SaaStr Annual 2019 Will Rock! Check Out the Agenda and Sessions

If your calendar had a “cloud season” the way your streaming app has a “true crime season,” SaaStr Annual 2019 is the season finale.
Three packed days. A convention center big enough to make your step counter file for overtime. And a schedule engineered to trigger
both inspiration and mild, harmless FOMO (the healthy kind that makes you drink water and network like an adult).

SaaStr Annual has a reputation for being unapologetically tactical: fewer fluffy “thought leadership” monologues, more
“here’s what we tried, here’s what broke, here’s what finally worked, please don’t do the dumb thing we did.”
SaaStr Annual 2019 turns that dial up againwith multiple stages, tons of mentoring, and a full-on “Money Day” for founders who
want to understand fundraising without having to decode VC tweets like they’re ancient runes.

Why SaaStr Annual 2019 is built to “rock”

SaaStr Annual 2019 is designed like a SaaS product release: bigger capacity, more features, fewer bottlenecks.
The move to a larger venue in San Jose isn’t just a change of sceneryit’s a practical upgrade that helps with the two things
every attendee wants more of: good seats and good conversations.

The event format also leans hard into variety. Instead of treating “SaaS” like a single job description (it isn’t),
the conference spreads content across functionssales, marketing, customer success, product, engineering, and leadership
so you can go deep on your role without sitting through a session that feels like it was written for someone else’s org chart.

SEO note (without being weird about it)

If you’re searching for the SaaStr Annual 2019 agenda, you’ll quickly notice the lineup is less about “topics”
and more about stages of growth: from early scaling problems to unicorn-level complexity, with plenty of
practical stops in between.

How the SaaStr Annual 2019 agenda is shaped (and why it works)

Think of SaaStr Annual 2019 as three themed days that map to what founders and operators obsess over:
scaling, learning from the breakout winners, and funding + finance.
That structure is useful because it gives you a default plan even if you show up without one (brave, chaotic, but valid).

Day 1: Scaling Day (aka “We are hiring… and everything hurts”)

Day 1 is built around scaling across functionswhat changes when you go from “scrappy and clever” to “operationally consistent.”
You’ll find sessions that speak to:

• Sales: building repeatable pipeline, comp plans, playbooks, and manager coaching rhythms
• Marketing: demand gen + brand, positioning that survives competition, and lifecycle that reduces churn
• Customer Success: net retention, expansion motions, and building a team that doesn’t burn out
• Product & Engineering: shipping faster without turning your roadmap into a haunted house
• Leadership: org design, hiring, culture, and “how to scale without accidentally scaling chaos”

Day 2: “Mythical Creatures of SaaS” (Prenicorns, Unicorns, Decacorns)

Day 2 is the fun one: the breakout stories, the “we went from 0 to ridiculous,” and the honest post-mortems that are
way more helpful than press releases. This is where you study patterns: what repeatably works, what fails, and what’s
simply a timing advantage you can’t copy (but can learn from).

Expect founder journeys, scaling lessons from category leaders, and case studies that blend strategy with the gritty details:
pricing changes, sales motion shifts, and the uncomfortable moment someone admits their “brilliant idea” didn’t survive the quarter.

Day 3: Money Day (fundraising, finance, and grown-up metrics)

Money Day is where the agenda leans into funding strategy, investor conversations, and how to understand your metrics
without lying to yourself (accidentally… or on purpose).
If you’re fundraising, thinking about it, or trying to spend responsibly after raising,
this is the day you circle in your calendar with the intensity of a CFO reviewing vendor renewals.

Sessions worth building your SaaStr Annual 2019 schedule around

With a multi-stage agenda, the goal isn’t to attend the “best” sessions (that’s a trap). The goal is to attend the sessions
that are best for your current constraints: pipeline, retention, hiring, product velocity, or capital strategy.
Below are session themes and examples that tend to deliver the most ROI.

1) CEO & operator sessions: the decisions you can’t delegate

Leadership content at SaaStr is strongest when it’s specificespecially when speakers talk about the messy trade-offs:
what they stopped doing, what they doubled down on, and what they wish they’d measured earlier.

• Scaling leadership: the top problems CEOs wrestle with as the company grows
• Culture under pressure: how to cross major headcount milestones without turning into a bureaucracy
• Operating cadence: board rhythms, forecasting discipline, and decision-making frameworks

2) Sales, marketing, and the “revenue engine” sessions

SaaStr is famously revenue-forward, and 2019 leans into modern go-to-market: inside sales evolution, lifecycle marketing,
and the reality that your funnel doesn’t behave like a neat textbook diagram.

• Inside sales & outbound: building repeatable pipeline with process (not heroics)
• Modern demand gen: blending brand + performance without treating them like rival departments
• Flywheel thinking: aligning acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion as one system

3) Customer Success and retention: where real SaaS winners live

Growth is nice. Retention is the part that keeps the lights on. Sessions focused on net revenue retention, expansion motions,
and success org design tend to land particularly well because the advice is measurable and operational.

• CS team building: hiring and enabling CSMs to drive expansion, not just “handle tickets politely”
• Net retention playbooks: how teams reach strong expansion without annoying customers
• Churn archaeology: diagnosing churn like a detective instead of blaming “bad fit” and moving on

4) Product & engineering: ship faster, break less

If you’ve ever watched a roadmap get eaten alive by enterprise requests, you’ll appreciate the product and engineering content.
This is where you’ll hear about scaling architecture, building for reliability, and making trade-offs that keep velocity alive.

• Scaling product management: prioritization at scale and avoiding “roadmap democracy”
• Engineering leadership: hiring, team structure, and platform decisions that prevent future pain
• Security & trust: the stuff customers care about right after they stop asking about features

5) Finance & fundraising: stop guessing, start modeling

Money Day content, plus finance-heavy sessions across the week, helps founders and operators sharpen how they talk about the business:
CAC, LTV, payback, burn multiple, and the narratives investors actually respond to. The best sessions connect metrics to decisions:
how a comp plan changes behavior, how pricing changes retention, and how forecasting supports hiring.

You’ll also find case-study style sessionsthings like fundraising lessons, pitch-deck breakdowns, and “here’s what we’d do differently”
retrospectives that are more useful than any generic “fundraising tips” listicle.

Mentorship, networking, and the “SaaStr magic” between sessions

The agenda is only half the event. The other half is the awkward-but-valuable hallway conversations where someone casually mentions
a tactic that saves you three months of trial and error. SaaStr Annual 2019 builds in structured ways to make those conversations easier.

Braindates and mentoring: less “networking,” more actual help

Braindates (mentoring meetups in small formats) are a standout feature because they change the default interaction from
“So… what do you do?” to “Here’s the problem I’m solvinghave you solved it before?” That simple shift makes the conversation useful fast.

Meet-a-VC and Money Day programming

Founders who are post-revenue (and serious about fundraising) get a different kind of value from SaaStr Annual:
curated investor access and programming designed to help you pitch, position, and understand what “good” looks like at your stage.
Even if you’re not raising this quarter, Money Day sessions are still valuable because they teach you how investors evaluate your story.

The sponsor floor (yes, really)

The sponsor area can be surprisingly high-signal if you treat it like a research lab instead of a swag buffet.
Want to see what “best practices” look like in the wild? Watch how modern SaaS companies pitch their product in 30 seconds,
how they position against competitors, and how they frame ROI. Then steal the good parts (politely) for your own messaging.

How to plan your SaaStr Annual 2019 schedule like a pro (without losing your mind)

With hundreds of sessions and multiple stages, the real skill is curation. Here’s a planning approach that works
whether you’re a founder, an operator, or someone who just likes collecting tactical notes like Pokémon.

Step 1: Pick a “theme” per half-day

Don’t try to do everything. Instead, pick one priority theme per half-day:
pipeline, retention, hiring, product velocity, or fundraising.
This keeps you from bouncing between sessions that are individually good but collectively incoherent.

Step 2: Use pre-registration strategically

Some sessions are in higher demand. If you can pre-register, do it for the sessions that would genuinely change what you do next week,
not just the ones with the biggest logos. Big-name speakers are greatuntil you realize the session you actually needed was the one about
fixing onboarding churn.

Step 3: Build whitespace into your agenda

Your best conversations won’t happen on a stage. They’ll happen in the hallway, in the networking lounge, or over coffee.
Leave 15–20 minutes between blocks so you can actually talk to people, take notes, and get to the next session without sprinting.
(No one wants to discuss ARR while you’re visibly out of breath.)

Step 4: Have a “people list,” not just a session list

Make a short list of roles you want to meet: a Head of Demand Gen at your stage, a VP CS who’s fixed churn, a RevOps leader
who’s built forecasting discipline. Sessions are optional; the right 3 conversations can be worth the entire ticket.

Step 5: Capture notes like you plan to use them

The best note-taking trick: write down one “do this next week” action per session. If you can’t find one,
it was either too high-level, or you picked the wrong session for your current stage.

Who should attend SaaStr Annual 2019 (and what “ROI” actually looks like)

SaaStr Annual is ideal for B2B SaaS founders and operators who want actionable strategies and peer-level learning.
Different roles tend to extract value in different ways:

Founders & CEOs

• Pressure-tested scaling lessons from leaders who have made (and survived) hard calls
• Fundraising strategy, investor expectations, and more realistic “what good looks like” benchmarks
• High-signal networking with other founders who can share templates, vendors, and hard-won mistakes

Sales, marketing, and RevOps leaders

• Comp, pipeline, enablement, and the operational mechanics of predictable revenue
• Lifecycle, retention loops, and aligning acquisition to expansion
• Modern GTM strategies that match how buyers actually buy

Customer Success, product, and engineering leaders

• Retention playbooks, expansion strategy, and CS org design
• Product planning and prioritization strategies that scale
• Engineering leadership and architecture decisions that protect velocity

The real ROI is rarely “I learned one magic trick.” It’s more like:
I stole five good ideas, validated my strategy with three peers, and left with two playbooks I can implement next sprint.

Conclusion: the agenda is your mapyour strategy is the vehicle

“SaaStr Annual 2019 will rock” isn’t just hype. The agenda structure makes it easier to learn by stage, function, and goal:
scale on Day 1, study breakout patterns on Day 2, and sharpen money decisions on Day 3.
Mix in mentoring, Braindates, and the Meet-a-VC style programming, and you get an event that’s less “conference” and more
“three-day operating system upgrade.”

Plan your schedule around the bottlenecks you’re facing right now, not the ones that sound glamorous.
Then leave room for conversationsbecause your next big breakthrough might show up disguised as a casual chat near the coffee line.

Extra field notes (): What “SaaStr Annual 2019 will rock” feels like in real life

You don’t need to “attend every session” to win SaaStr Annual. In fact, trying to do that is how you end up with 47 notes,
zero actions, and a mild existential crisis somewhere between Stage 3 and the sponsor floor.
Instead, experienced attendees treat SaaStr like a product discovery sprint: pick a hypothesis, run experiments, collect data,
and leave with decisions.

One recurring story from veterans: the badge pickup is a cheat code. If you can grab your badge early,
you start the conference calm instead of starting it like you’re late to a flight you can’t rebook. Calm matters.
Calm people make better networking decisions. Panicked people talk too fast and accidentally pitch someone who is just trying to find a bathroom.

Another common “I wish someone told me this” moment: your shoes are a business decision.
The venue is big. You will walk. A lot. Wear something that lets you move at “confident operator pace,” not “injured flamingo pace.”
When your feet hurt, your attention span drops. When your attention span drops, you stop absorbing the tactical gold and start
nodding politely at sentences you’ll forget in 90 seconds.

Mentoring sessions and Braindates tend to produce the most memorable outcomes because they force specificity.
Instead of listening passively, you show up with a problem statement:
“We’re struggling with onboarding-to-activation conversion,” or “Our expansion motion is inconsistent,” or
“We’re hiring AEs but ramp time is brutalhelp.”
People respond to that. You’ll get templates, scorecards, talk tracks, and the occasional blunt truth delivered kindly,
which is basically the SaaS equivalent of a spa day.

The sponsor floor can feel noisyuntil you use it tactically. Pick two categories you’re evaluating (say: sales engagement
and customer support automation) and do fast discovery. Ask each vendor the same three questions:
(1) Who is your best-fit customer by stage? (2) What’s the fastest measurable win?
(3) What’s the most common reason customers churn?
That last question is pure gold. You learn what breaks in real deployments, not just what demos look like.

Finally, the “after” is where most people drop the ball. The best attendees schedule 60 minutes the day they return to:
(a) pick the top five actions from their notes, (b) assign owners and due dates, and (c) follow up with 5–10 people they met
while the memory is still fresh. That’s how SaaStr turns from a fun event into actual momentum.
The conference ends on Day 3, but the ROI shows up in the next 30 daysif you do the unglamorous part.