Should I Sell for $50m … Or Push On And Try to Build a Unicorn?
BusinessInsider had a great story this week on Datto’s $1b exit to Vista Private Equity (more on the new role of PE in SaaS here). So much of it resonated with me, especially the story of the CEO’s 10 year journey, and turning down a $100m offer to sell. A decent offer to buy your […]
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 […]
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 […]
Where’s Our Facebook and WhatsApp?
Right now, a few doubts have creeped into the SaaS investor community. Multiples have plummeted since February. And for confusing reasons. Because … the best SaaS companies are growing faster than ever. And even the ones that haven’t missed a beat, like Salesforce, Atlassian, Marketo, Hubspot, etc. still have gotten hit: None of that worries […]
My 4 Year Anniversary. Thoughts on Selling Your Company.
So I’ve sold thrice. Twice as a founder, once as part of the management team of a start-up. And been through one failed Web 1.0 IPO. I’ve learned a lot. One time, the sale was clearly a friggin’ mistake. We sold to eToys for $900 million on paper, instead of a more complex deal with […]
What Entrepreneurs Should Learn From WhatsApp
Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion has dominated all news in Silicon Valley for the past 48 hours. Yesterday, I was at a urinal, and a group of people asked me what I thought. Most of the discussion seems to be around whether Mark Zuckerberg was crazy to pay so much for a relatively […]
Enterprise May Be Sexy, But….
On the very same day Salesforce.com acquires Exact Target in their largest ever transaction valued at $2.5B, TechMeme’s top news is crazy gamers dropped by even crazier gamers…
Quick Note: Dropbox – Mailbox Marriage Is A Hail Mary Pass
This morning an acquisition news got techies excited about Dropbox buying the iOS app with lots of buzz but few invites, Mailbox. In short, this is a hail mary pass after Google announced that you can now attach large attachments with Google Drive integration in Gmail. Dropbox had to react and they reacted by buying […]
Start-Up Success in SaaS? You Have to Bend the Odds In Your Favor. Some Thoughts on How to Do It.
Mark Suster put together a presentation (and a blog post) a few weeks ago that has really stuck with me me. I never, perhaps intentionally, looked at the odds of achieving a solid exit in a start-up. Actually it’s just this one slide that has really stayed with me … It turns out the odds of […]
And So Begins the End of this SaaS M&A Cycle
… and hence the acquisition dies due to excessive capital requirements. It’s almost impossible to blend a profitable entity with a new acquisition that is burning tens of more millions per year, unless it’s a total make-the-company bet like Android.
The 10x Rule: What Raising $1 of Venture Capital Really Means
Recently, a good friend of mine asked me how much he should raise in his round. He was lucky enough to have a range of options. My simple advice was: assume you have to return a liquidity event (sale or IPO) of at least 10x the amount you raise. Valuations change from round to round. […]
One More Reason to Take That M&A Offer – Sponsor Turnover
In the last 2 weeks, I met with two other CEO/founders whose companies had been acquired in the past 12-18 months. In some ways their experiences were different than mine. One was a consumer internet company acquired by an entertainment company. The other was a SaaS company, yes, but one that was basically pre-revenue. But […]
A Real Life SaaS Case Study: Eloqua. Marketo. Pardot. There Are 3 Different Paths to Success, My Young Padwan.
I don’t know about you, but I really can’t stand case studies. They always seem either contrived (forcing contrasts in companies that aren’t really there) or else too hypothetical, because we know which way things really worked out in real life (Case Study: Company A had to decide whether to do action X or Y. […]
IBM’s Worklight Acquisition: Few Thoughts
Two days back IBM announced their plans to acquire Worklight, the Israel based mobile development platform, to beef up their enterprise mobile strategy. IBM realizes that in this era of BYOD/Consumerization of IT, they need to had a strong mobile strategy supporting various platforms. In fact, at the recent Lotusphere 2012 conference, IBM showcased their […]
PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Engine Yard Acquires Orchestra
I am sure regular readers of this blog are convinced that PaaS is the future of Cloud Services. We are seeing this trend happening now with so much action on the PaaS front. Today Engine Yard (previous CloudAve coverage) reacted to the market trend and announced the acquisition of Orchestra, the Irish PHP PaaS company. […]
