Jason M. Lemkin
Co-Founder and CEO of EchoSign from inception through tens of millions in cash-flow positive SaaS revenue and acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc.
Jason then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where EchoSign was named the most successful acquisition of 2011-12, posting 199% YoY growth.
Maybe It’s More Important Your Co-Founders’ Weaknesses are Complementary To Yours
I think in the enterprise, in SaaS, it’s especially important you pick the right co-founders. It’s a 7-10 year journey, after all. In Consumer Internet, I guess so long as you hit it early, you can always get rid of Eduardo (as expensive as that may be), kick out the Sean Parkers, bring in the [...]
BATNA, And Oracle’s $811m Purchase of Eloqua
It may seem strange to see Oracle acquire Eloqua for $811m just a few months after their IPO. But it’s not strange at all. I am 95% sure talks at some level were going on for quite some time, long before the IPO. And 80% sure, a soft offer of less than $500m or [...]
Heading into 2013: Thoughts on Ways The Start-Up World is Just So Much Better Now
I came of age in the tech/venture start-up world in the late ’90s. As we go into 2013, I’ve reflected a bit on just how much better things are for founders and entrepreneurs now than they used to be, even just in 2005, when we started EchoSign, let alone the old days of Web 1.0. [...]
How to Get From 1.0 Launch to Traction in SaaS
Building 1.0 products is tough. Creating something from nothing is hard, a relatively rare skillset. You need tenacity, creativity, amazing developers, a keen understanding of your market both today and 24-36 months out. … But in the end, it’s the easy part. Because if you have a talented enough team, you can building almost anything, [...]
Want to Understand SaaS? If Nothing Else — Understand That It Compounds
If you haven’t done a SaaS start-up before, it’s different. The reasons are many, but I think they can almost all be summed up in one key factor: SaaS compounds. What does this mean, that SaaS compounds? It means it’s really, really hard to get revenues going. You close a customer for $120 in annualized [...]
Why Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) Is The Most Important Metric in SaaS
One thing that is great in SaaS, from a 20,000 foot perspective at least, is You Can See The Future. It’s the benefit of a recurring revenue stream in a B2B model. If you did $100k last month, and have grown 6% a month each month for the last 12 mos, I can pretty much [...]
Don’t Accidentally Bootstrap Yourself to Death
There’s a phenomenon, a type of SaaS company, that I think if you are scrappy, if you can make things happen as a founder — that you need to be careful not to become. It’s the Bootstrapped-to-Death Start-up. I’ve known quite a few over the past 7 years, and each and every one is [...]
Imagine a World With Unlimited Capital, and See Where It Takes You
There’s an exercise BigCos do, that I was asked to do, that at first, I thought was a waste of time. The exercise is: ”How would you run your business if short-term revenues didn’t matter?” I thought (and still think) in that context it was a bit of a trick question. First, of course revenues [...]
Why You Should Kill Your Competitor in SaaS
IMHO, most SaaS CEOs/founders aren’t Killers. They can’t be. They’re Builders. In fact, the two jobs of a founder/CEO are antithetically opposed to zero-sum and attack thinking. First, at a strategic level, the founder/CEO has to see the future, a positive future, that is 100x bigger than today. Focused on putting the internal pieces together [...]
I Don’t Know about CEO Coaches. But We All Could Use CEO Trainers.
Once you’ve been venture backed, if not before, you’ll hear a lot about CEO Coaches. The classic example is Bill Campbell, CEO coach to Steve Jobs, Google, now Mark Pincus, and other leaders in between. VCs generally have great networks of ex-CEOs and want to help, and plug you in with a CEO coach. The [...]
If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.
Ok I know this post and its title seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But empirically, I can tell you isn’t. Over the past 12 months, I’ve met with friends/colleagues/partners/ex-customers who are total rockstars and working on starting a company. I mean, total rockstars. (Yes, I know that’s an abused team). What [...]
Making Sense of Color after Meraki, and Going Big
I had a draft post I’d written weeks ago entitled something like “Color: Just an Enormously Large Seed Round Gone Horribly Wrong”, or something like that. Which I guess it was — $41,000,000 to build an iOS app with no revenue that no one ever used. But it wasn’t that interesting, that post/story, so I [...]
Yes, You Can Measure Everything. Marketing, PR, Dev, Lead Efficiency. Do It.
One thing so many people tell you, in small and big companies alike (especially the big ones), is “you can’t measure [XXX]“. PR firms always tell how you can’t measure the value of press. Engineers tell you that you can’t measure development, it’s a soft science. Corporate marketers tell you that you can’t measure the [...]
The Perils and Pitfalls of the “Been There, Done That” VP: Posers and Mercenaries
Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming).
Don’t Hire CEOs, Architects, Gamers, or Dualies
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. from various domains including particle physics. Front-end, mid-end, back-end engineers of all sorts and types. Sales managers back when I never managed sales. Internet marketers [...]
