Andy Wilson, CEO of Logikcull: “8 Things Learned Going from a Services Business to a SaaS Business”
Earlier this year, I violated Yet Another Rule of Venture Capital. Don’t invest in services businesses, They Say — and that includes SaaS businesses that born out of services business. Yes, Hootsuite and others have made this transition work well in the end, growing out of agencies and the like. But generally, they say, founders that come […]
5 Tips To Make The Journey More Fun
Really, there’s nothing I’ve done in my life that is harder than being a founder CEO. Nothing. It’s 100x harder than being a VP. Even if the actual work is easier. It’s 100x harder than being a VC. Even if delivering top returns as a VC is maybe even harder than as a founder. But I […]
Some Career Advice for Aspiring Tech CEOs
You’ve never been a CEO but might like to be one some day. But how? Nobody sees you as a CEO since you’ve never been one? I wrote this conundrum and the need to take charge of how the market define your skills in my much-read blog post on “personal branding.” If you don’t create the […]
In SaaS, Your Burn Rate is Muchly a Function of Your Chosen Competition
I’ve been doing this SaaS thing for a solid decade now, with some success, and plenty of mistakes, and yet there are some questions that are at some level, almost a mystery, mostly around “average” CACs and “average” burn rates in SaaS: Why was Veeva able to burn only ~$10m net on its way to an IPO? […]
Be Careful About Being a Meddling Startup CEO
I recently wrote a post talking about how some VCs meddle in operating company decisions or some executive teams are too reliant on VCs to jump in and make hard calls for them. Fred Wilson also wrote on a similar topic in his usual more succinct manner, with a great quote being: “One thing I […]
Why Most Online Video Companies Will Fail
I live in LA and fund startups. So you can imagine that I see a lot of video startups. Most will fail. I repeat the same mantra to every one I see. “You can’t build a large online video company. You have to build a large online tech company that distributes video.” I try to […]
Here’s What The @NYTimes Should Teach Its Writers About Social Media
Not everybody likes the NY Times. I happen to be a long-time fan and paid subscriber. I mostly read the op eds and have for years. I count amongst my favorite people to read from the left & the right as David Brooks, Thomas Friedman & Paul Krugman (and was a big fan of the late […]
Roundtrip Revenue: Probably, Just Do It.
If you’ve been around since the Web 1.0 days, a certain phrase may send shivers up your spine — “Roundtrip Revenue.” People went to jail at AOL for this, folks, overstating revenue by as much as $1 billion that wasn’t really real. It was just matched against AOL purchases, making the revenues in essence nonexistent. […]
Ok, We’ve Shut Registration Down at 1,850 Folks for The SaaStr Annual. What You Need to Know.
Phew. Ok well we went a bit over capacity, but we’ll have 1,850 SaaS founders, CEOs, execs and entrepreneurs at the (first?) SaaStr Annual this Thursday in San Francisco at The Regency Ballroom. A few things to know, if your coming, and if you’re not: > If you’re coming to the day sessions, come early […]
One Weird Trick to Build a Personal Brand
My long-time friend Jason Lemkin is on the verge of launching a spectacular SaaS conference called SaaStr this week. What Jason has achieved in no time flat in VC is astounding. Without inventing the browser he has single-handedly created a personal VC brand on a shoestring. And as I’ve written about before – building a […]
Why CAC is Usually Irrelevant in Early-ish Stage SaaS Companies (vs. B2C Where It’s Critical)
I recently meet with a very high-growth “XaaS” company. Not software as a service, but one that provides some version of humans-as-a-service. And after huge top-line growth, they were struggling now with CAC. They’d fueled their hyper growth with a combination of Adwords and Groupons and Facebook Ads and Twitter Cards. And when that party […]
How to Ensure Your First 2 Sales Reps Actually Work Out
A long-time reader, first time caller recently wrote in to ask a question that pretty much everyone asks some variant of: If you had to force rank these items in terms of what we should primarily be looking for in these first sales reps, how would you rank them? – has sold SaaS before (as […]
How to Build Online Relationships into Meaningful Networks
I was waiting for my son’s basketball game to start this morning and with the morning’s emails all drained I turned to Twitter and saw this Tweet from Marshall Kirkpatick Test: open your twitter stream, look at the 1st item in it, think of something to say in response, say it. Theory: it’s really that […]
The Most Misunderstood Facts About Building a Business on YouTube
Any reader of this blog for a period of time will know that I’ve been long YouTube for years. Along with Greycroft, I was the first institutional investor in Maker Studios (sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion) and am still the largest investor in Mitu Network, the largest online video producer of Latino content. […]
All These Enterprise IPOs: Why It’s Just Getting Good. Why These are The Best of Times for SaaS.
Reading the tech press you might get the sense that The Enterprise is something they are sort of forced to write about because it’s having a good run. We had a great Consumer run, a nice set of Multi-Billion Dollar deals around Social Networking, a WhatsApp/Snapchat fad around mobile messaging, an Alibaba, Instacart, Fab-ulous e-commerce […]
