SaaStr

MAY 1, 2020

During his career Navin has invested in 50 companies, 17 have gone public, 20 have been acquired. What made him take the jump into investing full-time from being an EiR? * During his career Navin has invested in 50 companies, 17 of which have gone public, and 20 have been acquired, an incredible record there.

B2C 179

B2C Investment B2B Pricing 179

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. In 2002, the company invested significantly in sales and marketing, but suffered a decline in revenue. In a typical year, the company invested about 20 to 30% of their revenue in research and development.

Outsourced Development 113

Outsourced Development Software Review Technical Review compliance 113

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 27, 2018

Investing in machine learning to make automation personal at scale. I studied artificial intelligence in college in 2004. This will be the biggest evolution yet, because it redefines what a messenger is and what it can do. We’ll share a lot more soon, but we think you’ll love it for the new use cases it will unlock, uniquely for you.

Artificial Intelligence 224

Artificial Intelligence Scale Machine Learning Technology 224

Tom 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 2010, SaaS companies as a whole began investing more to grow faster and in the past three years, average growth rates have risen to about 35%.

SaaS 100

SaaS Trends Startup Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 13, 2016

NetSuite spent $38M on payroll generated $17M in 2004. How many salary dollars does a business invest to generate one dollar of 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. in payroll at scale.

Revenue 100

Revenue Startup SaaS Benchmarks 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 8, 2015

The business was founded in 2004, but hit its stride 2009 and went public in 2012. Impressively, the company is investing more and more into engineering - exceeding 20% of revenues last year - likely developing broader feature set to enable additional up and cross sells. ServiceNow has recorded a better than 1.0 at $93M in revenue.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks Metrics SaaS Investment 113

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 7, 2015

Since 2004, Ultimate Software has generated positive cash flow. of gross margin per sales and marketing dollar invested. Over that time period, the business has grown 28% per year on average, steadily becoming one of the largest SaaS companies in the world. only once - during the year of the IPO.

Software 100

Software Marketing Forecasting Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 31, 2015

Private market rounds were 14x as common as IPOs in 2014, compared to the 2004-2007 era, when IPOs were about as equally common as large private financings. There’s a marked separation between the investment preferences of public and private investors. It’s a very heady time for startups and investors.

Finance 100

Finance Startup Pricing Acquisition 100

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. 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.

Healthcare 40

Healthcare Marketing Investment Development 40

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

It kept investing in making its overall growth model stronger. Modeling your loops helps you start investing in building out those new growth loops or products well in advance of when you need them to sustain your growth, because of course developing them takes much more time than improving a current loop. Why did they do this?

Payments 63

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 63

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

To get the most out of any SEO investment today, you need a holistic strategy. 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.

Outsourcing Services 137

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Hiring Software Review 137

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 2, 2014

The grey line smooths the chart to show long term changes and the blue dashed line marks the 2004 Median Series B pre-money. Perhaps investment size is remaining constant but valuations have increased and investors are satisfied with less ownership. The chart above illustrates Series A pre-money valuations in red.

Startup 113

Startup Trends Pricing Data 113

Stax

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

You’re making a purchase at a retail store, and the cash register is large, clunky, and painfully slow, even for 2004. Resistance to new technology can be a tough obstacle, so invest in training and make sure your employees are comfortable and well-versed. Let’s time travel back, just 20 years ago, to the shopping mall.

Payment Methods 88

Payment Methods Payment Services Mobile Payments Merchant Services 88

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 2, 2014

The chart above shows startup company formation rates, the number of new companies formed each year from 2004-2011 by Crunchbase sector. As the number of companies in a sector grows, do the odds of successfully raising capital decrease? Most of the categories are up and to the right. Though this is just speculation.

Advertising 100

Advertising Startup Trends Mobile 100

ChurnZero

JUNE 2, 2021

A [Rob]: That’s more of a question for the earlier stage investing in the public market. Salesforce started it and they went public in 2004. A private equity investor once said that he only invests in companies where that’s 40 or higher. Nobody’s burning that aggressively. I will say this much. Growth is king.

Benchmarks 98

Benchmarks B2B SMB SaaS 98

Tom Tunguz

JULY 6, 2014

Founded in 2004, GoPro is about 10 years old and during the past few years has witnessed spectacular growth. Because SaaS companies have substantially higher gross margins, they can afford to invest more in both functions. In other words, how many revenue dollars did one invested VC dollar create.

Startup 133

Startup Sales Hiring Benchmarks Advertising 133

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2014

FLTX 2004 10 128. To grow at that pace, HubSpot has been investing aggressively in sales and the company is widely respected for its content marketing prowess. For the moment, HubSpot is among the least profitable companies in the set, but I suspect this is because the company is investing in growth. RNG 1999 14 162.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks SMB Metrics SaaS 113

SaaStr

JULY 15, 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. Some of these businesses, maybe even many of these businesses have started investing more and more in selling online to their preexisting in store customers. There’s a stat I saw after 9/11.

Investment 151

Investment Scale Travel Venture Capital 151

OPEXEngine

JUNE 2, 2021

Cherwell was founded in 2004 as an IT process improvement software company and later expanded into other process areas within companies, including HR, facilities, and finance. . “They see the value of the product and so we focused on that much more heavily, which offset some of the softness of selling licenses to new customers.”

Metrics 52

Metrics Pricing Airlines Sales Hiring 52

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. Some of these businesses, maybe even many of these businesses, have started investing more and more in selling online to their preexisting in store customers. There’s a stat I saw after 9/11.

Venture Capital 174

Venture Capital Travel PayPal Scale 174

OPEXEngine

MAY 4, 2021

Corporate finance experience is declining, while investment banking is rising, as a path to the CFO seat, CFO Dive data shows. The newer path to CFO is through investment banking. ” Of 53 software-as-a-service (SaaS) CFOs that CFO Dive covered over the past year, almost 30% started out in investment banking. .

Payment Services 52

Payment Services Finance Communication Strategy 52

Kellblog

JANUARY 3, 2022

But you’re not fully committed, the board is split on the decision, you’re worried about the CAC impact of initially unproductive sales investments, and you’re not sure what to do. You have a nice US-based $30M SaaS business and you want to expand into Europe. 5] Happily, I’ve also done plenty of time in Box 2! [6]

Sales Hiring 126

Sales Hiring Scale Consulting Leadership 126

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

OpenView Labs

MARCH 24, 2020

If we look at two of the early SaaS companies to go public, Concur (1998) and Salesforce (2004), markets had no idea what to do with them. For this new business model, cash flow became a lagging indicator of success—so the market needed to come up with another way to understand whether these new companies were worth investing in.

Metrics 43

Metrics Scale SaaS Sales Hiring 43

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

David Politis: Yeah, so I started my career in 2004. So where we see the most of our investment is around customer success and helping people use our product, but really just define best practices for their heterogeneous best of breed environment, that three months ago didn’t exist at all.

Scale 164

Scale Cloud Sales Hiring Technical Review 164

BetterCloud

MAY 17, 2021

Daniel Waithe ’s career in Quality Assurance (QA) began in 2004, when he worked as a QA analyst for Citigroup. I can talk to someone and get advice with little effort and investment, but at the end of the day, will you take the chance on me? I often say that Black people in this space are over-mentored.

New CTO 52

New CTO Part-Time VPE CTO Coach CTO Hire 52

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Investment funds like Indie.VC Their first round of Angel investment in 2008 had not been a round for the sake of raising a round, or funds really even earmarked to invest heavily in growth. Series A investment). Said Gascoigne, “We shared openly that we may not want to raise further funding, sell the company, or IPO.

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

Matt Cameron: Back in 2004 was when the first time I started thinking about this. Typically it’s a person who’s on the rise and an investment that they make in their own career is to do the tour of duty, and make the mark by spinning up a new region, and then coming back to HQ, picking up a more senior role.

Underperforming Technical Team 80

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Technical Review 80

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2022

2004’s Lesson from WebEx. We have managed to thread the needle between not only scale and love from customers, but also GTM investment. Here, he discusses a few of the key lessons he’s learned along the way. My point isn’t to say that’s nothing new. It’s that we’re standing on tall shoulders, and there’s a lot to learn from the past.

Sales Hiring 219

Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise Mobile 219

The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication

MARCH 11, 2019

In 2004 when Alex passed away at the age of eight-her stand and inspiration had raised more than $1 million towards finding a cure for the disease that took her life. org, are asking Americans to “break up” with fossil fuels by divesting from fossil fuel investments. would be an economic and social disaster.

Marketing 40

Marketing Business Content Marketing Growth Hacking 40

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

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Shopify again has done that from 2004 to 2010 before they started scaling [inaudible]. In our cases it could be volume up [inaudible 00:15:16] grows with the customer’s business and then you are invested in everything [inaudible] how I like to think about it. So you bake that into pricing model.

Scale 127

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 127

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

You said about the Buzzfeed mistakes that you made being the very conventional ones as a boardroom this day, I would say that that is my duty, given the hindsight that I have from investing in 30 plus companies before, other investors with much more experience, to actually guide you away from those very conventional mistakes.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 131

Totango

MAY 27, 2022

The PLG model had been introduced to the video conferencing space years earlier in 2004 by future Zoom competitor GoToMeeting, which used a freemium offer to introduce users to its product. Zoom’s growth was supported by an investment from another company that has made a name for itself by using a PLG model – file hosting site Dropbox.

Acquisition 120

Acquisition Retention Technology Strategy 120

Outseta

OCTOBER 16, 2017

This was in 2003 or 2004, and we were spending $2B dollars a year in research which is nothing by today's standards but it was for the most that was being spent at that time. companies, invested too late in customer success programs and churn caught up with their businesses. So I went around to the different product teams. Geoff: Sure.

Interviewing 40

Interviewing Customer Success SaaS Software Review 40

SaaStock

MARCH 20, 2019

Founded: 2004. signed a multi-year equity investment deal with TELUS Ventures. Just recently, Kairos secured a $4M investment which will allow them to develop their technology even further. Because of their game-changing technology, La Caisse recently decided to invest CA$200 million in their product. PointClickCare.

SaaS Payments 271

SaaS Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payments 271

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

Meet Our Speakers… Patrick Arippol, Managing Director of Early Stage Investments, DGF Investimentos. He is leading DGF Investimentos’ specialized early-stage investment group – DGF Inova. In 2004, he became the CEO of Cogency Software. His first career steps were at Seer Technologies and Monitor Company in the 1990s.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207