SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? The common threads of my investments are companies creating a new category or disrupting the definition of a current category. #3. What’s different about your fund / how you invest and support founders?

Scale 214

Scale Software Review Payment Features AI 214

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 19, 2017

But as the chart above shows, the median amount invested in seed rounds continues to increase at about 40% annually. This trend started in 2014 and has continued through the first quarter of 2017. The anomaly in 2017 is due to an outlier. In 2016, the number of seeds has fallen by a 27.6% reduction in the number of seed rounds.

Marketing 100

Marketing Finance Startup Trends 100

SaaStr

AUGUST 1, 2022

Because in the Best of Times, there’s always more money to invest in top performers — and even mid-pack performer s. That really leaves just $120m to invest. (Yes, Yes, there are ways to “recycle” to get the amount available to invest up, but that’s not super important for this analysis). checks on average ($2.5m

Venture Capital 266

Venture Capital Startup Investment Pricing 266

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 17, 2021

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

Startup 349

Startup Software Engineering Finance Engineering 349

Sparktoro

JANUARY 2, 2023

It’s 2017, and you convince your executives to be early adopters of the #Web3 trend. Blockchain-based product investments, marketing with NFTs, perhaps your own crypto coin. It’s fun, interesting, and it feels like you’re ahead of your competition on a rising tide that will lift all ships.

Blockchain 131

Blockchain Marketing Trends Investment 131

SaaStr

AUGUST 22, 2023

Peter was part of an amazing batch of CEOs that Emergence Capital invested in, including me. Watch her session from Annual 2017, and if you aren’t inspired, you are doing it wrong: #3. But here are a few that stood out so much, that I truly learned something profound from them: #1. Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva.

Startup 206

Startup SaaS Investment 206

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2021

Now is the time to invest, in team and product at least. 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. Next year, you will have a $14m, or an $18m, or maybe even a $20m+ business.

SaaS 307

SaaS Travel Churn Revenue 307

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2021

CEO Peter Gassner is truly of the most impressive founders I’ve personally met and you can take a look at our deep dive from SaaStr Annual 2017 here not long after they’d IPO’d: One of many remarkable things about Veeva: it burned about $3m on the way to IPO. In basically one venture round and a bit of angel investing.

Scale 282

Scale Cloud Enterprise Scaling 282

SaaStr

MARCH 29, 2021

And it has been since 2017 or so! Invest long here. In the early days, invest heavily in any partners you have even 1 or 2 joint customers with. Invest in what is working. Salesforce’s biggest source of new revenue isn’t CRM or even support. It’s partners and platform. But that took time.

Payments 284

Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services Investment 284

SaaStr

DECEMBER 8, 2020

2013: first investment. Worth $2B by 2017. Solo founder. First product doesn’t work, no revenue for 3 years. 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.

SaaS 190

SaaS SMB Cloud Revenue 190

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2020

They wanted to invest in apps, not APIs. And they had to go months with no money at all. “If you are in survival mode, you need to think through ever investments you make now, weighted toward survival first, but the best outcome after the crisis is over second.” But at that time, fundraising was really tough.

CTO Hire 329

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Airlines 329

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2020

(Note: I wrote a version of this in 2017 when times were good. And more importantly, they are invested in you. Make sure net negative churn is at least covered and invested in. Maybe they can invest a little more, maybe they can’t. So here’s the 2020+ version). __. Hopefully, things are great. In the media.

Sales Hiring 303

Sales Hiring Startup Investment Revenue 303

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2021

The biggest change is that growth investors, the folks that invest at $10m+ ARR, are often now looking for SaaS startups to be tripling at this stage — not doubling. What’s the bar now to be a decacorn-in-waiting? To merit those crazy high valuations we seem to be seeing almost every day? Or at least growing 150% or so.

Startup 241

Startup SaaS Cloud Pricing 241

SaaStock

JANUARY 30, 2019

By 2017 as things stabilized, VC firms such as Accell and Tiger came back, while a new breed of local Seed stage ones was established. Its partners boast diverse venture experience and have previously invested in more than 70 companies. Founded: 2017. SaaS Investments: Pipefy, HeyDoctor. Founded: 2017. Stage: Seed.

Venture Capital 155

Venture Capital SaaS Healthcare Finance 155

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2019

Customers invest in not just products, but relationships. If you compare them over 10 year lifetimes, you’ll see you should probably invest much more in the bigger customers. Invest — at least in your bigger customers — as if they are worth 10x what they are worth today. Invest like that.

Scale 340

Scale Churn Construction SMB 340

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2019

That’s way, way up from just 22% of revenue from $100k+ deals in 2017. ” The Slack Fund is tiny. “As of January 31, 2019, Slack Fund has invested $10.1 He was granted an additional 3m shares in 2017 and 1.3m The S-1 is full of enterprise case studies, from Oracle to Fox to Splunk. more in 2019.

Scale 273

Scale Venture Capital SMB Enterprise 273

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2023

By comparison, the median growth rate for these businesses from 2015-2017 was 27%. Software is a riskier investment. You can invest in a security bearing 0% interest, but you won’t get a return, so folks generally don’t want to allocate capital to risk-free assets.

SaaS 232

SaaS Software Metrics Revenue 232

Totango

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

At Customer Success Summit 2017 , Sam Boonin, VP of Product Strategy at Zendesk, gave a keynote address where he pointed out that “relationships between businesses and consumers are complicated,” because what they want is different. As Zendesk grew and invested in people, the business and processes became complicated.

Customer Success 82

Customer Success Investment Scale Underperforming Technical Team 82

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 10, 2018

In December 2017, the amount raised in ICOs nearly equaled the amount raised by Series A investments globally. In the early 2000s, the billions of dollars invested enabled the Internet. About a third of the ICOs in 2017 raised some form of institutional capital before ICO.

Innovation 151

Innovation Blockchain Finance Marketing 151

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2022

When Sud took the CEO position in 2017, Vimeo was targeting consumers and creators. Focus on delivering product value, invest in top-notch onboarding and CX, and look for the patterns in your typical enterprise buyer journey. Read on for advice and lessons Vimeo learned along the way. Why the Shift to B2B? Key Takeaways.

B2C 190

B2C B2B Enterprise Leadership 190

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2019

But the goal overall is to significantly outperform the market (+50% higher) to account for risk, while rewarding those who can afford highly illiquid investments (universities, pensions, etc). A $50m fund with 10 investments leaves room for only $5m per investor. The IRR can be very attractive in late-stage investing, done well.

Benchmarks 150

Benchmarks Investment Data Marketing 150

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2019

in 2017, the day before their IPO. Here’s why: For every dollar of sales and marketing investment, DataDog generates $1.68 One last chart: revenue dollars at IPO per venture dollar invested. This is a measure of turning investment dollars into revenue, a sort of return on equity metric. as of this morning.

Metrics 189

Metrics Benchmarks Scale User Experience 189

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2022

So a top theme across SaaStr CEO interviews since 2017 or so, and across our 5 Interesting Learnings series with public SaaS companies, is … when should you go multi-product? It’s what I’ve found in particular across my 30+ venture investments. For multi-market, this could be $100m in ARR. jasonlk) April 29, 2022.

Scale 233

Scale SaaS SMB Scaling 233

SaaStr

MAY 30, 2020

This was an opener for SaaStr 2017 and is a terrific primer on how to market to multiple sized customers at the same time … a challenge so many of us struggle to get right. #8. We talk a lot about where things really are today, why and how things are and will bounce back, and more. #3:

Scale 152

Scale PayPal Investment Scaling 152

A Smart Bear

JANUARY 4, 2018

Of course a nice chunk is primary capital, i.e. for the company balance sheet, to invest in growth initiatives, security and quality, and advancing our existing strategic priorities through acceleration and de-risking. The majority of the funds pay back our early investors who believed in us enough to trust us with their money.

Engineering 70

Engineering Investment Revenue Technical Review 70

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2019

Whatever great work the sales team did in 2017 will be 100% behind them on Jan 2. Invest in training and onboarding. Sales teams often do the worst investment in onboarding of almost any function. Invest heavily in training your reps. Invest in optimizing lead routing, scoring and management. Just harder.

Scale 220

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Investment 220

Tom Tunguz

JULY 22, 2018

But in 2017, the Series A median surpassed the 2009 Series B median. of investment through that period. in investment - skipping a round of financing. 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.

Startup 142

Startup Finance Marketing Trends 142

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2022

Boterri’s company Accel invested in PayFit in 2017 and again in 2021. At the SaaStr Europa 2022 event, Accel Partner Philippe Botteri interviewed PayFit CEO & Co-Founder Firmin Zocchetto to ask about his GTM strategy. . Currently, PayFit serves over 7,000 customers and shows no signs of slowing down.

SMB 176

SMB Sales Hiring Scale B2C 176

SaaSOptics

FEBRUARY 21, 2017

Now in its third year, SaaStr has become the “must attend” event for anyone running or investing in a SaaS business. SaaSOptics. team joined close to 10,000 global SaaS founders, executives and investors in San Francisco for the annual. SaaStr event. Read more.

Investment 40

Investment SaaS Business 40

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 20, 2023

Here are the highlights that stick out for me when looking back on 2023, the best year* yet for ChartMogul. *Of course…we do say that every year, as you can see in our 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 , and 2016 posts. Launching ChartMogul CRM On April 4th, after months of stealth work, we launched ChartMogul CRM into the world.

Scale 52

Scale Subscription Payment Features Benchmarks 52

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 6, 2021

Imagine you have a dollar to invest and you can choose between two options: a public cloud service or a layer 1 blockchain. How do you decide which is more attractive? How does a token differ from equity? The answer is that tokens can act remarkably like equity if they are structured in the right way.

Government 215

Government Compensation Blockchain Banking 215

Point Nine Land

MAY 28, 2020

There is this idea in the VC community that investors usually know after the first meeting (or maybe even after the first five minutes) if they want to invest in a company. Every once in a while, though, you see a deck, try a product, or talk to a founder, and you know immediately that you just have to invest in this company.

Investment 90

Investment Development Venture Capital Marketing 90

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 26, 2021

Calendly has been a part of the OV family since our original investment in August of 2017. We’ve been consistently impressed by Calendly’s performance, and we’re beyond excited to deepen our partnership with this significant investment. We are thrilled to announce that Calendly has closed a $350M Series B, led by OpenView.

Acquisition 84

Acquisition Investment Strategy Marketing 84

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2020

Next up, we brought together some of the top VCs in Cloud to share with us how investing has changed in 2020, from Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures to David Sacks of Craft Ventures and many more. Over 40,000 watched the various sessions of New New in Venture: Next up, we had 70,000 (!)

Technical Review 278

Technical Review Cloud Enterprise Engineering 278

ProfitWell

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

The turning point for Calm came in 2017. Up until July 2017, the hero copy on their website read "Meditation Made Simple”. As a result, in December of 2017, Calm was awarded Apple’s app of the year - solidifying their arrival and spurring a 3-year (and counting) streak of download dominance. Positioning: Inputs vs Outcomes.

Acquisition 111

Acquisition Pricing Subscription Payment Features 111

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 9, 2020

In October of 2017, Netflix announced another pricing change. Given the company’s fraught history with pricing, I could not wait to hear how the 2017 pricing changes are impacting Netflix’s bottom line went. On Monday, January 22, Netflix announced the results in their Q4 2017 earnings. per month to $10.99 million).

Pricing 70

Pricing Forecasting Churn Finance 70

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 62

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 62