Tom Tunguz

MAY 13, 2015

At the time of its IPO, the company was only investing about 75% of its revenue and sales and marketing. After the company successfully completed its IPO, the company would increase its annual sales and marketing budget by 6X year-over-year to $230M and $298M in 2000 and 2001, at precisely the wrong time. The company spent $46.4M

Outsourced Development 108

Outsourced Development Software Review Technical Review compliance 108

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 13, 2016

In 2001, Salesforce spent $35.6M How many salary dollars does a business invest to generate one dollar of revenue. What percentage of revenue should be spent on payroll? on payroll and generated $5.4M in revenue. NetSuite spent $38M on payroll generated $17M in 2004. For every dollar of revenue, both of these companies spent $0.80

Revenue 100

Revenue Startup SaaS Benchmarks 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 21, 2015

A startup’s growth rate is often highly correlated with the amount of capital it can invest in sales and marketing. Software companies founded in 1998-2001 raised $50M before IPO. Though the number of rounds before IPO hasn’t changed materially, round sizes and total dollars invested have ballooned.

SaaS 100

SaaS Startup Business Model Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

JULY 22, 2014

If this pace of fund raising continues, 2014 would mark the biggest year for VCs since 2001, when the industry raised about $38B. Nevertheless, we will see a spike in the next six months as firms begin investing from new funds. I’ve used this data to draw the long term investment trends across the US venture capital industry.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Startup Banking Trends 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 18, 2015

Interestingly, despite the smaller contract sizes, SuccessFactors invested substantially more in sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue to generate their top-line growth than Taleo. Both of these business weathered the dot com crash in 2001 and the financial meltdown in 2008. Meanwhile, Taleo broke through in year 3.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Acquisition 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 14, 2014

The chart above compares the total number of MegaRounds, those VC investments of $50M or more, from 2001 through 2013. Note, I’m excluding Facebook’s IPO in 2012 as an outlier and I’ve adjusted for inflation. Last year, there was 1 MegaRound for every 2 IPOs.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Finance Trends Startup 100

SaaStock

JANUARY 25, 2019

from Astella Investimentos, Spectra Investments and others. Founded : 2001. Trailblazing through their home continent, venturing successfully onto the world stage or changing from on-premise software to SaaS, these companies could have a postal code in any SaaS hotspot in the world. CEO : Marcelo Lombardo. Founded : 2013. Hi Platform.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments 257

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 9, 2012

In short, small caps are utterly unattractive investment candidates for public market investors. The fraction of small IPOs with negative EBITDA has doubled to nearly 90% in about 30 years. Small IPOs. . Large IPOs. . Number. % < 0. Number. % < 0. Once public, profits don’t improve. Public investors punished them for it.

Marketing 100

Marketing Scale Venture Capital Finance 100

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense. He’d been in SaaS since 2001 and had worked in every role from salesperson, leader, founder, and CEO. She writes: It’s something that came up in a bunch of presentations during SaaStock, but Patrick Campbell had the numbers to back it up.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 9, 2022

By benchmarking critical go-to-market KPIs, like the Magic Number – which measures how many new dollars of revenue growth are obtained getting from your sales and marketing investment compared to your competitors. Indeed, recessions catch many companies by surprise, forcing draconian measures just to survive.

Scale 59

Scale VP of Engineering Payment Services Underperforming Technical Team 59

Valuize Consulting

JUNE 10, 2020

Today, many businesses are investing in customer success technology in the hope that ‘plugging it in’ will solve the challenges that come with their current reality. Unfortunately, these are often a collection of steps branded as ‘playbooks’ that lack integration with other key processes in sales and marketing. That’s a false hope.

Customer Success 40

Customer Success Engineering Scale Technical Review 40

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

We had to ruthlessly prioritize our team’s investments and activities. You can pivot when you see a project that you’re investing in right now is not going to pay off for too long of a term. Jason Lemkin: You were nominally founded in 2001, right? How do you leverage your team to do that? You had to pay.

Scale 156

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 156

Neil Patel

MARCH 25, 2021

You need to track and analyze every move that you make, as this is the only way to focus on the tactics that are providing the best return on investment (ROI). With more than 12 million customers, MailChimp has claimed its spot as one of the top email marketing providers and digital marketing tools in the world.

Payment Methods 144

Payment Methods Social Media Marketing Business 144

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2019

How to use Culture as the lever to maximize the ROI that you get out of the biggest investment your business will ever make. In 2001, you could raise money pretty easily at pretty high valuations, and in 2002 there were two types of companies: those who had raised large amounts of money at crazy valuations in 2001, and dead, right?

Sales Hiring 139

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Underperforming Technical Team 139

SaaStock

MARCH 1, 2019

According to Mike Laven, CEO of Currencycloud, the one thing necessary for any company to succeed in China – or in any of the Asian countries – is to get local investment. It has more than 100 investments since its founding in 2001. SAIF is also one of the biggest funds, investing in Hong Kong, China and India.

SaaS Payments 190

SaaS Payments Venture Capital Telecommunications Payment Services 190

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. There’s none of the brands that you’ve seen get to an IPO or continue on to a Fortune 500 company that is not making some significant investments there. Aaron : And they just have to do it.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 202

SaaStock

MARCH 20, 2019

signed a multi-year equity investment deal with TELUS Ventures. Founded: 2001. Just recently, Kairos secured a $4M investment which will allow them to develop their technology even further. Founded: 2001. Because of their game-changing technology, La Caisse recently decided to invest CA$200 million in their product.

SaaS Payments 271

SaaS Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payments 271

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. As for Chetan, he focuses on enterprise software and has made investments in MuleSoft, MongoDB, Elastic, Heap, just to name a few. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner.

Technical Review 148

Technical Review Development Team Review Scale Software Review 148

SaaStock

MARCH 20, 2019

signed a multi-year equity investment deal with TELUS Ventures. Founded: 2001. Just recently, Kairos secured a $4M investment which will allow them to develop their technology even further. Founded: 2001. Because of their game-changing technology, La Caisse recently decided to invest CA$200 million in their product.

SaaS Payments 100

SaaS Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payments 100

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

Interesting for a couple reasons, but Sunil’s been investing in cloud internet since before almost anybody. So, not that many people have started so early in the career, so long in the space, and great investments that we know like Datadog and Fastly, and good at it. GP and founder of Amplify Partners. Jason Lemkin: Crazy.

Sales Recruiting 165

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 165

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2019

What did it teach him about capital efficiency and investing ahead of time? The worst was right after we started BigMachines in 2000, we had a massive bust in 2001. And in that case, obviously, there’s also A, that it’s not you, right, it’s me, because we over invested, the market isn’t there.

Scale 146

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Leadership 146

Neil Patel

DECEMBER 11, 2020

Email autoresponders can save you a ton of time and deliver huge returns on campaign investment. Mailchimp is a powerful product that hasn’t lost its simple feel, though it has grown considerably since it first hit the market in 2001. But how do you keep a strong handle on your campaign as it plays out over weeks and months?

Scale 143

Scale Mobile Pricing AI Search 143

ProfitWell

APRIL 30, 2020

From cutting costs to investing, the ProfitWell Index serves as a data point for clearer market prediction. I think that if we look at past markets and past downturns—we had a blip in 2012, a blip in 2014, and obviously in 2008 and 2001 there were big downturns—what’s really fascinating is that the fundamentals of the U.S.

B2B 59

B2B SaaS Subscription Payment Features 59

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2018

I was at an agency for a while and then moved to the Bay Area in 2001. We need to invest in them, because their impact is significant. That’s when I really jumped into tech, and I was at eBay for about 7 years. I did interaction, visual design, and then got into management. Kate: I’m super excited to get this group together.

Scale 149

Scale Leadership Scaling Venture Capital 149

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital with over 20 years of operational experience. Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital, but has over 20 years of operational experience. We invest in technology companies typically at the earliest stages.

Payment Methods 55

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 55

Crafty CTO

APRIL 12, 2020

Where agile began I was managing software development projects at Viant in February 2001 when the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was published. Every piece of work starts with a raw idea, and with a raw idea in hand, our first step here is to “set the appetite”: how much of an investment is this idea worth?

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO Technical Review Software Development 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2020

Most of the investors actually wanted to invest in prior rounds and we ended up going with somebody else. It was 2001. When you’re advising an angel investment, say, what terms do you say, “Hey, make sure that this is aligned and make sure that we have this in place”? Dimitri Sirota: I think you mentioned Alex.

Scale 194

Scale Sales Hiring Technology Enterprise 194

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 15, 2018

It’s terrifying when I say we started at the end of 2001, which is now a very, very long time ago. That’s an area where a great example is mint.com, the financial services company that invested in a fantastic name and they had to pay for that domain. I know the workshops at Mule Design have taken off.

Underperforming Technical Team 198

Underperforming Technical Team Education Development Startup 198

SmartKarrot

JANUARY 18, 2022

India has seen exponential growth in SaaS investments in the last decade. Instead of marketing, Zoho invests in R&D and customer service. The company is aimed at providing solutions for companies invested in remote hiring. Kayako is an Indian SaaS company founded in 2001 by Jamie Edwards and Varun Shoor.

SaaS Payments 11

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments 11

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 13, 2020

It was like an experiment investment. Jay McGrath: There’s a Fortune Magazine article about Joe Torre from 2000 or 2001. In the beginning it was sort of dazzle them with the technology and all the cool stuff it can do, because it can do a lot of cool stuff, and people would buy in, but they were buying in small.

VP of Engineering 54

VP of Engineering Scale Communication Banking 54

SaaStr

JULY 22, 2020

We got started in 2008 when we first spotted this sort of new place in investing, which we called seed. At the time, there may be four or five other firms doing this same strategy of investing somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million into companies that were just getting started we would call it pre product market fit.

Venture Capital 216

Venture Capital Investment Travel Marketplace as a Service 216

The SaaS Garage

MARCH 12, 2020

Unfortunately a lot of less experienced 2001+ founders were far to optimistic in their planning, anticipating recovery within 8 – 12 months. Listen to those who have gone through the mega crises of 2001 and 2008 as entrepreneurs or investors. A significant future investment will be required.

Underperforming Technical Team 94

Underperforming Technical Team Payment Solutions Payment Methods Venture Capital 94

The SaaS Garage

MARCH 12, 2020

Unfortunately a lot of less experienced 2001+ founders were far to optimistic in their planning, anticipating recovery within 8 – 12 months. Listen to those who have gone through the mega crises of 2001 and 2008 as entrepreneurs or investors. A significant future investment will be required.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Payment Solutions Payment Methods Venture Capital 52

OpenView Labs

APRIL 25, 2020

Michael Burry (of “The Big Short” fame) wrote in a 2001 investor letter (opens PDF) : “$1 selling for $0.50 More and more headlines of late include the word volatility , which is oft associated with risk. Surprisingly though, investors can’t actually agree whether volatility does in fact imply risk. one day, $0.60 the next day, and $0.40

Marketing 52

Marketing Government Forecasting Pricing 52

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2022

Meltwater started in 2001, as you heard and grew consistently over time. Luciana: I had been telling people that the inflection point came when Accel invested, but I guess it was market and product and all that good stuff. It took us having a very … we had to go, we make an investment, hire the right person, ex-Barclays CIO.

Sales Hiring 257

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 257