Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

It’s impossible to talk about new technology without talking about human flourishing — every new technology from the plow to the microchip has typically been followed by a period of newfound wealth for consumers in the form of cheaper goods, improved productivity, and longer, healthier lives. In many ways, the most financially average person in our modern society experiences daily luxuries that history’s Pharaohs and Caesars could not imagine: instant communication, broadcast television, global

AI 139

AI Travel Technology Communication 139

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2024

So most of you can probably infer from funding posts and press releases just how much B2B funding is going into GenAI startups. But exactly how much? Sapphire Ventures has the latest data. In 2023: GenAI funding was up a stunning +271% (!) But overall, B2B VC funding was down -36% 2024 seems to be pretty much the same. Top SaaS VCs are investing 80%+ in AI-first startups: This is where the VC frenzy is right now.

AI 310

AI B2B Startup Investment 310

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 4, 2024

As we’ve been researching the AI landscape & how to build applications, a few design patterns are emerging for AI products. These design patterns are simple mental models. They help us understand how builders are engineering AI applications today & which components may be important in the future. The first design pattern is the AI query router.

AI 305

AI Artificial Intelligence User Experience Engineering 305

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Are Forward Estimates Going Up? Going in to this earnings season I expected a big driver of stock price performance to be how 2024 full year estimates change pre / post earnings. Since the macro feels more “stabilized” it felt fair to assume “are numbers going up or down” to be the question most correlated with stock price performance.

Cloud 185

Cloud Pricing Startup Revenue 185

Speaker: Pulkit Agrawal

Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are revolutionizing the way organizations interact with and optimize their software applications. As digital transformation continues to accelerate, DAPs have become essential tools for enhancing user engagement and software efficiency. This session is your guide into the robust world of DAPs, exploring their origins, evolution, and the current trends shaping their development.

Trends

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Ready to join the game industry’s premier professional event? If so, join FastSpring at Game Developers Conference 2024 at Booth S1931! We’d love to talk with you in person! Join us at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from March 18-22nd, for an extraordinary event dedicated to continually defining market innovations and providing insight into the future of games.

Merchant Services 156

Merchant Services Development Payment Services SaaS Payments 156

Nimble - Sales

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

This Valentine’s Day, let’s celebrate a different yet essential aspect of our professional lives: networking! Successful businesses thrive on networks of relationships that are built over time, which are crucial for sparking new opportunities, forming partnerships, and driving growth. We’ve connected with industry experts who have shared their insights and personal takes on how effective […] The post Heartfelt Connections: The Power of Relationships in Business Success ap

Business 130

Business 130

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s Your Best Advice for Struggling Entrepreneurs? Having struggled a lot myself in the early days several times … just a few thoughts to summarize my learnings: 1. Get help & upgrade the team. This is the #1 thing you can do to move the needle. Don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Especially if you are struggling.

Startup 305

Startup Investment Product Marketing Revenue 305

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

We’re entering a new pricing environment for software: AI vs non-AI. It’s only happened in the last few weeks. Recent earnings have pushed some of the most important companies to all-time highs. Company Performance Confluent 34% Cloudflare 21% ServiceNow 20% Microsoft 14% This dynamic doesn’t favor everyone. Theory created a public market AI index to track software companies who have significant product plans or current AI businesses.

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Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now January Green Shoots A couple key software players have given us commentary in their Q4 earnings report (quarter ending December) that January (the first month of Q1) saw some green-shoots. Could this be the sign of a slow rebound?

Cloud 154

Cloud AWS Metrics Subscription 154

Speaker: Ian Hillis, SVP of Growth at Payrix and Worldpay for Platforms

Join us for an exclusive webinar hosted by Ian Hillis, SVP of Growth at Payrix and Worldpay for Platforms, where he’ll explore the significant impact of embedded finance on the software industry! This session is designed to provide you with the strategic insights needed to navigate the future of SaaS successfully, all while gaining a deeper understanding of how these trends can enhance your competitive edge, boost revenue, and deepen customer loyalty.

Finance

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

fs Builds features developer-built projects showing step-by-step examples, code snippets, and advice on how to approach building with FastSpring. The goal of this series is to not only help you build with FastSpring, but also to inspire you with new and unique ways to leverage FastSpring’s systems to best serve your company. As always, our support and sales engineering specialists are available to help if you need assistance along the way.

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Subscription Payment Features Merchant Services Payment Methods 157

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

The biotech industry is built on one of the cleanest go-to-market strategies in existence: if you make a safe drug that really works, patients are likely to receive it and payors are likely to pay for it. This simplicity is of course shrouded in the complexity of biology, and demands that biotech companies thoughtfully de-risk existential concerns throughout the drug development lifecycle.

Development Team Review 125

Development Team Review Technical Review Finance Systems Review 125

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

2023 was a big year for LinkedIn and its top creators. The platform cracked 1 billion users , added and removed several key features (goodbye Carousels), and became a destination for many top creators. The LinkedIn team must have come away with many lessons as they announced some key pivots within the first month of 2024, most notably making the “Creator Mode” feature the default for every user.

Social Media 125

Social Media ChatGPT AI Engagement 125

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Is It Normal for a Founder CEO to End Up With Just 10% Equity? Yes. Roughly speaking, this is what generally will happen after 3 rounds of traditional venture capital. If the company sells 15–20% in each round, and 15–20% is reserved for employees, that typically will leave 15–25% for the founders in total. Q4 2023 Median primary round dilution: ⚪️ Seed: 19.9% ?

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Venture Capital Acquisition SaaS Leadership 283

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Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

Last week, Reddit filed their S-1 to go public. At least 10% of their revenue - about $60m - comes from selling data to train Large Language Models. Reddit’s data sales revenue will likely be much more than 10% by the end of the year. Quoting directly : We expect our growing data advantage and intellectual property to continue to be a key element in the training of future LLMs.

Artificial Intelligence 260

Artificial Intelligence Business Model Business Travel 260

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q4 ‘23 Two quotes from the Amazon and Microsoft earnings call really stood out to me this week. Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud.

Cost optimization & reporting 154

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 154

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

A lot of big changes around direct-to-consumer options in the games industry have been going on in the past few months. For example: The settlement between U.S. States and Google. A ruling in favor of Epic in Epic Games v. Google. The Supreme Court rejecting appeals from Apple and Epic. Apple’s most recent announcement of policy changes skirting around the new DMA rules.

Payment Methods 153

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments SaaS Payments 153

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

The traditional clouds (AWS, GCP, and Azure) are getting dated. They continue to be the standard for the vast majority of cloud workloads, of course, but they are built around a set of operational practices that were more relevant a decade ago. Lately, we’ve seen the rise of a number of hosting platforms that are better aligned with modern development practices.

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Investment GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS Azure 123

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Revenue

The Moz Blog

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

An About page is often part of a buying journey. It can drive people to your site and help convince them to trust your brand, boosting both brand loyalty and conversions. Ann shares four key steps to create better-performing About pages.

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Branding 123

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

So layoffs still fill the headlines in 2024. Even now. I thought we’d be behind them by now, that the cuts were sort of a one-off. But now everyone is focused on getting more and more efficient. To $300k-$400k+ per employee at scale. So cuts continue. But don’t the headlines obscure what’s really happening, because they tend to shout out quieter trends.

Sales Hiring 282

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 282

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2024

The Community Source licenses may be the future of open source software. With closed-source software, the code isn’t shared outside the company that wrote it. Open-source code is freely available to examine & use. Open-source companies like Elastic ($13b), Confluent ($10b), MongoDB ($33b) have been phenomenally successful. Along the way, many of them have changed their licenses to shield themselves from copycats.

Government 206

Government Compensation Development Technology 206

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 23, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Rule of X Meritech and Bessemer both recently did an analysis that looked at the Rule of 40 and asked the question “what if growth / profitability shouldn’t be treated equally in the Rule of 40?” The Rule of 40 looks at the sum of a companies growth rate and FCF margin (or some other profitability metric like EBIT margin) and says that the sum s

Cloud 146

Cloud Metrics Subscription Payment Features 146

Speaker: Maher Hanafi, VP of Engineering at Betterworks & Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Executive leaders and board members are pushing their teams to adopt Generative AI to gain a competitive edge, save money, and otherwise take advantage of the promise of this new era of artificial intelligence. There's no question that it is challenging to figure out where to focus and how to advance when it’s a new field that is evolving everyday. 💡 This new webinar featuring Maher Hanafi, VP of Engineering at Betterworks, will explore a practical framework to transform Generative AI pr

Generative AI

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

About this series: fs Builds features developer-built projects showing step-by-step examples, code snippets, and advice on how to approach building with FastSpring. The goal of this series is to not only help you build with FastSpring, but also to inspire you with new and unique ways to leverage FastSpring’s systems to best serve your company. As always, our support and sales engineering specialists are available to help if you need assistance along the way.

Payments 153

Payments Payment Solutions B2B Payment Features 153

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

Whether you’ve just made your first $100 or crossed the $100,000 mark, monetization is an ever-evolving part of your journey as a creator, thanks to platforms constantly innovating new ways to pay – and TikTok is no exception. The platform introduced the TikTok Creativity Program to address issues with the (now defunct) TikTok Creator Fund, designed to reward creators for their high-quality and original content.

Payments 122

Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions Payment Methods 122

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

This essay was co-created with Dan Hockenmaier. In marketplace businesses, the network is the product. If you’re not growing both supply and demand, the product generally isn’t getting better over time. And your network effects which compound organic growth are not getting better, and probably getting worse. Most marketplace founders and leaders intuit this over time, so they obsess over growth metrics.

Payments 116

Payments SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods 116

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

In this latest episode of CRO Confidential , Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM). Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Before joining Zapier, Giancarlo was at Atlassian as a technical sales lead before moving to DropBox as a Senior Director of Growth and Monetization, and was CMO at Confluent – so he

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 278

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Generative AI