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 […]
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 […]
The Lead Plateau You May Hit Just As It Gets Good. How to Plan Around It.
Many SaaS companies hit an “organic lead plateau” at several phases: When you get Really Big, at some point, every company in the world is an Opportunity. Box, Salesforce, etc. really don’t have many new opportunies to hit up. Instead, they have to work them better. This can hit you around $50-$80m-$100m ARR or so. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
