Top SaaS influencers: investors, makers, and thinkers to follow
Last updated: Feb. 2017
The world of SaaS has turned from heavy cloud to sexy apps and APIs. Investors, makers and curious minds have participated in the building of a vibrant SaaS ecosystem: both in terms of products and in terms of ideas and discussion.
The insights they share on their blogs and social networks are shaping the future of the industry, so following these influencers is a MUST DO to stay informed of the latest hot topics and stay ahead of the game.
SaaS Investors and VCs
Jason Lemkin
I like to call him the SaaS Guru. Partner at Storm Ventures (invested in Algolia, Pipedrive, Marketo…) he also co-founded EchoSign. He’s also behind SaaSTr, a resource-full website for SaaS people.
David Skok
VC at Matrix Partners — after having founded SilverStream software, among other things, David Skok also writes a cool website full of resources, ForEntrepreneurs.
Tomasz Tunguz
VC at Redpoint Venture, also writes very insightful article on tomtunguz.com (really you should read the.whole.thing)
Lincoln Murphy
Lincoln Murphy is known for being a SaaS marketing genius and a growth hacking expert. He currently puts his knowledge to work at Sixteen Ventures and GainSight.
Christoph Janz
Works at Point Nine Capital, and has invested Zendesk, Geckboard, Algolia, 15five. His blog is regularly updated with cool articles about SaaS.
Mamoon Hamid
General Partner at Social+Capital VC. He’s board director of an impressive list of SaaS products, among which Slack and Intercom. His tweets are definitely worth reading.
Byron Deeter
Partner at Bessemer Venture, a leading VC in the SaaS industry, Byron invested in Twilio, Sendgrid, DocuSign, Intercom (and more).
Brad Feld
Managing Director at Foundry Group (early-stage IT VC), Brad Feld is board member of great SaaS products such as Mattermark of Moz. He also co-founded startup accelerator Techstars and FYI, writes books about startups.
SaaS Makers
Steli Efti
CEO and co-founder of Close.io. His blogposts on Close.io’s blog are pretty enlightening.
Noah Kagan
Co-founder of AppSumo, Noah Kagan also writes http://okdork.com/ along with many other articles and guest posts elsewhere. He knows a thing of two about SaaS marketing.
Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce.com. That pretty much sums it all up. He also tweets a lot.
Hiten Shah
After launching CrazyEgg and KissMetrics, Hiten Shah is a pretty fruitful writer, blogger and social media addict. He writes about SaaS here: http://hiten.com/
Peter Reinhardt
Peter is the CEO and co-founder of Segment. He also writes http://rein.pk/ where you can read about APIs as well as Earth physics.
Eoghan McCabe
His latest tweets are about ping-pong. I think it’s crucial for the SaaS industry, but if you disagree, no worries, he’s also the CEO of Intercom.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Creator of Ruby on Rails and former CTO of Basecamp, David write a lot, mostly on tech issues, also on startups (in his book Rework): http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/
Stewart Butterfield
Slack is the SaaS to follow these days (and to use, by the way) — as is his CEO, Stewart Butterfield.
Sean Ellis
Sean is behind GrowthHackers.com, that I read and use (almost) everyday, and Qualaroo. He’s a must-follow.
Brian Halligan
The CEO of Hubspot likes to share his knowledge on inbound marketing across the web and in great books. FYI his co-founder and CTO also likes to babble on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dharmesh
Aaron Levie
The CEO of Box tweets a lot about SaaS and cloud issues. According to his Twitter bio, he also loves another 4-letter words that contains 2 “A”s. I’ll let you discover what it is.
Writers and thinkers
Mike Butcher writes great SaaS-related articles on TechCrunch
Aaron Ross
Author of Predictable Revenue — which is a book, but you can find many other resources on its website: http://predictablerevenue.com/
Phil Wainewright
Writes and blogs about SaaS on http://diginomica.com/ and on ZDnet.
Justin Pirie
Writes interesting posts about SaaS — and other topics — on his blog http://www.justinpirie.com/
Keep an eye on them
This part is purely a list of cool people I know who write and tweet interesting stuff on SaaS, that you might not have heard of (yet!) — I wish to enrich this paragraph, please suggest me interesting people!
Mathilde Collin
CEO at Frontapp, shares her knowledge (on SaaS, Lego and being a CEO) on Front’s blog.
Clément Vouillon
I have zero objectivity when sharing his blog: I used to work with him and he started saasclub.com — but take a look at it anyway, he’s writing great stuff.
Julien Lemoine
Another frenchie (not on purpose, I swear) — he doesn’t tweet as much as he should, since he’s the CTO of Algolia and has a lot to share.
Thomas Schranz
Co-founder & CEO of Blossom, he writes on Medium about SaaS and his own experience.
Jakob Marovt
Young and promising founder of PipeTop, he has a pretty cool Medium.
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