Marketo: Winning, IPOing, and Going Upmarket (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. We were super excited to have Phil Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Marketo, sit down and talk to us about the triumphs (and struggles) leading Marketo from inception to IPO. Phil […]
What is it Like to Wake Up and Have the Press Ready to Torpedo Your Business?
In case you missed it, the press yesterday ran several stories questioning the viability of a wireless charging company I invested in called uBeam. Obviously my day turned out very differently than I had anticipated when I woke up, but it wasn’t half as bad as the entire team at uBeam must have felt yesterday. […]
Raising More Than $20m in Venture Capital? It’s All Good — If You Are Even Better Than Box
For the past few years, it’s been pretty confusing trying to understand what’s going on in SaaS fundraising. Starting in ’13 through mid-’15, rounds dramatically grew in size and pace, and dozens of unicorns were minted. Things then slowed down dramatically in Q1 ’16, as the SaaS public markets crashed … and then recovered in […]
CIO alert: Information technology is a $4 trillion global business
Research from IT advocacy group, CompTIA, offers interesting data about the size, scope, and growth of the information technology industry. For CIOs and other IT professionals, understanding the trends can help you create company strategy, identify job opportunities, understand areas of growth, and sidestep the impact of industry weakness. For example, there is a skills […]
How Would You Build a Movie Studio if You Started Today?
I met Andrew Stalbow and Petri Järvilehto from Seriously several years ago after they had just left Angry Birds where they were responsible for international business development / licensing and the game studio, respectively. They had a new company in mind and they posed a question to me “If Walt Disney were to try and […]
Getting Your Series A Mojo Back
You Need to Find Your Mojo A Chip On Your Shoulder A few years ago I wrote a blog post on entrepreneurs with a chip on their shoulders. I think it’s an important read. A chip on one’s shoulder as in, “Fuck the system, it’s broken and I want to fix it” is exactly the […]
When the Player-Coach is Just That. And No More.
We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about not screwing up that VP of Sales hire. Done right, it will accelerate your company to the next level. Done wrong — you can lose the better part of a year, and half of your last round of capital. And we’ve talked a lot about the trade-offs in […]
Lead, Follow or Get the Fuck Out of the Way
Lead — It’s hard to be a real leader. Decisions are never black or white, so most people fudge. The straddle middle grounds to keep everybody happy. They make compromises to try and hold together constituencies. On business decisions they want to hedge their bets so they do a little bit of everything but nothing […]
At $50k in MRR, Running Out of Money Is No Longer an Excuse
We’ve talked a lot about SaaStr on the challenges in getting from nothing to that first $1m-$1.5m in ARR, “Initial Traction”. That is takes longer than you think. That if you get 10 customers, you can get another 10, 100, and so on. There’s a particular moment in time I want to focus on here […]
Why Misunderstanding Startup Metrics Can Cost You Your Business
There has been a lot of public debate over the past several weeks about whether it’s a good thing to be “gross margin positive” or not and commentary always reminds me that some people at startups don’t quite understand financial metrics or even how to think about which ones are healthy. When I publicly Tweeted […]
#CXOTALK: Workday CEO explains his top priorities
Workday is one of the few pure software-as-a-service vendors operating at large enterprise scale. The company’s products fall into two broad categories: human capital management and financials. Both HCM and financials are backbone applications used by every large organization, and Workday’s customers are among the biggest companies in the world. During a conversation with Workday’s […]
SaaS Financial Plan 2.0 (from Christoph Janz)
Recently on SaaStr, we did an important post on a simple Trailing Four Month Financial Model. This is one of my best hacks. If you average the growth rate over your last four months, and keep updating it — you’ll have a real-time model that keeps you honest. More on that here. But what about just […]
How to Avoid Being Disrupted as a VC
My partner Greg Bettinelli (worth following on Twitter) was recently named by The LA Business Journal as the “Top deal maker in Los Angeles in Venture Capital.” Numero uno. I was nowhere to be found. And that’s a true reflection of just how successful and prolific Greg has been in LA. In a world that is […]
Is it SaaS? Is it ARR?
A lot of us SaaS old timers feel like it may almost be time to retire the SaaS acronym. Isn’t everything SaaS now? No one is building on-prem software from scratch anymore, are they? It’s a fair point. I remember when Salesforce used “No Software” as their tag line. I was at a Salesforce event, […]
An Inside Scoop on the Funding Environment and What it Might Mean for You
$30 million. That’s how much Invoca raised and we’re announcing it today. It is an heroic accomplishment in a brutal fund-raising market in which only market leaders can bring in that sort of money. But the story started more than 6 months ago. And the narrative may tell you something about your own journey one […]
