Organizaion” A really great, open session on what Okta got right to win:

• Todd is humble and candid about how they won (going enterprise, early) and where it ended up being OK they were a bit late, or took time to win (mobile, dev).
• On how to recruit in the early days, when not everyone gets it.
• On how and when to be respectful to potential partners, like Salesforce
• On when feature parity really matters, and where to focus early on
• And so much more!

#2: Auren Hoffman, CEO of Safegraph and founder/CEO of unicorn IPO’d Liveramp: “How to Build a Unicorn in 8 Simple Charts”

Auren is a SaaStr favorite and has been doing a series of charts on Twitter and LinkedIn summarizing his learnings.  I asked him to do the charts live.  This was even better than I expected.  The Q+A at the end is especially good — stay for it:

#3: “Zendesk’s Secret Sauce to Scaling to $1B: SMB and Mid-Market Success” with VP Global SMB Sales Sharon Prosser and VP GTM Strategy Astha Malik.  

We love sessions where 2 colleagues riff off each other on the learnings.  Here’s a great example on truly scaling with SMBs:

#4: Therese Tucker, CEO and Founder of Blackline: “Lessons on the 20 Year Journey”.

Therese was one of our most popular speakers of all time at 2018 Annual and we asked her back as she moves to Chairman to reflect on her 20 years founding Blackline.  The company was entirely bootstrapped for more than a decade, and had to tilt to an entirely new product 2+ years in, so it was no easy journey in the early days.  Therese shares:

• How to know how long a VP can scale
• Learnings about the ROI in becoming even more hyper-customer centric
• Why you really want from your investors
• When to force yourself to focus
• How to recruit in a less hot space

And much more!  It’s a great session:

#5:  Howie Liu, CEO and co-founder Airtable: “Lessons in Scaling a Low Code Platform with Airtable”.

We run a lot of SaaStr on Airtable so the team was excited for this session.  It ended up being a fascinating discussion about the challenges in building a horizontal platform.  Things take longer when so many industries and verticals could use you.  That takes patience, Howie shares.  And much more.