Short transcript of a panel-style discussion at the SaaStr community event reflecting on the value of the SaaS/cloud community, the importance of discipline and continuous learning, and practical advice on building teams, culture, and long-term-focused product/engineering work. Speakers emphasize community learning, stealing ideas from peers, not doing everything yourself, and the responsibility to innovate while scaling teams.
This is the most advanced form of building things the world has ever seen, and that's bonkers if you think about it.
Sastr brings together the best of what this cloud computing community is all about and really magnifies it out.
You have to be confident about what you do. You have to be confident about what you believe in. I think having a conference like this.
And having the content and speaking a.
Language that other people understand is really identify. I feel like a SASS nerd in a way.
Rather than trying to motivate yourself or make yourself feel better, focus on discipline, focus on learning, codify lessons.
Whoever your hero is, they weren't born that way. They had to figure it out just like you do.
If you put all of those different experiences together, you kind of steal from all of them, right? If I was in the audience, I'd be stealing pieces from everyone.
It's worth taking a look at each of the different problems and saying, well, is there a way for software to solve this?
Because in a lot of cases they answered, bs.
You don't do everything yourself, right?
So you've got to get everyone else.
To be committed to a big, long term goal.
Building a team and a culture that knows how to focus and yet grow at the same time is a skill that I think I've honed over the years. The pressure's on us to innovate and provide more value constantly, but not to be helicopter parents. I feel a responsibility to make sure we win.
The community is at the core of defining not only who you are as a business, but who you could be.
If you can get a cohort of people that are simultaneously experiencing and going through the same problem and put them together so they can actually talk amongst each other as they're learning things, that's really powerful.
As a community, we've done amazing things and I want to thank everyone for being a part of it. And I want to tell myself in two years, wherever it's at investors, to look back at this moment, that we, as a team, everyone here, did something amazing.
