David Cummings
Co-Founder, Atlanta Tech Village. On 1 show, 0 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Everything David Cummings said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Cummings: Double SaaS Prices Until 25% to 50% Ask for Discounts
“And then raise your prices every six months. Go ahead and double them until you're at the upper end of reasonable. You'll know you're at the upper end of reasonable when people on the phone Start asking for discounts, 25 to 50% of the time, right?”
Pardot grew to $13M ARR and sold for $100M without board meetings
“We raised zero dollars of venture capital. We sold the business for a hundred million dollars, and we had never held a single board meeting. So think about that. We sold Pardot. We had thirteen million of recurring revenue. Hundred percent year-over-year growt…”
Cummings: SalesLoft will reach a $1B unicorn valuation within two years
“And so now, seven years later, SalesLoft has over 400 employees, has raised over seventy-five million dollars of venture capital, and in the next two years, if not sooner, my prediction is that they will be a unicorn that you'll be able to read about on TechCr…”
Cummings: Qualtrics scaled to $500M ARR without primary balance sheet capital
“Ryan Smith from Qualtrics, and he told the amazing story of going from zero to five hundred million of revenue
And not requiring any primary capital. Five hundred million in recurring revenue, and they never raised any money that went to the balance sheet.”
Atlanta SaaS scaling is primarily constrained by a lack of C-level talent
“What's more difficult coming from a city like Atlanta growing SaaS businesses is C-level talent. We have amazing individual contributors. We have amazing people from a middle management perspective. But the C-level talent has been a real challenge.”
Cummings: Never Give a SaaS Discount Without Receiving Value in Return
“And when people ask for those discounts, have a consistent discount policy, 1015, 20% off, but never give a discount without asking for something in return. Always get something in return. Get them to commit to doing a press release, to be a testimonial, to do…”
Cummings: Pardot Needed Wholesale Leadership Overhaul to Scale Beyond $13M ARR
“Our senior talent wasn't going to be able to make the next leap to go from thirteen million of recurring to 20 to 50 and beyond. We knew that we were gonna have to do a wholesale change Of our senior team at time of sale.”
Cummings: Pardot generated $250M in recognized revenue at Salesforce last year
“Today, six years later, Pardot, as part of salesforce.com, last calendar year, did two hundred and fifty million of recognized revenue.”
Cummings: Invested $350K as sole pre-revenue investor in Calendly on the spot
“And right there on the spot, I wrote him a check for 350,000 dollars as the sole pre-revenue investor, and today Calendly is used by millions and millions of people around the world.”
Cummings: Most SaaS investors view credit lines as safety nets, not growth tools
“In today's world, most SaaS companies, at least the ones that I'm involved with, the investors on the board recommend using lines of credit as a safety net, but not to actually grow the business.”
Cummings: Pardot sold at $13M revenue without a CFO
“Now, we sold the business at thirteen million of revenue. We had no CFO.”
Cummings: Segment SaaS metrics across three buckets at $10M ARR
“Once you hit ten million in recurring, my recommendation is to take all your generic metrics, CAC to LTV, magic number, all your generic metrics, and then break them out by the three most important segments of your business.”
Cummings: Top Interview Indicator Is Whether Candidates Were Pulled into Roles
“And what you want to listen for, whether they have two years of experience or 22 years of experience, you want to listen to the fact that they were pulled from their position into the next role. You want to hear that somebody somewhere saw something in them an…”
Cummings: SalesLoft's first product was an InsideView clone that failed
“Day one with SalesLoft, with Kyle, the first idea that we had was to be a knockoff of InsideView. So InsideView shows a newspaper of sorts of your contacts. So you want to know as a salesperson when a contact of yours changes jobs, like a job change alerts. An…”
SalesLoft's early prospector tool suffered high churn from one-time data scraping
“What we quickly found with the prospector tool is that it was a sugar high. People would come in, they would go get 5000 contacts, and then they wouldn't renew. We knew we wanted to build something that had sustainable recurring value.”
Cummings: Pardot took and burned $3M from SVB with zero warrants
“Back then, we negotiated with Silicon Valley Bank that there were no warrants, so there was no dilution at all, and we got three million dollars from the bank, and at time of sale, we had burned all three million dollars.”
Cummings: Pardot Raised Monthly Pricing from $65 to $1,500
“At Pardot, we started our product, we charged 65 dollars a month, and then six months later we went to a 125 dollars a month, and then six months later we went to 325 dollars a month, six months later 500 dollars a month, then seven 50, then a thousand, then 1…”
Cummings: Pardot gave free house cleaning and in-house massages to all employees
“So at Pardot, we provided free house cleaning to all 100 plus employees.
So company administered house cleaning.
We took our central conference room, turned it into a spa, hired a masseuse on staff as a W-II employee.
We followed the results only work envir…”
The other half of the tape: David Cummings's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Kyle Porter 3Doug Song 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Official SaaStr Podcast 4
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens David's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder, Atlanta Tech Village | 0 +1 | 18 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |