So we are gearing up now for the 6th (!) ever SaaStrAnnual, March 10-12 in San Jose / SF Bay Area.
We’ll have:
- 20,000 attendees (our goal. we will at least come close)
- 5,000 mentoring sessions and 1-on-1s
- 1,000 VCs
- 400 sessions and workshops
- Our first-ever CXO Summit with $100 billion+ in buyers represented
- 100+ leading sponsors and vendors exhibiting
And this will be the first one where we know what we are doing 
Scaling this quickly, and more relevantly, changing and evolving so much each year is hard. We’ve been in 5 different venues the first 5 years, with 3+ different agencies helping us, and so much more change. And what started off as a side project to bring the SaaStr community together is now a real (if tiny) organization with eight figures in revenues — and expenses!
We’ve also branched out, and had 1,600+ at our first SaaStr Europa in Paris, then 2,500+ this year at Europa #2. We also had 1,200+ at the first SaaStr Scale this year in SF as well. And beyond that, we have 100,000+ downloads to our podcasts and 1m+ views to our content each month.
Our top sponsors asked us to do more for them, and more deeply integrate them with our year-round SaaStr activities.
It took us a little while to figure it out, but now we have and it will enable us to partner more deeply with a handful of top-tier vendors whose value and mission we believe in and align with.
The first is G2.
In many ways, G2 was built at a parallel time and on a parallel mission to SaaStr. Godard Abel, CEO, sold his start-up BigMachines to Oracle at roughly the same time I sold EchoSign / Adobe Sign to Adobe. We both weren’t quite done, and took our energies on related but different paths. Godard founded G2 and also a 2.0 version of BigMachines at the same time (!), selling the latter, Steelbrick, to Salesforce for $300m+ after less than 3 years. Boy, he raced way past me.
At the same time, he also saw a gap in educating the market on SaaS, albeit more from a traditional business perspective. SaaStr was all about community, learnings and sharings. G2 was about rebooting a lot of how buyers discover new and established vendors, and using more honest and community feedback to feed that vs. the traditional magic quadrant model.
So it’s pretty fun for me to be partnering more deeply, with both founders and a product and mission we believe in and is synergistic with our values.
You’ll see G2 big time at SaaStr Annual, SaaStr Europa, SaaStr Scale, SaaStr East, CXO Summit, and more.
But you won’t see anything that isn’t laser-focused on helping the next generation of founders and Cloud execs. That’s what we do. That’s our mission.
And thank you, G2, and all the rest of our readers, sponsors, attendees and more for being on that mission with us.
That mission isn’t changing. It’s only getting better.
The post A Big Thank You to Our First Unicorn Sponsor, G2. And What We’ve Learned. appeared first on SaaStr.
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
