Buffer Resources

AUGUST 12, 2024

  I quickly burned out when I tried starting a YouTube channel in 2017. I lacked strategy, struggled with the technical aspects of video production, and failed to gain traction despite publishing 35 videos. This led to me eventually abandoning my YouTube efforts altogether.

AI Search 97

AI Search Technical Review Consulting Social Media 97

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2025

Why It Matters : The report shows that VC investment has been highly correlated to rates, but in a moderate interest rate environment, rates will likely play a smaller role similar to 2017-2019. The Implication : Founders and investors betting on rate cuts to revive the market may be disappointed.

Outsourcing Services 173

Outsourcing Services Venture Capital Outsourced Development Data 173

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2025

2025-2026 Anduril 2017 Palmer Luckey Defense Tech $1B $30.5B Revenue Valuation IPO Timeline Databricks 2013 Ali Ghodsi Data Analytics $2.4B $62B 2025-2026 Netskope 2012 Sanjay Beri Cybersecurity $487M $7.5B Q3-Q4 2025 Discord 2015 Humam Sakhnini* Communication ~$600M $15B 2025 Figma 2012 Dylan Field Design Software $600M $12.5B volume $91.5B

B2B 187

B2B Payments SaaS Payments Payment Services 187

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 184

AI Search AI ChatGPT Innovation 184

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 5, 2024

  For example, take a look at how our Content team worked together back in 2017 to plan our editorial calendar.   As you can probably guess, we don’t do things the same way anymore. Our blog and writing process have seen many iterations throughout the years. 

AI Search 108

AI Search Social Media Systems Review Technical Review 108

Scytale

MARCH 12, 2025

Before founding Synthesia in 2017, he co-led Immersive Futures, shaping the UKs VR/AR industry and working with the UK government to establish Londons first high-quality volumetric capture studio, Dimension. As co-founder and CEO of Wayve , he is transforming transportation with AV2.0,

Startup 59

Startup Scale Cybersecurity AI Search 59

Totango

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Account executives can’t sell like it’s 2017 anymore. Every business needs a customer-led growth motion to stay in business for the long term. Go-to-market teams need to prioritize customer ROI as the driver of decision-making, metrics tracking, and relationship management.

Scale 71

Scale Marketing Finance Outsourced Development 71

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

The philosophy behind profit sharing We’ve carried out profit sharing at Buffer  since 2017 , and we see it as a component of building a long-term, sustainable, thriving business. But beyond the practical aspects, profitability gives us conviction and helps us to be really ambitious about our future.

Business 100

Business Revenue Finance Strategy 100

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2025

When Observe was founded in late 2017, the decision to build 100% on Snowflake was controversial enough that it cost them founding team members. The 100% Platform Commitment: Observe’s Bet on Snowflake Jeremy Burton’s story with Observe provides a fascinating case study in platform commitment.

AI 269

AI DevOps as a Service Scale Outsourced Development 269

How To Buy Saas

MAY 26, 2025

Introduced in the seminal 2017 paper “ Attention Is All You Need ” by Google researchers, the transformer architecture has become the dominant paradigm in AI models. Modern LLMs are built on the Transformer architecture , which introduced the attention mechanism that allows the model to effectively understand context.

Artificial Intelligence 64

Artificial Intelligence Data Software Review SaaS 64

Blulogix

MAY 16, 2025

Maybe even macros from 2017. Schedule a Demo Today Why Its Failing Why Its Failing Youre Still Using Spreadsheets for Billing Youve got sensors on freight containers across continents. But back at HQ? Your billing process lives in Excel. Manual data entry. VLOOKUP formulas. Its dynamic, its high-volume, and it needs automation.

Payments 52

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 52

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

So we’ll jump you in a time machine and go back to whatever moment sticks out in your head. Fred Viet: It’s more an advice that I receive. And I think it was in the first two years of my career. Fred Viet: You start, you think you’re really good, and you’ve got a lack of self-awareness. You don’t go really deep.

Outsourcing Services 117

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 117

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 18, 2024

Check out the 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 , and 2016 posts. To everyone in SaaS (and especially our incredible customers): heres to a productive, profitable close to 2024 💪 The future looks brightand I can’t wait to see what we build together.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Benchmarks Innovation Payment Features 52

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2025

The Numbers Don’t Lie: A Tale of Two Eras The Golden Age (2017-2018): When VCs Were Heroes Looking at 2017 funds—the darlings of the previous cycle: 81% returned capital after 5+ years Median IRR of 11.5% (that’s actually good!)

Venture Capital 272

Venture Capital Technical Review AI Compensation 272

Sales Hacker

MAY 13, 2025

which was acquired by Oracle in April 2017. Previously, Michael was the co-founder and chairman of Moat, which was acquired by Oracle in April of 2017. He also co-founded WGI Group, LLC, to provide growth capital to early and expansion stage startups in enterprise software, consumer internet and digital media industries.

AI Search 74

AI Search AI ChatGPT Software Review 74

SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2025

Here’s what you need to know about their path to scale.

Scale 238

Scale AI Artificial Intelligence SaaS 238

TrackStreet

JULY 2, 2025

Since its relaunch in 2017, Amazon has offered brand owners better tools to control how their products are represented and sold. Companies may find that shifting from a 1P (Vendor Central) to a 3P (Seller Central) model provides more control over pricing, inventory, and customer experience. Leverage Amazon Brand Registry 2.0

Branding 40

Branding Scale Marketplace as a Service Pricing 40

Neil Patel

JUNE 9, 2025

Here’s a short timeline that puts AI Mode in context: May 2017: CEO Sundar Pichai announces the launch of a dedicated AI division called Google AI at I/O, the company’s annual developer conference. March 2023: Google opens up early access to Bard , its first gen AI chatbot.

AI Search 60

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT 60

FastSpring

OCTOBER 30, 2017

Experts are predicting that 2017 will be the strongest holiday shopping season ever for ecommerce. Because even last year, when many people were feeling uncertain about the U.S. economy in the post-election season, they still spent 13% more online than the previous year.

Software 137

Software Business SaaS 137

Neil Patel

JULY 19, 2025

Mobile devices have generated over 50% of all website traffic since 2017, so use a mobile-first approach during your redesign process to appeal to the largest percentage of users. Since 2017, mobile devices have generated over half of website traffic. Bad Mobile Experience Is your site the opposite of mobile-friendly?

Underperforming Technical Team 46

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Mobile 46

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Despite only launching in 2017, it’s one of the fastest-growing apps in the world and recently overtook Google as the  most visited  internet site.​ We analyzed more than 5 million Instagram posts to find the times most likely to get likes, comments, shares, and more.

Social Media 126

Social Media Payments Branding Payment Methods 126

Neil Patel

JULY 22, 2025

That’s what happened to Pepsi in 2017 for their ad that featured Kendall Jenner, which co-opted protest imagery to sell soda (and promptly got called out for trivializing real social movements ). Tone-deaf or Insensitive Posting Some trends are tied to serious or sensitive events, and misjudging the tone can result in intense backlash.

Branding 63

Branding Social Media AI Search ChatGPT 63

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Here's what's interesting: we started out with a simple "$500 per person" approach back in 2017. How we handle conferences at Buffer We've put some real thought into how we approach conferences at Buffer (and yes, I've had a front-row seat to these discussions!). Spoiler alert: It wasn't great.

Social Media 111

Social Media Marketing Innovation Venture Capital 111

The Angel VC

JANUARY 10, 2017

Today is January 10, 2017. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. Today I'd like to take a stab at the (early) 2017 answer to that question. So, what does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in early 2017? Here's the 2017 SaaS Funding Napkin!

SaaS 262

SaaS Marketplace as a Service Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 262

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 26, 2017

And this data implies that fewer earlier stage companies raised, which means there will be fewer Series Bs in 2017 and fewer Series Cs in 2018. Despite this increasing amount of capital on investor’s balance sheet, 2016 was a slower year by round count.

Startup 255

Startup Software Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 255

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2024

So Carta has some of its latest data on VC performance and it’s pretty interesting: There’s a lot going on this chart but let me break it down from a founder perspective: The median 2017 fund is 7 years into a 10-14 lifetime — and is sitting at 1.8x “TVPI” But it’s not quite that good. So back out 20%.

Venture Capital 307

Venture Capital Investment Data 307

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 306

Trends Software Marketing Data 306

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

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 296

Software Review Startup SaaS Pricing 296

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

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 316

Startup Sales Hiring Government Outsourced Development 316

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 284

Technical Review Travel Scaling SaaS 284

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

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 273

Outbound Sales Team Scale Scaling SaaS 273

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 306

PayPal Cloud Engineering 306

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 252

Scale SaaS Company Culture Leadership 252

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