SaaStr 086: Why You Have To Focus On A Tiny Market & How to Sell That Market To VCs with Auren Hoffman, Founder @ Safegraph & LiveRamp

Auren Hoffman is best known for being the former CEO and Founder @ LiveRamp, the leading data onboarder that was acquired by Acxiom for $310m. Today’s talk focuses on the 5 core lessons Auren took from that incredible journey with LiveRamp. Auren was also an angel investor and board member at BrightRoll, prior to it’s $610m acquisition by Yahoo. Today, he is the CEO at SafeGraph, the startup that is unlocking the world’s most powerful data so that machines and humans can answer some of society’s toughest questions.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• What is Auren’s thesis towards hiring all round athletes as opposed to position players? When do it make sense to do either? What stage of the company is right for which persona?
• What are the two different types of sales personas? At what type of company should you hire a relationship driven sales team and then what type of company for a product driven sales team?
• Why does Auren believe you should target a very small niche of the market? What are the benefits of such focus? How can you sell such a small market to VCs?
• How does Auren perceive the future of enterprise software? How has the rise of bottoms up sales affected the SaaS environment? How many more SaaS companies and buyers of SaaS are there today, compared to 10 years ago?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Auren Hoffman

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