SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Even when the global economy literally melted down, and >froze< in 2009 — the buyers in SaaS still came. Some are much more impacted post-Covid, like Shopify and Zoom. But even there, the growth is real. Churn went way up, for sure. But buyers still came. More on the actual data here.

Marketing 285

Marketing Startup Cloud Churn 285

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2020

Marc Benioff said one of his top mistakes was not hiring enough salespeople in 2009, during the peak of the last downturn. There are no easy answers, but we do know one thing: When things come back, you will need everyone great. At almost every company, if we’re honest, the “bottom” 10% doesn’t contribute that much if any value.

Sales Hiring 238

Sales Hiring Scale Customer Success Scaling 238

Tom Tunguz

JULY 22, 2018

Median round sizes have increased from 2009 dramatically across seed and Series A-C. In the chart above, I’ve drawn dashed lines from the values in 2009 across the graph. The dashed blue line is the median series A from 2009. Seed rounds have not surpassed 2009 Series A levels. Two blocks of the ladder have flipped.

Startup 155

Startup Finance Marketing Investment 155

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Marc Benioff said not hiring more sales reps in 2009 was one of his top mistakes. Thank goodness we didn’t need more capital. VCs came back in force by early ’10, but they sort of evaporated in ’09. Something to think about. These are unique times. But if your customers are larger and happy, they will renew.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring SaaS Churn Enterprise 269

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 31, 2020

I remember reading the Netflix culture deck published in 2009 and feeling inspired. The words on the page resonated with me because they conveyed a logic and thoughtfulness not often underpinning cultural decisions broadly. They are brave because they don’t appeal to everyone.

Interviewing 248

Interviewing Management Data Marketing 248

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

When Apple started using the catchphrase “There’s an app for that” in 2009 to convey the breadth and variety of apps available in its App Store, we could barely begin to picture just how true that would become – well over half the time spent online in the US is spent on smartphone apps. . And then there’s messaging.

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2023

Wildly Profitable — And Profitable Since 2013. The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 and began to take off in 2012. Top-tier growth + top tier profits beats Insane Growth in today’s world. As perhaps it always should have. #2. By 2013, it was profitable and never looked back. Today, it’s insanely profitable.

Scale 251

Scale Advertising Scaling Revenue 251

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2022

This was probably 2009 or so. It’s just, as you scale, what you do in the sales process as CEO evolves and changes. I remember when we closed Groupon as one of our Ten (or so) Largest customers, back in the day. They’d brought us on shortly after they’d deployed Salesforce all across the company.

Sales Recruiting 210

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 210

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2023

Even the 2008-2009 downturn, while truly brutal, didn’t hit SaaS as hard as the rest of the economy. Not easy, but easier and easier: There was a bump in 2016, a Flash Crash in SaaS, when budgets were slashed, but it didn’t last long enough to really impact renewal cycles. SaaS markets had fully recovered later that year.

SaaS 234

SaaS Churn Sales Software 234

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2023

I sold a sales tool in 2008-2009 when the global economy was in total meltdown, and I’ll tell you, we sure didn’t stop selling. We had a great conversation on how much harder it is now with Gong’s incredible CRO here: But is that an excuse to sort of quiet quit? To give up a bit? I say No. In fact, I always say No.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Sales Startup Investment 202

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 29, 2019

Founded as a gaming company called Tiny Speck in 2009, the company’s initial product, Glitch, didn’t catch on as expected. Slack has transformed the way we work. By replacing email with beautiful and simple internal chat, Slack has productized productivity.

Benchmarks 261

Benchmarks Metrics Scale Revenue 261

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

We still doubled sales in 2009. Since leads still came in, and the internet still grew, and SaaS still had true ROI, everyone was sort of unprepared for when the economy got even a little better in 2011. That sort of sums it all up. So if you are worried about the downturn that has to come at some point, what’s actionable?

SaaS Payments 269

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale SMB 269

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2019

It stayed small until 2009 when the founders were bought out by a private equity firm. SurveyMonkey is one of the Old School SaaS companies that has followed an interesting path. Founded back in 1999 (like Salesforce) in the Web 1.0 days, for years it was run by a tiny team and dominated the self-service side of surveys.

Scale 221

Scale SaaS Payments Payments Payment Services 221

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2021

They bring together their respective strengths to drive remarkable product-led growth for PagerDuty, the incident response SaaS that’s been invaluable to tech teams since 2009. CMO Julie Herendeen and CPO Sean Scott are PagerDuty’s product & marketing power couple.

Product Marketing 266

Product Marketing Marketing B2C Strategy 266

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 18, 2019

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by 3 former Amazon engineers who were often on-call. To engineers, being on call means carrying a pager to respond to crises when software breaks or services go down. In the 10 years since that day, PagerDuty has built an exceptional business.

Metrics 193

Metrics Benchmarks Software Review Engineering 193

Andreessen Horowitz

JULY 21, 2022

Since our inception in 2009, Andreessen Horowitz has been a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. This was highly intentional on our part.

Cloud 145

Cloud Venture Capital Technology 145

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2019

He moved the company to San Francisco in 2009. PagerDuty was founded in 2009 and recently began trading on the NYSE under ticker symbol $PD this April, seeing a whopping 50% pop in the stock right at open. He served as CEO for the company until 2002 before moving on to Materna. Henrique Dubugras Brex Founder/CEO.

Sales Recruiting 171

Sales Recruiting Software Review Technical Review PayPal 171

Andreessen Horowitz

JANUARY 25, 2021

We embraced speaking directly to our audience — from the builders of the future to the tech-curious — right as the firm was started in 2009. It started out with blogging about why we invested in a founder/founding team. Initially, … The post Doubling Down on the Future appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

Investment 145

Investment 145

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 6, 2023

In Q4 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos for $1b. But, it didn’t feel that way in the moment - at least not from my vantage point - the markets felt like molasses. Companies chewed gravel, gritting out each quarter. About 5 quarters later, the exit market offered a little sprig of hope. Then GreenDot’s IPO in Q2 2010 at $1.4b

Venture Capital 174

Venture Capital Acquisition Investment Marketing 174

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 18, 2022

Kerrest co-founded Okta – an enterprise identity management company – in 2009 and currently serves as its executive vice chairperson and chief operating officer. This is an excerpt from Zero to IPO: Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Frederic Kerrest, pp. I’ve heard a lot.

Startup 143

Startup Management Identity management Enterprise 143

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Additionally, if you look at the mobile shift, the iPhone was released in 2007 but we didn’t get our first mobile apps like Uber and Snapchat until 2009 and 2010. It wasn’t until years later that Workday and Salesforce and a whole generation of SaaS companies came along to build on top of that infrastructure.

AI 198

AI Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Mobile 198

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 16, 2024

When Marc and I started the firm in 2009, the conventional wisdom in Venture Capital was that in any given year, only 15 companies would ever generate $100M in revenue and those 15 companies would drive almost all of VC returns. I am pleased to announce that we have just raised $7.2B This marks an important milestone for us.

Venture Capital 144

Venture Capital AI Innovation Enterprise 144

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

While working at LinkedIn back in 2009, she was offered the role of building out the first SDR and BDR organization. This was probably the most important decision for her because it led to an appreciation of the different types of deals and segments, and starting at the bottom and working her way up was a great learning experience.

Scale 227

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 227

Hitenism

JANUARY 6, 2017

At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing. We launched it in 2009 with a pretty good idea, a strong product, and a vague plan for growth. Twitter didn’t begin to hyperlink the hashtags in search results until mid 2009. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. Kind of bland, right?

Startup 182

Startup Marketing Engagement Content Marketing 182

Natalia Luneva

JANUARY 14, 2023

The post Artcut 2009 software free download for windows first appeared on Natalie Luneva. The post Artcut 2009 software free download for windows appeared first on Natalie Luneva.

Software 40

Software Compensation Marketing 40

The Angel VC

JULY 17, 2015

It took a few years – which shows how much ahead of its time 37signals was – but eventually other SaaS companies redesigned their websites or rebuilt them from the ground up: Campaign Monitor in 2008 (click for a larger version) The trend was clear: Less and less text, bigger font sizes, larger images, videos.

SaaS 188

SaaS Software Review B2B Trends 188

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 20, 2020

While many things in our industry have changed since we started the firm in 2009, closing these funds … The post Fund VII and Growth Fund II appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz. Today we are excited to announce the closing of two new funds, bringing our total assets under management to nearly $16.5

Management 116

Management 116

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

2009: Fully localized platform. . “Do you want 80% of your customers to be able e-sign your contacts? ” Today, table stakes. But back then, believe it or not, we had the only cross-platform solution.

Scale 187

Scale Mobile Branding Engineering 187

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 14, 2018

In most cases, the “founded” date corresponds with the year in which the company was founded, but there are a few exceptions, like Slack, which started in 2009 with a completely different product and didn’t launch Slack as we know it today until 2013. If the fiscal year ends on October 31, I allocated it to the same calendar year.

SaaS 174

SaaS Revenue Payment Features Subscription 174

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2024

In 2009, that spiked to 35%. That might level off or increase, but these companies are hoping that, even though multiples have compressed, they’ll be able to grow into a number that is higher than the prior round they raised. While the number of down rounds raised has gone up and doubled over 2023, it’s still very low on a historical basis.

Venture Capital 230

Venture Capital Management Scale AI 230

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2023

Android followed after, and that really, late 2009, early 2010, that suddenly changed. I know, because we were working on a game, we started our company in the beginning of 2009, and we completely missed the boat. It was also, as revolutionary as it was, compared to what we have today it wasn’t nearly as big.

Scale 326

Scale Sales Hiring PayPal Development Team Review 326

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2019

2009: Fully localized platform. . “Do you want 80% of your customers to be able e-sign your contacts? ” Today, table stakes. But back then, believe it or not, we had the only cross-platform solution.

Scale 176

Scale Mobile Branding Engineering 176

Tom Tunguz

MAY 13, 2015

Ariba attained profitability in 2009 for the first time. Similar to net income, Ariba sustained cash flow breakeven for the first time in 2009, but flirted with the mark since about 2004. But, the company has been operating at close to breakeven since 2004. Ariba acquired a company called Tradex technologies for $1.6B

Outsourced Development 113

Outsourced Development Software Review Technical Review compliance 113

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 18, 2014

In addition to looking at gross numbers, let’s compare the growth rates from 2009 to 2013 of each of these buckets. more common in 2013 as 2009 and $75-100M rounds have doubled during this time frame. 30M-$50M and $150-$200M rounds rounds are 1.5x

Finance 100

Finance Investment Scaling Data 100

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 5, 2023

What You Will Learn: May’s perspective on the economy now compared to that of 2008/2009. Highlights: (6:12) May’s learnings from Lehman Brothers and the economic crisis of 2008/2009. (14:11) Writer’s decision to make PLG table stakes and how they leverage their motion to secure enterprise customers.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Enterprise AI Banking 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 12, 2014

In 2009 and 2010, the company recognized more revenue from services than subscription. Unlike these other companies, WorkDay has employed a huge professional services team in addition in investing massively in their R&D to create a broad suite of products. In dollars, WorkDay $30M on research & development on revenues of $25.2M

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks Deferred Revenue Venture Capital Outsourced Development 113

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. I broke into SaaS in 2009 I was the second sales hire and the 10th overall hire at a New York City based SaaS business called Zocdoc. Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

Sales Recruiting 251

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 251