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.
7 Things We’ve Learned in Hybrid Revenue SaaS
By Tony Knopp, CEO & Co-Founder of InviteManager, which makes planning your client entertainment easy. Building an enterprise SaaS is a challenging proposition. Doing so with a services business attached can be even more interesting. Here are seven things we’ve learned about building, raising money for, and growing an enterprise SaaS with a hybrid services […]
My First Big Sales Deal
In my first start-up, I was mostly hunting whales — seven figure and eight figure deals. I had no experience doing any of this. For our First Big Customer, we’d been negotiating a $6m/year contract for quite some time (they always take time). We finally had the “all hands” meeting with all the C-level and […]
Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot: From Day 0 to IPO. What Went to Plan. What Most Certainly Didn’t (Video + Transcript)
In anticipation of the upcoming SaaStr Annual 2017, we’ll be releasing the full series of transcripts and videos from all the awesome 2016 sessions. There are rules in starting an enterprise software company. You will fail if you: 1) try to build a suite of products out of the gate, 2) focus solely on SMBs, or 3) […]
Why Some SaaS Companies Stall Out at $20m ARR
Part of my job when I invest in a start-up is to get folks excited about the company. It’s not that hard. Because I am genuinely excited. Or I wouldn’t make the investment . And part of the picture I try to paint for the The Next Investor is where they’ll be in 12-18 months. E.g., […]
Small Deals at Large Companies. Hooray!! And 100% At Risk.
Every customer you close, the next day, is at risk of churn. A month-to-month customer can basically cancel anytime. An annual contract customer can sort of cancel anytime, but really probably won’t for a year, or even 3 (more on why Year 3 is the biggest risk for bigger customers here). You know this, of […]
e-Staff Meetings and 1-on-1s: You Gotta Do Them
For the first time in my career, I’ve worked with amazing first-time managers as CEOs. Before I was a CEO, I was a mid-level manager, a director. And then a VP. Across a few start-ups. Before I was first a founder. Those management team weren’t perfect, and I wouldn’t copy everything they did. But at […]
4 Tips To Earn Respect as a Young CEO
While age ultimately doesn’t matter — results do — in SaaS, starting off as younger-than-average can create stress in a sales and customer-driven environment. But Aaron Levie started Box at 19, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out at 19-ish, you know all this. Some some hacks: Start with SMBs. It’s easier to get taken seriously, […]
Why The LinkedIn Acquisition is So Important to SaaS
So, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $25.6 billion dollars. That headline shocked all of us the other day. But if you step back, it’s not that impressive, the raw number itself. After all, as a public company, LinkedIn was worth $32 billion just a few months earlier, and had been on one heck of a run […]
The Easiest Ways to Get From $1M ARR to $10M ARR
The most important thing is not to chase the shiny penny, assuming you are growing at least 60% Year-over-Year. You’ve done the Impossible. You’ve gotten 50, 100, whatever # of businesses to pay you $1,000,000 a year. There are 10,000 new apps out there. It’s “impossible” to get to $1m. You did it. Now, the […]
How to Avoid Being Replaced as CEO by Your VCs
Worried about a bunch of VCs replacing you? You should be a little worried, probably. Just the other day, a CEO that I know fairly well was fired by a VC. Strange thing was, the VC didn’t talk to the rest of the board. Who didn’t agree. So he got un-fired. Awk. Ward. CEOs getting […]
The Difference Between Very, Very Good Founders. And Truly Great Founders.
I consider myself a “Magna Cum Laude Minus” founder. Nothing I’ve done has ever failed (although I’ve almost failed many times). I returned 5x to my investors — twice. Look, that’s pretty good. And I think I was a pretty good CEO. But not the very, very best. And I didn’t really know what […]
Faking Being in the Bay Area
There’s an endless and lively debate about the advantage of being in the SF Bay Area in SaaS. I’ve done 22 investments. The vast majority got started outside of SF, and all but 2 moved here. I’ve invested in founders from Paris (3x), Estonia, Portugal, London, Sweden, Belgium, Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, and more. […]
Don’t Let Them (Your Best Employees) Go
Now that a handful of next-generation SaaS companies have IPO’d, you can start to see the turnover more viscerally that you can observer at quieter, privately-held start-ups. You see the VPs moving on. 6-12 months after almost any IPO, and especially after one that doesn’t create a slew of millionaires … folks leave. It’s a […]
So Your App Is Just a “Nice to Have”
In the old days, folks would criticize start-ups as “just a feature”. Oh Google/Salesforce/Microsoft will just build that. Back in the day when the world was a desktop OS, there was a lot of truth to that. When the web became our OS, that started to fade. The reality is, in SaaS, Salesforce has built […]
Cornerstone OnDemand’s Kirsten Helvey: Scaling from 30-1,500 in SaaS: Lessons From the Frontlines (Video + Transcript)
In anticipation of the upcoming SaaStr Annual 2017, we’ll be releasing the full series of transcripts and videos from all the awesome 2016 sessions. In this session, Jason Lemkin receives some valuable insight from Kirsten Helvey, COO of Cornerstone OnDemand, a cloud-based learning and talent management solutions provider. Drawing from her 11 years of experience […]
