SaaStr 165: Step By Step Guide To Building Truly Diverse Teams, Why Data Professionals Must Be At The Core of Your Company & How To Move Upmarket Effectively with Harry Glaser, Founder & CEO @ Periscope Data

Harry Glaser is the Founder & CEO @ Periscope Data, the startup that allows you to transform your business with the fastest, most powerful analytics platform. To date, Periscope have raised over $34m in funding from some of the very best in the business including Bessemer, SV Angel, DFJ, Susa Ventures and Data Collective, just to name a few. With this funding they now serve over 975 customers including Adobe, Flexport, Tinder, NewRelic and more. Prior to founding Periscope, Harry was a Product Manager @ Google. Fun fact about Periscope, it was voted the best small company to work for in 2017.  

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Harry made his way from being a PM at Google to convincing his co-founder Tom to leave his comfortable corporate job in Seattle to chase the startup dream in the valley?
• Diverse Teams: There a a lot of all white male teams in SaaS, what should they do to create a more diverse, well-rounded team? What is the first step? What is the framework for achieving this hiring ambition? What are the biggest challenges? Where does Harry see founders most often making mistakes in building diverse teams?
• Data Teams: Why does Harry believe that founding teams must have data professionals within them from Day 1? Why does Harry believe this makes those startups more successful? What are the fundamental benefits? How does this data-centricity change the decision-making of the organisation? What are the core challenges in scaling this data team?
• Moving Upmarket: Why does Harry believe that it is better to do SMB to enterprise than enterprise to SMB? How does the product fundamentally change when addressing the enterprise market? How does the structure of the team change with the move? How does the messaging of the company alter with the move to a more enterprise focus?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Harry know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. Harry recently tweeted “you don’t choose the kind of CEO you are”, what kind of CEO are you then?
3. A moment in Harry’s life that has served as an inflection point and changed the way he thinks?
4. What can a founder do today to instantly make a better workplace culture?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Harry Glaser