Interview with Yvonne Wassenaar, CIO of New Relic, on SaaS businesses

Questions: 1. What is a SaaS business? 2. What about some of the benefits and disadvantages & difficulties of operating with a SaaS model? 3. What cultural/behavioral issues would you consider as the fundamental drivers of growth for SaaS businesses in the next five to ten years? 4. What does New Relic’s target customer look like, and are there prospects who run a web-based businesses that aren’t a good fit for your solutions? 5. How do you measure/evaluate the customer’s experience? What are the key performance indicators for it? 6. The gross & net margins for many of the established SaaS companies can be overwhelmingly good, but everyone seems to be doing “the Amazon thing” and investing their cash. Do you think an environment, where nobody is showing a profit, can be unhealthy? Or do you think it’s healthy and necessary? Why? 7. The examples being the Ubers and WhatsApps of the world: What do you think about our current ability to build enormous, disruptive, technology companies with a relatively small workforce: Blessing or a curse? Job creators or job destroyers?

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