SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Would You Invest a 5 Million Dollar Payout From an Acquisition? He literally lost everything in his prior startup. The post Dear SaaStr: How Would You Invest a 5 Million Dollar Payout From an Acquisition? Bear in mind I’m not a CFA, CPA, or professional financial advisor. But I have been through it.

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SaaStr

MAY 25, 2023

Probably just say Yes pic.twitter.com/K483lKnyzd — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  (@jasonlk) April 21, 2021 So I wrote a version of this post years ago, about when to think about selling your startup, if you do get an attractive offer. Every Big Tech company has a budget for sub-$100m acquisitions. 2 turned down an $80m offer on $2.5m

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Acquisition Venture Capital Scale Generative AI 360

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

Because in the short-term, it often costs basically close to nothing to acquire a smaller startup with cash on hand, or do a corporate VC investment. So if Salesforce invests a few billion in AI startups, and those values at least don’t go down — there’s essentially no cost to Salesforce. What do I mean?

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Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 237

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 7, 2022

Zendesk & Anaplan announced their acquisitions within days of each other & their multiples bound the outer edges of the range: 5.1x & 13.4x. The more free cash the company produces, the lower the acquisition multiple. Curiously, free-cash flow margin correlates to forward-revenue/EV multiples at -0.996.

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Acquisition Pricing Startup Software 258

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2022

Startups create products. When a business is ready to scale, a startup ought to develop an organizational roadmap. Managers of paid acquisition, organic acquisition, and marketing operations/systems report to the head of demand generation. The question for early-stage startups is how to start building this structure.

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Startup Acquisition Product Marketing Scaling 353

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

Because in the short-term, it often costs basically close to nothing to acquire a smaller startup with cash on hand, or do a corporate VC investment. So if Salesforce invests a few billion in AI startups, and those values at least don’t go down — there’s essentially no cost to Salesforce. What do I mean?

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Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 206

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What happens to employees after your startup gets acquired? for anything longer than a transition period, and either won’t agree to hire all of them, or will transition them out post-acquisition. The post Dear SaaStr: What Happens to Employees After Your Startup Gets Acquired? It varies — a lot.

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Startup Sales Hiring Finance Acquisition 221

Tom Tunguz

MAY 25, 2022

Yesterday, Broadcom announced it will acquire VMWare for $70b, the largest software acquisition in history. This merger also suggests a wave of acquisitions may punctuate 2022, in particular, take-privates. Public companies can’t hide from the 70% collapse in multiples the way startups can. before the acquisition.

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Neil Patel

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

The problem with selling your startup is the long exit time. Who wants to wait almost a decade to buy a startup when the face of tech is evolving at such a rapid pace? Micro startup acquisitions. Micro Startup Acquisitions: What Are They, and Why Should I Care? What does this mean for startups?

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Technical Review Payment Methods Acquisition Startup 144

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2023

The US startup M&A market in Q4 2022 was one of the quietest in the last 20 years. The total quantity of acquisitions demonstrated greater resilience shrinking by 56%, while the median acquisition value tumbled from $81m to $22m (-72%). It’s no surprise Q4 2022 acquisition value plummeted. in Q4 2022.

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Startup Marketing Acquisition Pricing 282

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2022

Dear SaaStr: What Percentage of Startups That Are Acquired Remain Successful? Salesforce grew Mulesoft, ExactTarget, and so far, Slack and all grew well after their acquisitions. ZoomInfo , one of SaaS’s great recent IPOs, is really an acquisition story. The “ZoomInfo” product was an acquisition. Every week.

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Chart Mogul

AUGUST 20, 2020

Selling a startup can be an exhausting, overwhelming process, but the right preparation can make it much easier. 4x entrepreneur Andrew Gazdecki shares how you can better prepare yourself for your startup's acquisition, and make the journey a rewarding one. Selling your startup is a full-time job. Negotiate everything.

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Acquisition Startup Technical Review Scale 105

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2022

Dear SaaStr: How Long Does It Take the Average SaaS Startup to “Exit”? I took a look a little while back at how long it took the average SaaS company that was sold for $1B+ to get that acquisition. years (maybe the better metric): The fastest of the bunch was Divvy’s $2b+ acquisition by Bill 5 years after funding.

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Startup SaaS Acquisition B2B 275

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Do Companies Prefer Stock Over Cash When They Acquire Startups? All things being equal, most tech companies that are very profitable (Adobe, Microsoft, Intuit, SAP, Oracle, Google, Facebook etc) would prefer to do acquisitions with cash. That includes any stock-based acquisitions. appeared first on SaaStr.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2020

Q: Which merger and acquisition trends, if any, do you expect to unfold in the next 12 months? Not some tiny startup that might take years to get to material revenue or market share. If you are worth $20b-$1T+, you often don’t want to wait for a small acquisition or internal initiative to bear fruit. You buy that growth.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Why Do Many Startup CEOs Quit After Their Companies Are Acquired? I left my first startup after 20 days, post-acquisition. Acquirers should recognize this and turn the CEOs into 50%-time consultants and “non-executive chairpeople” of their startups, until the help isn’t needed anymore. That can be tough.

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Startup Consulting Acquisition Retention 239

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2021

Q: When should a CEO walk away from an acquisition? I’ve walked from acquisitions where I, to be honest, did want the money but still walked. You have (at least) 4 constituencies in an acquisition: You and your co-founders. A little more here: When Should You Sell Your Startup? I’ve thought about this a lot.

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Acquisition Pricing Cloud Startup 248

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2024

First, bear in mind acquisitions are relatively rare. The vast majority of startups will never get one acquisition offer, let alone a good one. You’d be surprised how leaders at Big Tech Cos hear of startups, and who they know about, and who they don’t. Dear SaaStr: How Do You Build a Real Exit Strategy?

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Strategy Acquisition Startup Engineering 260

SaaStr

JULY 16, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Do Late Stage Startups Prefer to Get Acquired or Go Public? We’ve Never Seen That Before Today, an acquisition can seem so much easier. It really varies. Especially these days, when the IPO markets are closed. When it was literally an IPO a Day in 2021, it seemed almost easy. And today — it seems so far from easy.

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Startup Acquisition Pricing SaaS 230

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2019

Let’s put this acquisition in context. First, it’s the third business intelligence related acquisition in the past month. Google announced the Looker acquisition last week. in acquisitions suggests that 2019 will be similarly active as 2018, which saw $66B of acquisitions. in revenue, growing at 29%.

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Acquisition Pricing Startup Software 226

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 16, 2023

This is the moment startups with big balance sheets’ advantage will shine. First, acquisitions. Many startups will look to raise starting in September. The metrics for Series As remain unclear, which provides an opening for selective technology & team acquisitions at reasonable prices.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Can You Grow a SaaS Startup Without Spending a Ton on Sales and Marketing? A few examples: Mailchimp was bootstrapped to $1,000,000,000 in ARR Qualtrics was bootstrapped to a $6B acquisition Atlassian was bootstrapped all the way to … today $30B+ Veeva is very enterprise but only spent ~$3m in true venture capital.

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Scale Venture Capital Startup Marketing 224

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Know When It’s Time to Sell Your Startup? We sold to first startup to an other hot startup about to IPO — instead of a more complex deal with Amazon. Strong acquisition offers are just so much rarer than people realize. The post Dear SaaStr: How Do You Know When It’s Time to Sell Your Startup?

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Startup Acquisition Marketing Strategy 203

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2023

At SaaStr Annual , IBM’s VP of Software and Technology Raj Datta and Director of Startups Kylie Rutherford shared how AI is changing the game for companies of all sizes. AI is a very competitive landscape, so startups have to ask themselves how they’re going to gain a competitive advantage with it.

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AI Technology Scale Startup 238

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2024

So Carta put out some recent data I found very useful on how many startups raise another round, and how many sort of quietly wind down, in the first 5 years or so after being founded (from 2018 to early 2024): Almost none IPO’d in the first 5 years, but that just makes sense. And half the Seed stage startups had shut down by Year 5.

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Pricing Acquisition Startup Education 264

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2020

The other day Coupa did its first $1B+ acquisition, of 18+ year old Llamsoft. There should be a lot more billion+ acquisitions in Cloud and SaaS, if only because there are more decacorns to buy them. They all can buy something, or really several startups like Twilio has, for $1B+ now : So how long does it take?

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

At this year’s SaaStr Annual, Mark Roberge, co-founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital, takes the stage to have a bake-off between startups and incumbents when it comes to who will win the AI Go-to-Market race. So, consider what the innovator’s dilemma is today as you rethink your startup in an AI-first world in a hyper cycle.

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AI Technical Review Startup Management 256

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

But perhaps not as much as you’d expect from a $1B+ acquisition. No, the real elite players have made investments so great that the startups themselves aren’t just worth billions, but the VCs’ own stakes are. Not Just Billion Dollar StartUps. Let’s take one example, The Trade Desk. Today it’s worth a stunning $30 Billion.

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Startup Acquisition Investment Sales 213

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 13, 2022

For example, most web3 companies don’t consider tokens as a cost-of-customer acquisition , but they ought to be. Those fundamental changes create opportunity for marketing startups to serve web3 marketers better. This new marketing discipline will enable the first generation of crypto martech (marketing technology) startups.

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Startup Blockchain Banking Advertising 206

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

We’ll share the answers in today’s brand new episode of CRO Confidential, where our host Sam Blond, partner at Founders Fund, sits down with Toast CRO, Jonathan Vassil to talk about their proven customer acquisition strategies that led to its record-breaking growth. They created the first corporate card specifically for startups.

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Payment Methods Acquisition Scale Payments 194

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2022

Dear SaaStr: When Is the Best Time for a Co-Founder to Leave a Startup? This also generally is the right way to go if your startup is acquired. And if you’ve decided it’s time to go after an acquisition, be supportive of gradual change and be flexible. If you’ve truly decided to leave, then it’s time. It’s now time to move on.

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Startup Acquisition Engineering Company Culture 254

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

An acquisition can make or break your startup. At worst, a disastrous deal leads to wasted wasted time and money, a startup’s two most precious resources. As a former M&A attorney and serial SaaS founder myself, I’ve experienced acquisitions from every point of view. Good acquisitions aren’t easy to pull off.

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Acquisition Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 161

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Second, the significant stock market volatility makes valuing acquisitions difficult. First, anti-trust scrutiny , which blocked the Adobe/Figma transaction, has pressured five trillion-dollar-market-cap-acquirers.

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Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Startup Acquisition 210

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. More competition increases costs of customer acquisition. What happened to these figures during Covid? We can examine the sales efficiency of public software companies to get a sense. What happened?

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Sales Hiring Sales Startup Acquisition 276

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 20, 2020

Selling a startup can be an exhausting, overwhelming process, but the right preparation can make it much easier. 4x entrepreneur Andrew Gazdecki shares how you can better prepare yourself for your startup's acquisition, and make the journey a rewarding one. Selling your startup is a full-time job. Negotiate everything.

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Acquisition Startup Technical Review Scale 52

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

The software M&A (mergers and acquisitions) market saw its best year yet in 2020, and it’s on track to see another record year in 2021. VC-backed startups are buying other startups at the fastest pace in over a decade and North American startup investment totaled 155 billion this year so far.

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Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 96

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

The Journey of Selling Your Startup Harry was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which raised a seed round before finding customers, yet didn’t run out of money before becoming an overnight success 3-4 years later. It’s about the $50-$500M bread-and-butter, classic startup exit. Google’s acquisition of YouTube was awesome.

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Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review Technical Review Data 161