SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2020

2004 Salesforce IPO Brought Financial Capital to SaaS Founders. With the Salesforce IPO in 2004, we saw the first sign that institutional investors were comfortable with a standard set of SaaS metrics: Churn, sales efficiency , ARPU, LTV, customer acquisition cost , and so on. . In 2004 the Salesforce CRM was the shiny object every dollar of financial capital chased. . Debt for SaaS companies done right is a gift. Done wrong, it can weigh you down like an anchor.

Banking 180

Banking Venture Capital SaaS Metrics 180

Adhere Creative

FEBRUARY 17, 2019

Those born between 1980 and 2004, now over 75 million members, are in the prime of their lives at 18–34 years old. Millennials have developed distinct priorities, purchasing habits, and values that set them apart from previous generations. With blossoming to established careers, they are a fresh market that requires a new wave of medical marketing campaigns that will motivate them to make an investment in themselves at your practice. Here is a guide to get started.

Healthcare 40

Healthcare Investment Development Marketing 40

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2020

When the company first began web app development and selling software-as-a-service in 2004, their business model wasn’t even called SaaS. Wondering how your SaaS business got slapped with a multi-million dollar sales tax bill from one or multiple states?

Banking 180

Banking SaaS Sales Software 180

The Angel VC

JULY 17, 2015

Until 2004, that is, when a small, Chicago-based web design agency called 37signals launched its project management tool called Basecamp : Basecamp in 2004 (click for a larger version) Basecamp looked radically different from any other piece of B2B software. When you look at the landing pages (or homepages or marketing sites, however you want to call them) of today's SaaS companies, they usually look quite beautiful.

SaaS 159

SaaS Trends B2B Enterprise 159

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2019

In 2004 he became CEO of MarkLogic where he stayed until 2010. Meet SaaStr’s Most Respected Leaders of 2019. Our most popular CEO, COO’s and Presidents that spoke at SaaStr Annual 2019. Curious how we came up with this list? We found our most popular speakers by speaker views and likes, session bookmarks and ratings weighing categories more heavily for overall rating than initial interest.

Banking 193

Banking Leadership Cloud Metrics 193

TechStars

JUNE 4, 2019

I had the great privilege of joining Google in 2004. I joined the legal team back in 2004, and I actually worked on the IPO deal team for my first year, which was a fascinating and wonderful experience, with the process of going public and really being part of a very fast growing organization. From Google for Startups to Startup Weekend to Rise of the Rest and beyond, Mary Grove is passionate about community-driven change, and helping make it happen.

Startup 173

Startup Entrepreneurship Scaling Travel 173

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

In 2004, he became the CEO of Cogency Software. Latin America is undergoing a digital transformation, and the SaaS community is exploding as a result. We conducted intensive market research with SaaS practitioners across LatAm to dig into the reasons behind the region’s hypergrowth, and worked with the progressive global VCs who are fuelling the SaaS boom to understand the key players and the scope of the opportunity.

Entrepreneurship 171

Entrepreneurship Telecommunications Healthcare Consulting 171

SaaStock

MARCH 20, 2019

Founded: 2004. As we wrote in our launch post about expanding SaaStock New York into SaaStock East Coast , our main aim is to foster a community of top SaaS companies that spans all the way from Florida to Quebec. The SaaS industry’s beating heart will probably always be New York, and it will also be the home of SaaStock East Coast on June 4-6. However, we believe in giving the entire coastline a chance to flourish.

SaaS 214

SaaS Healthcare AI Airlines 214

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 3, 2018

In 2004, six years later fewer than 1000 of these shareholders had traded their shares for cash. Last week, AirBnB proposed granting their most valuable hosts shares in the company , much like employees. This requires a change in securities law. It’s a novel idea that has a history, promise and some risks. In 1998, an online travel agency, TravelZoo, tried this. They granted free shares to 700,000 people who signed up to use the service.

Blockchain 61

Blockchain Travel Startup Technology 61

Kellblog

JULY 25, 2020

3] Per the footer, since Salesforce’s June, 2004 IPO. [4] I was playing around on the enterprise comps [1] section of Meritech ‘s website today and a few of the charts I found caught my attention.

Venture Capital 69

Venture Capital Metrics Pricing Revenue 69

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2020

In my early twenties I founded three companies between 1995 to 2004 which all had successful exits, including an acquisition by Microsoft and an IPO. Navin Chaddha: I joined the venture capital business as an entrepreneur in residence in 2004 to work on my fourth company and one thing led to the other and I became a venture capitalist. So what do you know now that you wish you’d known when you entered venture as that EIR in 2004?

B2C 139

B2C Venture Capital Investment B2B 139

Outseta

OCTOBER 12, 2020

Dimitris Co-founded Buildium back in 2004. “It The challenges that I’ve faced as a bootstrapped founder simply aren’t the ones that are commonly talked about By Geoff Roberts · 17 min read The internet is littered with horror stories detailing the many challenges of entrepreneurship.

Venture Capital 111

Venture Capital Entrepreneurship Compensation Scaling 111

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

Founded in 2004 , their expertise in the local SEO niche has generated over 201 million local leads for about 19,000 clients worldwide. Founded in 2004, this company earned the list of Inc.

Engineering 103

Engineering Content Marketing Onboarding Strategy 103

SaaStock

MARCH 1, 2019

Founded: 2004. 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. You can read his advice and a plethora of valuable insight on Asian expansion in Notion VC’s The Journey East guide created for companies thinking of expanding to Asia. However, it was that particular advice that stuck with us.

Telecommunications 160

Telecommunications Venture Capital Investment SaaS 160

Neil Patel

DECEMBER 2, 2020

Founded in 2004, the e-commerce platform now reports an annual gross merchandise volume exceeding $61 billion and has over 500,00 merchants. By subscribing to Shopify’s e-commerce platform, Shopify customers can harness the platform’s shopping cart solution to sell, ship, and manage products.

Advertising 79

Advertising Strategy Engagement Sales 79

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 28, 2019

Just as background, I’ve been on a Mac since I was seven and I last worked on a Windows machine in 2004. A few weeks ago, I installed Windows on my Mac using BootCamp. BootCamp allows you to have both operating systems on your computer at the same time and choose the one you want to use when. I was curious about Windows. So I installed it and tried to use it for a few days. Here are my impressions.

Travel 43

Travel Advertising Data Branding 43

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2013

From about 2004 to 2011, the average publicly traded SaaS company held an EV/Rev multiple of 3 to 5x. In the 2004 to 2009 period, average revenue growth for SaaS companies hovered around 25%. In the past 24 months, something extraordinary has happened. The value of publicly traded SaaS companies has grown by 200 to 400% while the underlying customer unit economics of those businesses hasn’t changed.

Trends 40

Trends Revenue Startup Enterprise 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JUNE 28, 2017

One typical Friday morning in 2004, I walked into a government building and headed to work. I was a junior Java engineer and part of a hired team building an internal system for a government agency. We were a few days behind on schedule, and a technical issue arose. During the morning team meeting, we made a plan to refactor a small key part of the codebase - an effort that should have taken just the morning. And I made a classic mistake.

Startup 63

Startup Government Innovation Engineering 63

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 14, 2020

In 2004, he earned a PhD for his work in transformative learning and change. Sales is the somewhat dark art of convincing people to buy stuff. I hope that rubbed you the wrong way. Maybe you almost jumped out of your seat to write a strongly worded comment about why that’s wrong.

Sales 90

Sales Consulting Interviewing Development 90

Sales Hacker

JUNE 19, 2020

In 2004, he earned a PhD for his work in transformative learning and change. Mindset is the driving force behind sales performance, and as sales professionals, we all have to be pretty mentally tough. But mindset matters even more during a crisis like COVID-19. If you find yourself anxious and stressed , you’re not alone. But remember, you’re no stranger to challenge. You’ve had targets assigned that seemed unachievable. You’ve had game-changing deals fall through.

Construction 77

Construction Consulting Management Strategy 77

Tomasz Tunguz

MAY 13, 2015

But, the company has been operating at close to breakeven since 2004. Similar to net income, Ariba sustained cash flow breakeven for the first time in 2009, but flirted with the mark since about 2004. Ariba went public in 1999 three years after having been founded. In its first year of selling, the company generated $800,000 in revenue. Then it ramped. $8 8 million, then $45 million, then $274M.

Revenue 40

Revenue Software Investment Churn 40

SaaStock

MARCH 20, 2019

Founded: 2004. As we wrote in our launch post about expanding SaaStock New York into SaaStock East Coast , our main aim is to foster a SaaS community that spans from Florida to Quebec. The SaaS industry’s beating heart will probably always be New York, and it will also be the home of SaaStock East Coast on June 4-6. However, we believe in giving the entire coastline a chance to flourish.

Healthcare 100

Healthcare AI SaaS Airlines 100

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

Founded : 2004. When we announced a few weeks ago that we would be bringing our leading SaaS conference to Asia, and running it in Hong Kong, many locals thanked us for choosing the city. As we mentioned in our launch post, we couldn’t not do it there, with its international spirit, openness to everyone, relaxed atmosphere, and proximity to many other SaaS hubs around, all attracting us to Hong Kong.

SaaS 183

SaaS Blockchain Transportation Automotive 183

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 18, 2015

Meanwhile, all of the companies requiring longer than 8 years were founded before 2004. SaaS startups are growing faster than ever before. Publicly-traded SaaS companies founded from 2008 through 2014 needed 50% less time to reach $50M than their counterparts founded between 1998 and 2005. I stumbled across this trend when looking at a different chart used in my S-1 analyses that compares the time to $50M for each of the 51 or so publicly traded SaaS companies.

Engineering 40

Engineering Trends Revenue Enterprise 40

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

And I remember they were born in 2004 our business was kind of at the bottom but they were also wound up being born nine weeks premature. But the other thing that made it successful, in 2004 I went to one of the first Dreamforce’s met Marc Benioff. Join G2 Crowd CEO Godard Abel for a session on the secrets to the top-rated vendors on G2Crowd, AppExchange, and other platforms. He also discusses all the trials, errors and successes he had throughout all of his previous startups.

Company Culture 180

Company Culture SaaS Cloud Leadership 180

Tomasz Tunguz

AUGUST 13, 2012

From 2004 to 2007, the company grew at a fairly linear rate. For years, a product can grow linearly before suddenly seeing compounding growth. Facebook is a great example. And then, the magic happened! The network effects kicked in and exponential growth ensued. Linear growth always precedes exponential growth. For market places, in social networks or in advertising exchanges, the story is always the same. Linear, linear, linear. BOOM, exponential. One day, the magic happens.

Advertising 40

Advertising Marketing 40

Tomasz Tunguz

NOVEMBER 13, 2016

NetSuite spent $38M on payroll generated $17M in 2004. What percentage of revenue should be spent on payroll? In 2001, Salesforce spent $35.6M on payroll and generated $5.4M in revenue. as both of these companies scaled and approached IPO, the operating expense ratio (OER) or operating expense divided by revenue, asymptotes to 0.8. For every dollar of revenue, both of these companies spent $0.80 in payroll at scale. The OER is a metric of efficiency.

Revenue 40

Revenue Benchmarks Scaling Finance 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 14, 2016

The last time I learned a new programming language was 2004. I had been writing in Java for about four years, and then I heard whispers of a new framework called Rails that allowed engineers to write web applications in one-tenth the time of a Java web application. Over the course of a few weeks, I bought an armful of paper books, read them, and worked through the examples. A few weeks later, I built my first Rails application and brought it to work at Google.

Engineering 40

Engineering Education Data 40

OpenView Labs

JULY 23, 2019

In 2004 he was a co-author of The Price Advantage. At the spring edition of the Professional Pricing Society (yes there is such a thing) pricing thought leader Craig Zawada challenged the audience with some provocative claims. Craig has been disrupting pricing for a couple of decades now. This book introduced some of the key frameworks for pricing strategy, value mapping (see this article for more on value mapping) and the pocket price waterfall.

Pricing 46

Pricing B2B AI Trends 46

OpenView Labs

JUNE 24, 2019

In 2004, Logikcull was a highly profitable services company that streamlined legal discovery by processing and packaging data from customer hard drives. Some SaaS companies still have the pricing strategy that their founder picked after a thirty minute whiteboarding session five years ago; those startups subist but rarely thrive.

Pricing 58

Pricing Subscription Healthcare Banking 58

Inside Intercom

JULY 16, 2020

In the first decade after its founding in 2004, Shopify amassed 120,000 customers and catapulted into the top 10 on Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list. As tech continues its path toward democratization, with better offerings available to more people, an odd contradiction has revealed itself: on the enterprise side of things, most software simply isn’t very good.

Enterprise 70

Enterprise Branding SMB Software 70

Tomasz Tunguz

JUNE 8, 2015

The business was founded in 2004, but hit its stride 2009 and went public in 2012. Worth $11.5B, ServiceNow is the third public SaaS company, after Salesforce and LinkedIn. Based in San Diego, ServiceNow employs roughly 3000 people, and sells a system of record for IT operations teams to manage IT assets, facilities, and human resources.

Benchmarks 40

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Churn 40

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 13, 2019

If you continue to operate as if it’s 1994 — or even 2004 — you’ll be left behind for a competitor that has better evolved to communicate with your customer base. In the digital era, customer rapport rules the day. People expect more communication and personal connection than ever before. . That being said, building rapport with clients in the digital era is also more complex than ever before.

Sales Funnel 64

Sales Funnel Communication Engagement Education 64

How SaaS Works

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Turning Personal Connections into Long-Term SaaS Growth Basecamp, a set of product management tools, has been around since 2004. The How SaaS Works series simplifies the complex world of software-as-a-service (SaaS) into the practical fundamentals for anyone involved in SaaS. These are the real-world lessons learned from founding a SaaS company from ground zero to growing it all the way to acquisition as well as case studies from other SaaS companies who have both succeeded and failed.

Content Marketing 43

Content Marketing Strategy Engineering Marketing 43

Tomasz Tunguz

APRIL 23, 2017

Founded in 2004, Fleetmatics employs about 1150 employees. There are approximately 22 million trucks in the US. Many of these trucks run software to track the location of the vehicle, manage inventory, and comply with regulation. There are two SaaS companies operating at greater than $100M in ARR in the space and they illustrate one of the mantras on this blog: there are many different ways to build a SaaS company.

Venture Capital 40

Venture Capital SMB Finance Strategy 40

Inside Intercom

MARCH 27, 2018

I studied artificial intelligence in college in 2004. We just raised $125M in a round led by Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins. Here’s what we’re going to do with it. 2018 is shaping up to be a massive year for the Intercom platform. Historically, we’ve spent proportionately way more on research and development than other software companies we track, and that won’t stop any time soon. This funding will go straight into building great new software at a pace you’ve yet to see from us.

Machine Learning 88

Machine Learning Technology Mobile Retention 88

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 18, 2016

Jeff Bezos used the Five Whys in 2004 to investigate why a conveyor belt had injured a worker. Why is this ad appearing on this site? This was a frequent questions both advertisers and publishers asked of Google. Behind the scenes, machine learning models match the best ad to the best website, given a set of constraints including budget and the dynamics of the ad auction.

Machine Learning 43

Machine Learning Advertising Startup Engineering 43

Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 28, 2016

The second largest, Jasper, is an internet of things software company founded in 2004, which Cisco acquired for $1.2B. Through the end of July in 2016, $70B worth of SaaS companies sold. Their size follows a power law with LinkedIn at $26B and Netsuite at $9.3B. The more than $600B in cash on the balance sheets of large public tech companies combined with a recent pricing correction in SaaS companies presaged a flurry of acquisition activity.

Acquisition 40

Acquisition Software Pricing Revenue 40

SaaStr

JULY 17, 2020

Just before 9/11 occurred, we’d hit a USP domestic travel record and it took three years until May 2004 to get back to the level. 353: Keith Rabois (Paypal, Linkedin, Square) and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin talk about the landscape of SaaS & Cloud fundraising and valuation in 2020. This episode is sponsored by Lightmatter. SaaStr’s Founder’s Favorites Series features one of SaaStr’s best of the best sessions that you might have missed.

Venture Capital 136

Venture Capital Travel Healthcare Government 136

Tomasz Tunguz

APRIL 25, 2013

When the neologism was popularized in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, the words Web 2.0 captured a desire for the web to become interactive. It was a description of a movement towards social media and engaging users on the web. But more than an idea, it carried a design aesthetic which focused on the user, user experience and engagement. After all, users wouldn’t participate on a hostile site. We’re no longer in the Web 2.0

Airlines 40

Airlines Mobile Social Media User Experience 40