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 140

AI Travel Technology Communication 140

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 332

AI Artificial Intelligence User Experience Engineering 332

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 297

Startup Investment Product Marketing Revenue 297

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 195

Cloud Pricing Startup Revenue 195

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Payments

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.

Subscription 136

Subscription Payment Features Merchant Services Payment Methods 136

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 128

Development Team Review Technical Review Finance Systems Review 128

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.

Startup 300

Startup AI Software Pricing 300

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 292

AI B2B Startup Investment 292

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 161

Cloud AWS Metrics Subscription 161

Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science

Are you ready to move beyond the basics and take a deep dive into the cutting-edge techniques that are reshaping the landscape of experimentation? 🌐 From Sequential Testing to Multi-Armed Bandits, Switchback Experiments to Stratified Sampling, Timothy Chan, Data Science Lead, is here to unravel the mysteries of these powerful methodologies that are revolutionizing how we approach testing.

Innovation

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 132

Merchant Services Development Payment Services SaaS Payments 132

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.

Branding 123

Branding 123

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.

Investment 121

Investment GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS Azure 121

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

The Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) launched on January 12, about a month ago. On the first day, investors bought $655m & nearly $2b in the first three days. Since then, the figure has swelled to $4.6b. It’s not a fair comparison but for fun, we can compare the Bitcoin interest to the largest technology IPOs for a sense of scale. Company IPO Date Raised $B Facebook May-12 $16.0 Uber May-19 $8.1 Snap Mar-17 $3.9 Airbnb Dec-2 $3.5 Snowflake Sep-2 $3.4 DoorDash Dec-2 $3.4 Lyft Mar-19

Finance 262

Finance Technology Scaling 262

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Payments

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Is The Best Indicators of Product Market Fit at an Early Stage SaaS B2B Startup? This is a rough metric, but I’d say from experience working closely with 25+ SaaS companies … if you aren’t growing > 10% a month after $10k in MRR or so … then you don’t yet have product-market fit. Not yet at least. One way or another, every reasonably fast-growing SaaS company hits double-digit growth, for a while.

Product Marketing 272

Product Marketing B2B Startup Marketing 272

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 161

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 161

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 124

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments SaaS Payments 124

BlueSnap

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

When CFOs and other business leaders think about their return on investment, it is easy to overlook payments. However, your global digital payments strategy can significantly impact profitability. The post Why (and How) to Think About Your ROI of Global Digital Payments appeared first on BlueSnap.

Investment 116

Investment Strategy Business 116

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Revenue

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

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 267

Artificial Intelligence Business Model Business Technical Review 267

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Recently at Pavilion’s CEO Summit, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin, took the stage to do something. a little bit different. Typically on SaaStr.com, we try to focus our content on mistakes to avoid, lessons learned and how to scale faster, but for the CEO Summit, Jason addressed the audience with what’s most top of mind for him at the start of 2024. “I really think we are in a new world as managers and as leaders,” Jason said to kick things off. “2023 was nuts,

Sales Recruiting 278

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 278

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 152

Cloud Metrics Subscription Payment Features 152

As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

Pricing

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 124

Payments Payment Solutions B2B Payment Features 124

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 29, 2024

Everyone knows that founders have been on a whipsaw over the past several years. Pivoting from growth at all costs in 2020 and 2021 to efficiency in 2022 and 2023 meant slashing budgets, shelving new projects, doing RIFs, and picking fights with your cloud provider over your bills. That’s hard work, and founders should be commended for doing it. But now, the market is stabilizing and companies’ optimization 1 cycles 2 are coming to a close. 3 Efficiency alone doesn’t build a generation-defining

Technical Review 111

Technical Review Innovation Cloud Trends 111

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

Instagram Stories have completely changed how creators and brands use Instagram. The short, vertical images and videos that disappear after 24 hours offer a whole new way to connect with your followers. From offering your followers a sneak peek behind the scenes to using the huge variety of fun stickers available in this part of the app to generate engagement, Stories are super fun and versatile.

Social Media 113

Social Media Mobile Engagement Interviewing 113

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 246

Government Compensation Development Technology 246

Advertiser: Data Robot

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Generative AI

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% ?

Venture Capital 266

Venture Capital Acquisition SaaS Leadership 266

Totango

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

To make it to the Super Bowl, a football team must have two things: a strong defense and a strategic offense. The defense maintains a good field position and prevents the opposing team from scoring points, while the offense orchestrates smart plays to gain additional yards and score points. Similarly, to be successful, an enterprise needs to be able to prevent churn and increase revenue growth.

Retention 108

Retention Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Churn 108

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

Thanks to Tony Markov for contributing to this article! If you’re not sure how to sell an app direct to consumer (D2C) outside the app stores — or if you’re looking for a new way to monetize your mobile app or game — you may be wondering what options you have. Steep fees from platforms like the Apple App Store and Google Play can understandably cause game developers and app creators to look beyond the convenience and ubiquity of traditional app marketplaces, but restrictions from the platform pr

Payment Methods 118

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Services 118