Kellblog

DECEMBER 27, 2021

Before diving in, let me remind readers that I do these predictions in the spirit of fun, they are not business or investment advice, and that all of my usual disclaimers and terms apply. The addition of smart contracts were a very a powerful extension that came with Ethereum. Flood of venture capital (VC).

Blockchain 143

Blockchain Technical Review Venture Capital Sales Hiring 143

Tom Tunguz

JULY 14, 2013

With more than 80% of venture capital investments occurring in enterprise and with the public markets disproportionately rewarding SaaS companies with huge enterprise value-to-revenue multiples ( median is 7.6 ), it’s no surprise that interest Software-as-a-Service is booming. Characteristic 4: Efficient Sales Model.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Venture Capital SaaS Machine Learning 100

Point Nine Land

JUNE 22, 2023

SaaS companies in particular have high gross margins (no IT admin) and recurring revenues (subscriptions), a combination which means they can re-invest a substantial piece of their revenue into (hopefully) predictable growth. It’s not very surprising then that we’ve built, invested in, and bought a ton of software over the last few decades.

Outsourcing Services 59

Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development AI 59

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2019

Niall Wall, Box SVP of Business and Corporate Development alongside Vicki Lin, Stripe’s Head of Ecosystem and Cecilia Stallsmith, Slack’s Director of Platform Marketing discuss scaling your revenue via indirect channels and platform ecosystems. Then also went into venture capital where I invested in API first products.

Payments 124

Payments Scale Scaling Revenue 124

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 4, 2020

Years later, he’s got a thriving business that is not venture capital backed. Years later, he’s got a thriving business but one that is not venture capital backed. Sam Jacobs: Have you developed a process to answer that question of should you hire, should you fire? How do you evaluate talent?

Scale 105

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 105

The Angel VC

APRIL 30, 2015

By putting together a comprehensive set of data you can pre-empt 90% of the questions which investors will ask you when they assess a potential investment. That is, a chart that shows your new MRR, expansion MRR, contraction MRR, churn MRR and reactivation MRR for each month since launch. That was a great question. What do you think?

Software Review 186

Software Review Outsourced Development Acquisition SMB 186

ChurnZero

JULY 21, 2020

IntelAgree is a growing AI-powered contract management SaaS company that enables legal teams to do impactful work, not busy work. 5 Interesting Ways Real Companies Use Net Promoter Score Results – See how to take NPS data and use it to fuel and direct your marketing strategies, Customer Success best practices, and even Product development.

Scale 52

Scale Venture Capital AI Search SaaS 52

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 8, 2012

After all, some months ago we invested in ePetWorld , which runs hundeland.de , a fast-growing online shop for dog food and supplies. In fact I think they are pretty bad, and I'm amazed how slowly Google has been developing them if you consider that they were launched many years ago already.

Cloud 140

Cloud Outsourced Development Investment Startup 140

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

To date Bob has raised over $15m with Crossbeam from friends of the show including Andy @ Uncork, Matt @ Firstmark, Bill @ First Round and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures, to name a few. Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018.

Sales Hiring 133

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 133

SaaStock

MARCH 1, 2019

According to Mike Laven, CEO of Currencycloud, the one thing necessary for any company to succeed in China – or in any of the Asian countries – is to get local investment. SAIF Partners is one of the top private equity firms that provides growth capital financing for Asia businesses. SaaS Investments: Goodera, and others.

SaaS Payments 190

SaaS Payments Venture Capital Telecommunications Payment Services 190

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

If you outsource your content to some crappy agency that recycles ChatGPT, your content marketing will fail. When Lemkin started investing ten years ago, his first five early-stage investments were wildly successful. Talkdesk is worth $10B, and he invested when it was just five people. Develop a playbook.

Scale 259

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 259

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

They asked themselves, “what if we moved to some motion of licensing contracts?” Silicon Valley-based venture capital companies might tell you to build productivity models around hiring salespeople and scaling your organization that way, but it’s not the way. Invest in and put that into the market to start softening the beach.

Scale 213

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 213

SmartKarrot

SEPTEMBER 1, 2022

It is a sign of development, showing that the business has effectively transitioned from an R&D organization dependent on venture capital to an autonomous, long-lasting enterprise. . It is challenging and labor-intensive to develop a product that meets all the requirements of an enterprise organization.

Enterprise 10

Enterprise Outsourcing Services Scale Payment Services 10

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 1, 2020

Because what we found is that one of the low points of any customer experiences, the moment after the contract is signed, all the good will and momentum that you create in the sales cycle is lost. While I was there we grew from a hundred and change employees to 450, we raised another $150 million in venture capital.

VP of Engineering 63

VP of Engineering Branding Scale Marketing 63

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 4, 2021

I’m self-taught with coding, and I have a great connection with youth, so I was lucky enough to get a contract in the New York City public schools on an afterschool basis. At that time, I had my own full-time business in contracting. I lost that contract.” So, they started losing dozens of contracts.

Outsourcing Services 151

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Business Scale 151

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2019

To date, Amit has raised $68m in funding for Gong from the likes of Norwest, Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments, and Wing Venture Capital, just to name a few. Finally, before that, Amit was the Founder & CEO @ SparkThis, an outsourced marketing and sales service for cloud companies.

Outsourced Development 137

Outsourced Development Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 137

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2020

So people were paying people to take their futures contracts. When the future is predictable, people like to invest. That happens in venture capital, and that’s happening right now. Every venture capitalist is stress testing his or her own portfolio. This is the US Venture Capital Market.

Technical Review 204

Technical Review Payment Services Payment Methods Development Team Review 204

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

Bootstrapped because nobody in their right mind would have actually invested in us back then and took it up until 2014 as a bootstrapped company. Venture capitals are playing a numbers game. It is much more painful to have to fire people and contract as a company than it is to grow. Some needed talent development.

Startup 278

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 278

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 22, 2022

Both new and existing SaaS companies moved into developing industry-specific software, giving rise to Vertical SaaS companies. Horizontal SaaS companies develop and provide software for a specific function used by companies across all industries. These factors resonated well with the investment theses of venture capital firms.

Business Model 52

Business Model SaaS Business Scale 52

Point Nine Land

MAY 20, 2021

Our investment in Pento. Ola, Christoph, and I have been working very closely with Pento over the past two years and now is a great time to share more about our investment and our thesis for Pento. Yesterday our portfolio company Pento announced that they’ve raised a $15.6 million Series A led by our friends at General Catalyst.

Outsourcing Services 52

Outsourcing Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 24, 2020

In Moz Founder Rand Fishkin’s brilliantly open and honest book Lost and Founder , he uses an example VC fund called “Scorpio Ventures” to outline some of the fundamentals of how venture capital firms work. Scorpio Ventures goes out to a series of limited partners (LPs) and pitches their ability to pick great startups.

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Venture Capital SaaS Payments Sales Hiring 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 24, 2020

In Moz Founder Rand Fishkin’s brilliantly open and honest book Lost and Founder , he uses an example VC fund called “Scorpio Ventures” to outline some of the fundamentals of how venture capital firms work. Scorpio Ventures goes out to a series of limited partners (LPs) and pitches their ability to pick great startups.

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Venture Capital SaaS Payments Sales Hiring 52

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

Now, I just invest in SasS companies. They know how to the close to develop the relationship. I just raised that venture capital. investing in customer success as a function. Let’s say ACV’s annual contract value, what your product’s price per year. That’s my background. laughter].

Sales Hiring 271

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 271

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And we now got to this point of one to $2 million in ARR across about 50 to 60 contracts. But the thing about the TAM you were talking about is that, partially what we’re seeing is that those customers, it’s harder to get bigger contracts out of them. Is that a good investment to make? The ROI is amazing.

Scale 229

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 229

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

The SaaS Garage

MAY 10, 2017

I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical when the founder of that company mentioned to me that he is about to sign an overdraft (debt capital) contract with a bank, only a few weeks after he had initiated the dialog. Investors like to invest their money in sexy fields like product development, marketing and expansion strategies.

Technical Review 73

Technical Review Startup Banking Outsourced Development 73

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

New CTO 152

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 152

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

I run marketing and communications for Battery Ventures. It’s a global technology focused investment firm. In enterprise software, it’s all about contracts, long term contracts. That’s something we’ve really developed as we’ve come along in our product team to look for specific experience.

Scale 172

Scale SMB VP of Engineering Leadership 172

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

But boy, I can tell you from all the companies I have invested and worked with that have a hardware/software component, it really actually gets brutal as you scale. Enough venture capital can certainly bridge that gap. Jason Lemkin: But it’s funny, the second investment I ever made is a company called Algolia.

Scale 234

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 234

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

Watch our latest webinar to hear from Bigfoot Capital Founder Brian Parks, SaaSOptics CEO Tim McCormick and Techstars Partner Ari Newman as they share best practices on raising seed capital and getting to a series A round. We discuss: How seed and Series A investment criteria differ. Tim McCormick: 00:06:56 .

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

Watch our latest webinar to hear from Bigfoot Capital Founder Brian Parks, SaaSOptics CEO Tim McCormick and Techstars Partner Ari Newman as they share best practices on raising seed capital and getting to a series A round. We discuss: How seed and Series A investment criteria differ. Tim McCormick: 00:06:56 .

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 16, 2018

Watch our latest webinar to hear from Bigfoot Capital Founder Brian Parks, SaaSOptics CEO Tim McCormick and Techstars Partner Ari Newman as they share best practices on raising seed capital and getting to a series A round. We discuss: How seed and Series A investment criteria differ. Tim McCormick: 00:06:56. Excellent, great.

SaaS 40

SaaS Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 40

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 4, 2019

When your customer signs the contract and subscribes, you may get some cash up front, but that cash cannot be counted as revenue until you've earned it. Have I begun developing my own personal business model that will enable me to seek the right kind of funding and use it well? Growth stage. Mature stage.

Business Model 54

Business Model SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payments 54

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 22, 2019

A missed clause in a contract can mean the difference between a healthy profit and a client losing millions of dollars. Jack had a background in software development and Rian was working as an IT manager at Gowling, Canada’s largest law firm. A “dropped ball” in the legal profession can have major consequences. It came from a web.de

Technical Review 40

Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring Business 40

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital with over 20 years of operational experience. Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital, but has over 20 years of operational experience. Since he joined Netscape, he then co-founded Tellme Networks.

Payment Methods 55

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 55

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

David Skok: So I actually, I’m definitely a believer that it definitely gets easier and I think we see that in our venture investments too. So to our mind, I think when any venture capitalist is investing in markets, one of the very first questions they’re asking themselves is, is this a big opportunity?

Scale 196

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 196

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

We wanted to automate research that was being outsourced and then we wanted to take it to the world. You have a face transition, you have a mini brand, and then you have a brand, and then once you have a brand investing in it, it actually is more important than we realize. It’s worth every ounce of investment.

Acquisition 133

Acquisition Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 133