SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

Then, in 2017, with around $50M in revenue, BILL added payment capabilities. You have to keep going when you’re doing something that wasn’t done before. There was an inflection point for BILL around 10k customers. The network was growing, and they saw real virality. That was probably 2012. BILL network has 7.1M

SMB 312

SMB Payment Services Payments Payment Methods 312

Tom Tunguz

MAY 9, 2022

I went through my archives and found this post from 2017 that showed that the most expensive stock at the time was Veeva at 11.7x If the valuation environment mirrors 2017, CloudFlare’s multiple would halve again. In 2017, the average company traded at 5.4x Today, CloudFlare tops the list at 22.2x.

Trends 311

Trends Software Marketing Data 311

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

After the correction earlier this year, public valuation multiples had reset to those of 2017. Before this announcement, US venture-backed software M&A was tracking to its worst year since 2017, at about $7b, down from $71b last year. Congratulations to team Figma on building their impressive business.

Startup 355

Startup Acquisition Pricing Revenue 355

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2025

Anthropic (founded 2021) Stability AI (founded 2020) Cohere (founded 2019) Databricks (founded 2013) Windsurf (founded 2021) Cursor (founder 2022) Hugging Face (founded 2016) OpenAI (founded 2015) Synthesia (founded 2017) Palantir (founded 2003) These companies didn’t start with today’s AI vision fully formed.

AI Search 191

AI Search AI ChatGPT Innovation 191

Tom Tunguz

MAY 21, 2023

The rest of the top quartile has remained depressed, suppressing the cohort to 2017 levels, just as they were last year. But rally hasn’t convincingly beaten the black line representing the 2017 median. These top five stocks explain the most recent earnings upward in the chart above.

Software Review 302

Software Review Startup SaaS Pricing 302

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2022

Early businesses tend to create more instruments to hire, grow, and incentivize. tokens resemble equity in most ways, but possess one additional function: they can be used to pay for service. Trailing 2 Year Inflation Rate. Founded Year.

Startup 320

Startup Sales Hiring Government Outsourced Development 320

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2020

From $8 billion in market cap in 2017 to $117 billion today! A $2 billion market cap is amazing. But $20 billion is now becoming “common”, if that term can be used. Shopify is the crazy one. Most of these names were worth a fraction of their current market cap at IPO. Zendesk IPO’d at $1 billion.

SaaS 363

SaaS SMB Cloud Enterprise 363

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2021

60%+ of our speakers have been less represented speakers since 2017 and all our IRL events since 2017 have had a majority of women speakers.W. Submit for any of our events here. Please also review our detailed guidelines here. In a nutshell: We prioritize diversity. We require fresh content and perspective. No repeats.

Technical Review 290

Technical Review Travel Scaling SaaS 290

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2022

One of the crowd favorites has been Mark Roberge, all the way back to 2017. 2017: How the Best Outbound Sales Teams Are Managed. Mark first joined us in a terrific panel session on how the top outbound teams are managed, 2018: Sales Mistakes that Can Kill Your SaaS Business How to Avoid Them. Ok, now a look back!

Outbound Sales Team 278

Outbound Sales Team Scale Scaling SaaS 278

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2021

And here’s a fun look back to the very first Plato event, back in SaaStr’s original CoSelling Spacem in 2017! They have sessions and roundtables with the VPEs and CTOs of Atlassian, Datadog, Gusto, Box, Coda, Safegraph, Headspace, Flatiron, Lyft, Superhuman, Netflix, PayPal and so much more! It’s epic. Sign up here.

PayPal 311

PayPal Cloud Engineering 311

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2024

The Rebrand That Changed Everything 2017’s pivot from dapulse to monday.com wasn’t just a name change. Product-Led Growth Before It Was Cool While others were building massive sales teams, Zinman pushed for a product that would sell itself. The result? ARR growth?

Scale 257

Scale SaaS Company Culture Leadership 257

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 18, 2020

In 2017 and 2018, the median high-growth private company raised at a higher forward ARR multiple than in the public markets. Let’s excise this group of 50% growers from the rest and add Redpoint internal data for forward ARR multiples for later-stage companies, which are all growing above 50%.

Software Review 363

Software Review Finance Enterprise Acquisition 363

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 17, 2021

Here are 2015 , 2017 , This year, I was certain the categories would have been influenced by COVID19. From time to time, I chart the fastest growing categories of startup investment in the US for seed through Series C.

Startup 362

Startup Software Engineering Finance Engineering 362

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

The point is that SaaS multiples are still higher than where they were from 2010-2017. Draw a straight line and assume multiples gradually expand at the same rate as they were growing from 2017-2019. The Bear Case: Multiples are still elevated compared to the pre-2018 period. It just went nuts during Peak Covid.

SaaS 348

SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 348

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

It’s not slowing down Salesforce, Snowflake, or almost any other SaaS or Cloud leader. Salesforce Growth: 2023 $31.8B (guidance) 2022 $26.5B 2021 $21.25B 2020 $17.1B 2014 $4.1B. Thank you Ohana! pic.twitter.com/CMhrBXgHSF. — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) May 31, 2022. We may be headed for a big downturn, we’ll see.

Sales Hiring 347

Sales Hiring Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 347

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2019

I didn’t calculate this figure in 2017. (note I’m switching from median to average here). In 4 years, we’ve seen a 4x increase in the median MRR of a Series A SaaS company. That’s quite a growth rate. There are two reasons for this increase.

Benchmarks 262

Benchmarks Startup SaaS Data Analysis 262

The Daily Egg

MARCH 22, 2019

In 2019, wherever you look, you will find its traces.

Management 275

Management Trends User Experience Marketing 275

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2023

So the minor point is maybe we’re just back to 2016-2017 in SaaS venture capital for Series A and later rounds. For the best ones. But the bigger point is especially for new founders and execs to just look at the chart above. We’re never “going back” to how things were in late 2020 and 2021.

Venture Capital 67

Venture Capital AWS SaaS Startup 67

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2022

Today, the public markets value companies like it’s 2017. At 28 employees, a $16m Series A fueled the company for 35 months. That’s a lot of buffer to achieve Series B metrics [1]. But we’re no longer in 2021.

Headcount 325

Headcount Venture Capital Finance Startup 325

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 23, 2020

Prior to Shopify, Kaz was the Product Lead for Payments and Billing at Facebook and was the former CEO of Kash, a payment technology company that he founded and which was acquired in 2017. During the conversation, we’ll discuss: What does the future of financial services look like?

Payment Solutions 286

Payment Solutions Payment Services Payments Banking 286

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2022

CEO and co-founder Bill Magnuson was CTO until 2017, then took over as CEO from a co-founder, and owns 4.5%. Bull Wall Street seems fine with it. 60% still “counts” as software. 1,000 employees at $250m in ARR. A good yardstick for more enterprise-focused SaaS. Dilution added up over the years, with Magnuson owning 4.5%

New CTO 69

New CTO CTO Software Review B2B 69

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Starting in 2017 when the data is richer, the PLG companies increased R&D spend from 27.5% I categorized these companies by their primary motion: sales or product-led. Sales-led companies have oscillated around the 25% mark. However, PLG companies are a different story.

Software 302

Software Trends Revenue Startup 302

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 29, 2022

In 2017, SaaS companies reported their cost of customer acquisition had increased by 65% in the previous five year period. What happened to these figures during Covid? We can examine the sales efficiency of public software companies to get a sense.

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Sales Startup Acquisition 317

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2021

Salesforce Growth: 2021 $20.8B Guidance 2020 $17.1B 2014 $4.1B. Thank you Ohana! — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) August 25, 2020. If you haven’t done a SaaS start-up before, it’s different. The reasons are many, but I think they can almost all be summed up in one key factor: SaaS compounds.

SaaS 331

SaaS Travel Churn Revenue 331

SaaStr

DECEMBER 8, 2020

Worth $2B by 2017. $200m from Silver Lake. 2016: IPO at $1.15B market cap. 2020: Worth $7B today. Zendesk : Founded 2006. Raised $500,000 (!) in first angel round in 2007. IPO in 2014 at $1B. Crossed $1B in ARR in 2020. Today worth $16B. Obviously, these are outliers. And revenue has grown to $1B+ ARR for all the winners.

SaaS 289

SaaS SMB Cloud Revenue 289

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2021

We’ve had a majority of women speakers since 2017, and aim for 66% less represented speakers. So for 5+ years we’ve had a very specific set of speaker guidelines at SaaStr Annual and related events. We’re not close to perfect and keep learning. Since Covid hit though, we did a lot of digital events.

Data 290

Data Marketing 290

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2023

rev 2017: $30m rev. UiPath has had an incredible history, taking 10 years to get to that first $1m in ARR … and then turning into one of the fastest growing software companies to $1 Billion in ARR ever ! UIPath History 2005: Started as a tech outsourcing company 2014: $500k rev. seed round 2015: $1m rev. 2016: $3.5m 2018: $155m rev.

Company Culture 290

Company Culture Innovation AI Enterprise 290

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2019

That’s way, way up from just 22% of revenue from $100k+ deals in 2017. He was granted an additional 3m shares in 2017 and 1.3m Today, Slack has 575+ customers paying more than $100k a year, which important now accounts for 40%+ of its revenue. The S-1 is full of enterprise case studies, from Oracle to Fox to Splunk. more in 2019.

Scale 279

Scale Venture Capital SMB Enterprise 279

SaaStr

MAY 28, 2021

But over time, it’s added a large enterprise and B2B component for marketers and others to track, manage and market videos that we’ll spend a bunch of time digging in on, as it’s the fastest-growing segment, growing from little-to-none in 2017 to 25% of revenue today. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

Enterprise 325

Enterprise Scale B2B Metrics 325

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2022

#1 source of traffic to [link] : 2022: SEO 2021: SEO 2020: SEO 2019: SEO 2018: SEO 2017: SEO 2016: SEO 2015: SEO 2014: SEO 2013: SEO 2012: SEO. Even Year 1 pic.twitter.com/5FtzBG2v1O. — Jason BeKind Lemkin #???????????? jasonlk) March 15, 2022. So we’re coming up on Year 10 for SaaStr!

Engagement 278

Engagement Data Sales Marketing 278

SaaStr

OCTOBER 22, 2023

In 2017, he was named by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 CMOs in the world to follow for thought-leadership in the digital marketing domain. Chandar also spent years at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a strategic advisor to Fortune 500 companies. He is a Strategic Advisor to the CEO of Freshworks.

AI Search 290

AI Search Consulting Leadership AI 290

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2021

Where it Went: $45m revenue in 2017 and reported $100m+ in 2021, but acquired for modest sum in 2021. Where it Went: Acquired for $850m+ by Sage in 2017. Thought this would be about $50m. Where it Went: A $7B market cap and IPO. 557 SEOmoz. in 2011 GAAP revenue. Boy, there is just so much money in marketing. 563 Demandware.

SaaS 290

SaaS Technical Review Software Review Scaling 290

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2023

Each year from 2017-2021 was easier than the prior year. The biggest issue though is how long it just got easier and easier. Now we have a whole generation of SaaS employees and execs who have only seen SaaS. Get Easier Every Year. 2022 was harder, but it took a while to see it wasn’t transitory.

SaaS 318

SaaS Churn Sales Software 318

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 21, 2024

In 2017, the industry migrated from ASC 605 to ASC 606, which are financial arcana as esoteric as it reads. If that argument is correct, then the average gross margin of a software company in the public domain would fall from 72% to 47%. Quite a stark difference. Profitability for software companies isn’t straightforward.

Software 297

Software Business Construction Government 297

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

This was around 2017, and CS became simpler and focused on post-sales, retention, and reduced churn. This revenue chart is 2017-2021 before Braze IPO’d. They hired tech support people, and they got re-entrenched into the zero-to-one building mindset rather than the rest of the CSM function, which already had a little scale.

Scale 296

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 296

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

This led to our first meet-ups in 2013 and 2014, the first SaaStr Annual in 2015 , the industry’s leading podcast in 2016, the first SaaS founder coworking space in 2017, and SaaStr Pro , the first learning management system for SaaS founders in 2018. 2017 The Third SaaStr Annual: Scale Together.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 312

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2023

Up until say 2017–2018 or so, in SaaS, there was a rough rule: a relatively small amount of secondary liquidity ($1m-$2m) would be offered by growth investors in top VC rounds once a startup crossed $10m ARR or so. Dear SaaStr: Can Founders Still Sell Some of Their Shares in Venture Rounds in 2023?

Startup 59

Startup Investment SaaS Revenue 59