Kellblog

MAY 24, 2022

Here are some of the things we discussed on the podcast : If you think of startups are organisms that convert venture capital (VC) into ARR, then we need some metric for how efficiently they do that. Using my formula (= 1/CCS) for aggregate burn, here are some benchmarks. < < 1 is amazing (i.e., 1-2 is good (i.e.,

Metrics 103

Metrics Venture Capital Benchmarks Finance 103

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 12, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. WorkDay financed this huge investment by coupling long-term, near-million-dollar agreements and nearly $200M in venture capital.

Benchmarks 109

Benchmarks Deferred Revenue Venture Capital Outsourced Development 109

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

Venture capitalists have financed many of those businesses. Over that 20 year period, annual SaaS investment has increased 20x, peaking in 2014 at $7B. Those venture dollars have financed a panoply of competition. I believe competition is a major driving force, especially since venture capital is conspicuously copious.

SaaS 187

SaaS Venture Capital Finance Machine Learning 187

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 11, 2022

So what should you do if you’re strapped for cash and have your sights set on venture capital? In this case, you may not be prepared to take on a round of venture capital. However, between the huge price tag, long implementation times, and the current market outlook, now might not be the time to make such an investment.

Scale 97

Scale Scaling Technical Review Venture Capital 97

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 1, 2014

Inspired by Ben Horowitz’ excellent “Good product managers, bad product managers” post and Stefan Smalla’s “Good leader, bad leader” masterpiece I’ve tried to put together my thoughts on what I think makes a great venture capital investor. When you are an entrepreneur you are living and dying with your company.

Technical Review 248

Technical Review Venture Capital Investment Finance 248

The Angel VC

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

In a Wall Street Journal interview that was published yesterday, Bill Gurley , General Partner at Benchmark and one of the smartest and most successful VCs of all time, said that the current environment reminds him of the tech bubble of the late 1990s: “Every incremental day that goes past I have this feeling a little bit more. and $41.8B

Venture Capital 167

Venture Capital Interviewing Startup Benchmarks 167

OPEXEngine

JANUARY 25, 2022

Though the SaaS segment hasn’t emerged untouched from market-wide volatility, SaaS continues to attract high multiples and significant investment interest in companies with strong business models and strong growth rates. Investment Scrutiny. But it’s not all bad news. . Speed to Market. G&A Spend in IPO Year.

Venture Capital 52

Venture Capital Cybersecurity Forecasting Finance 52

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

In many ways, 2022 (Q2-ish) marked the end of the glory days and we entered the “SaaS slump” We saw new business plummet and an 82% year-over-year drop in venture capital investment in 2022. From what we can see in the VC landscape it doesn’t seem like investment and funding are going up.

AI Search 52

AI Search Benchmarks Venture Capital AI 52

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

Back in business school, Brian was working at a venture capital firm, helping businesses think about growth when he had an “aha” moment. There are no pricing benchmarks, no existing business or revenue models to follow, no idea if there’s even a market for it. Driving connection and growth with conversational relationships.

Venture Capital 211

Venture Capital Advertising Communication Branding 211

Kellblog

OCTOBER 30, 2022

One of my new benchmarking themes is that people need to pay more attention to matching their benchmarks with their aspirations. 2] As I said in a recent speech, it’s the difference between benchmark off all SAT test takers and Ivy League applicants. See slide 13 of this presentation. [3]

Metrics 134

Metrics SaaS Benchmarks Churn 134

Sixteen Ventures

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

So what about that popular notion that a good benchmark for paying back CAC is 1/3 of the customer lifetime? So back to that “CAC Payback period of 1/3 customer lifetime” thing… it was simply MARKETING put out by a Venture Capital (VC) firm to improve their deal flow of companies they could invest in AT A DISCOUNT.

Venture Capital 87

Venture Capital Benchmarks Acquisition Investment 87

Buffer Resources

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Investing in a coach : Dre believes in learning from those who have already achieved what she aspires to become. By investing in a coach, she gains insights and guidance that help her define her goals and develop a strategy to achieve them. Dre's system combines strategic planning and continuous learning.

Systems Review 111

Systems Review Social Media Technical Review Scale 111

Sales Hacker

APRIL 19, 2022

For instance, according to our benchmark report, RevOps-developed plans had the most trust. And if your company doesn’t have a RevOps team, it might be time to invest in one! Sales compensation is the caboose — not the engine,” said Pablo Dominguez , venture capital Insight Partners’ Operating Partner of Sales and Customer Success.

Compensation 87

Compensation Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Retention 87

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

Less focus on venture capital or funding rounds. Valid question, and I’m going to answer it — because the reasons (plural) we have for investing in this initiative may not be as simple as the most cynical among us assume. That includes: A global focus. Professional moderation.

SaaS Payments 146

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Software Review 146

Baremetrics

MAY 7, 2019

million – about half of all the cash they had on hand – to buy out their main venture capital investors after eight years since founding. TinySeed , Earnest Capital , and Indie.vc Build your startup in a way that you don’t need investment. Buffer spent $3.3 ” Rob Walling of TinySeed.

Finance 111

Finance Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 111

Tom Tunguz

JULY 20, 2014

In 2008, when I started working at Redpoint I knew very little about how the venture business worked, and before I started at the firm, I wanted to prepare by learning as much as I could about the industry. Unfortunately, not much was written about venture capital at the time. Bob Kagle, Benchmark. Mitch Kapor, Accel.

Interviewing 100

Interviewing Venture Capital Banking Benchmarks 100

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2020

Some of these businesses, maybe even many of these businesses have started investing more and more in selling online to their preexisting in store customers. I mean, including IAA and now four investments over the last month, let’s say. Everybody wants to invest in it or most funds are looking into those.

Investment 151

Investment Scale Travel Venture Capital 151

Chart Mogul

JUNE 9, 2023

After analyzing data from over 2,100 SaaS startups to publish the SaaS Benchmarks Report 2023 Sid is full of insights on the topic at hand. Prior to founding Salesroom, Daria was an investor at Oxx, a growth-stage B2B software investment fund. Sid Jain, Senior Analyst at ChartMogul, joins to moderate the discussion.

Trends 52

Trends SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 52

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

burn) by failing to invest in the second half of 2023 for growth in 2024. It’s important to see both subscription and overall (aka, blended) gross margin for benchmarking purposes. Bad subscription margins can kill an investment deal faster than a high churn rate. 2024 and 2025). months vs. quarters) or detail (e.g.,

Technical Review 116

Technical Review Software Review Forecasting Churn 116

The Angel VC

SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

So you’ve recently started a company, you’ve started to talk to angel investors and seed funds about your seed round, and suddenly a large VC appears on the scene and wants to invest. If a large fund wants to invest in your startup, that’s a great validation. Consider a $400M fund that invests, say, $250k in a startup.

Investment 180

Investment Finance Startup Benchmarks 180

SmartKarrot

MARCH 2, 2023

The Venture Capital sector has seen substantial expansion in recent times and some VCs have started to podcast and share valuable resources for entrepreneurs, other investors, and those interested in learning more about the industry. He invested in more than 20 early-stage companies.

Venture Capital 10

Venture Capital Scale Entrepreneurship EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) 10

ProfitWell

MARCH 12, 2020

You can find the full data breakdown and benchmarks linked here if you're interested in digging a bit deeper. Companies with more than five plans are seeing 40-50% higher ARPU on a relative basis than those companies with less than five plans. So does this mean you should add a bunch of tiers to your pricing and call it a day? Not exactly.

SaaS Payments 52

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Venture Capital 52

The Angel VC

MAY 8, 2015

As a caveat, I'm going to mention some benchmark numbers but it's very important to note that none of these numbers can be viewed in isolation. There is not one number which will determine if investors want to invest. It's always about many puzzle pieces which together form a picture of the strength of your company.

Development Team Review 252

Development Team Review Software Review Scale Acquisition 252

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Now, I’m a venture capital investor. All right, so the answer is there are actually 61 a cloud unicorns, and we’ll flash them up. How long can this last?

Cloud 101

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 101

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2019

They are a company that’s grown at a venture scale without venture capital infused into the business, which makes them, from my perspective really, really interesting. When we did take investment, one great thing was we actually started setting targets. We look at things two ways: Benchmark the market.

Scale 55

Scale Sales Hiring Management Forecasting 55

Outseta

AUGUST 31, 2018

is a venture capital firm that invests in companies that focus on selling their product at a profit from day one. While this audience is not searching for software when they search for MicroConf, we’re using some interesting ad copy to lure them in to a landing page we built specifically to address this audience: [link].

Payments 40

Payments Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payment Methods 40

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Do you gun straight for the glamour (and pressure) of venture capital investment? What about a venture capitalist who might be sympathetic to your mission? We break down different funding options, when the time is right to be seeking investment, and what you need to really impress your investors. Venture capital.

Venture Capital 56

Venture Capital Scale SaaS Benchmarks 56

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

They have funding from some of the best in the business including the likes of Benchmark, Sequoia, Redpoint and Marc Benioff, just to name a few. As for Chetan, he focuses on enterprise software and has made investments in MuleSoft, MongoDB, Elastic, Heap, just to name a few. Does Sam agree founders should be selling up to $1m in ARR?

Technical Review 154

Technical Review Development Team Review Scale Software Review 154

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

This cash, in addition to a small amount of venture capital, has provided the wherewithal to fuel the business’s growth. Atlassian spends aggressively in research and development, investing more than 40% of revenues of late into improving their products, optimizing the funnels which fuels the growth of the flywheel model.

Benchmarks 117

Benchmarks Metrics Venture Capital SaaS 117

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

5 Reasons I Hate the Rule of 40 by Mikael Johnsson, SaaS Nordic While not necessarily completely useless, I would strongly argue that R40 is a metric applicable to the world of PE and public markets investing and is not a good metric for assessing the quality of venture-stage companies. Because this drives investment decisions.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Do you create broader richer data sets and sell those back to companies for benchmarking purposes? And the third piece is we’re really anxious to disrupt an age-old industry that has sales compensation, benchmarking and analytics, which generally speaking is a year old. It’s not venture capital money.

Marketplace as a Service 95

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 95

SmartKarrot

DECEMBER 14, 2021

More specifically, are there any key performance indicators (KPIs) that VCs check for before investing; the answer is slightly complex. Of this, just 20 eventually go on to receive investments — this means that there’s just a 0.7% However, the 20 that do end up raising funds typically attract substantial amounts in investment.

Venture Capital 10

Venture Capital Business Model Leadership Customer Success 10

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 4, 2021

Access to capital was the first one. And it’s perfect within this C-A-S-H, that C comes first because capital is the first thing. We need capital. Capital investment, capital to buy machinery. And I know people will often say, “Oh, try to get VC funding or angel investment funding.”

Outsourcing Services 151

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Business Scale 151

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 23, 2014

Since then we've looked at hundreds of SaaS startups and have gained additional insights through the work that we've been doing with the SaaS startups that we have invested in. Zendesk's benchmarking reports come to mind as an example. More than two years ago I wrote about what we look for in early-stage SaaS startups.

Startup 152

Startup SaaS Acquisition Scale 152

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

I run marketing and communications for Battery Ventures. It’s a global technology focused investment firm. In fact, we were below benchmarks for SaaS companies. Just as an example, at Battery we invested in a company called Bright Tree, which is outside of Atlanta, which makes software for the home health care market.

Scale 168

Scale SMB VP of Engineering Leadership 168

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2019

Carbon Black, DocuSign, SurveyMonkey, Tenable, Smartsheet, Dropbox; fantastic names that in aggregate, when you put together the three ways to buy stocks, public, IPOs, private venture capital dollars and then outright acquisitions. Last year was a record in terms of total combined capital by a large multiple. companies.

Cloud 166

Cloud Scale Finance Retention 166