SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Roughly speaking, this is what generally will happen after 3 rounds of traditional venture capital. This is after 3 full rounds of venture capital, and if you are then on the path to IPO or Big Acquisition (which hopefully you are if you take 3 rounds), that 10% (or whatever amount) will still be worth a lot.

Venture Capital 280

Venture Capital Acquisition SaaS Leadership 280

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2024

It’s not always the right strategy. But there is a lot of freedom in being capital efficient but also raising just enough to start that people can eat. Really, I did a version of this myself, raising $9m in each of my two startups and stopping there. It has its cons. It’s at least worth thinking about. One and Done in raising VC.

Venture Capital 330

Venture Capital Social Media Startup Strategy 330

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 8, 2019

In 1986, Amar Bhide wrote “ Hustle as Strategy ” for the Harvard Business Review. It’s not a powerful new strategy that a new leader infuses into the organization. In many SaaS categories as well as in venture capital, this idea is absolutely true. Great execution is a winning strategy.

Strategy 221

Strategy Venture Capital Banking Software Review 221

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 16, 2020

Both are equally viable strategies. Ideally, the management team should raise more capital to move to the upper right quadrant of the matrix. Venture capital, debt, or negotiating better cash collections (multi-year prepay) are all viable strategies to position the business to press its advantage.

Strategy 302

Strategy Startup Venture Capital Acquisition 302

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2024

Raising Venture Capital in 2024? SaaStr 711: 5 Lessons from Scaling Six Products to $100M+ with Samsara’s Chief Strategy Officer Kiren Sekar  5. But — It Doesn’t Mean You Won’t Run Out of Money. A Buying Signal — Or The End of an Era?

Venture Capital 233

Venture Capital Scale AI Customer Success 233

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS, Venture Capital, Bootstrapping, and Valuations – understanding market trends and investment patterns is critical. With market downturns and reduced venture capital funding, some businesses struggle to stay afloat. However, others seem to remain unimpacted by these changes.

Venture Capital 217

Venture Capital Scale Technical Review Software Review 217

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2023

Navigating Corporate Venture Capital: Strategic Benefits for Early-Stage Founders with Erin Yang, VP and Chief Technologist Workday Savannah Greene, Principle @ Workday #2: How Expensify Grew to 10M Users Through Word of Mouth Joanie Wang, Director of Marketing and Brand #3. The Most Popular 2023 Annual Braindates So Far: #1.

Venture Capital 219

Venture Capital Acquisition AI Innovation 219

Andreessen Horowitz

MAY 13, 2024

A $20 product can work with a product-led growth strategy (think Dropbox, OpenAI, Midjourney, etc). A $1M product can work with an outside sales strategy (think Workday, ServiceNow, Databricks, etc). In venture capital, we always ask ourselves “why now?” To quote Mean Girls : “The limit does not exist!”

Venture Capital 107

Venture Capital AI Business Model Cloud 107

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2024

Before heading to Silicon Valley for Google, he worked for DoubleClick, in venture capital and as a strategy consultant. Satya joined Google in 2003 and was responsible for AdSense product management and partnerships. Satya’s education is memorialized by a BS in Finance and a BS in Psychology from The University of Pennsylvania.

Marketplace as a Service 232

Marketplace as a Service Venture Capital Entertainment Construction 232

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 16, 2020

Both are equally viable strategies. Ideally, the management team should raise more capital to move to the upper right quadrant of the matrix. Venture capital, debt, or negotiating better cash collections (multi-year prepay) are all viable strategies to position the business to press its advantage.

Strategy 185

Strategy Startup Venture Capital Acquisition 185

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2021

Companies like Atlassian and Qualtrics have cruised past nine-figures in ARR (and IPO’d in the case of Atlassian) without needing any venture capital. Many successful SaaS start-ups bootstrap to $1m in ARR or so, and then raise their first external capital to grow faster. Not the worst strategy in the world.

Sales Hiring 361

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 361

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2021

How Would a Person Start a Venture Capital Fund? Shifting to the Next Gear: Proven Strategies to Accelerate Growth with Intercom CEO Karen Peacock. FT: Yamini Rangan’s Top Metrics as HubSpot’s New CEO. 6 Key Signs a VP Can’t Scale Beyond $5m-$10m ARR. 5 Interesting Learnings from Samsara at $500,000,000 in ARR.

Venture Capital 243

Venture Capital Scale Scaling Metrics 243

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2023

SaaStr 632: CRO Confidential: How To Adapt Your Sales Strategy To The Current Sales Environment with Sam Blond and Hannah Willson, SVP of Sales at Modern Health  5. How To Adapt Your Sales Strategy To The Current Sales Environment with Modern Health’s SVP of Sales Hannah Willson 5.

Scale 201

Scale Venture Capital Startup Retention 201

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2023

Series B is where the go-to-market expertise is essential – you have to know how to truly understand who your target customers are and set up an experimental channel strategy. What’s your pulse check on the venture markets right now, today? Venture is cyclical. B-round fundraising is challenging. This time, it took 15.

Scale 231

Scale Venture Capital AI Generative AI 231

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2020

A bit more here: The 10x Rule: What Raising $1 of Venture Capital Really Means | SaaStr. Raising venture capital may push you to go bigger. Sometimes, having an “exit strategy” and maintaining optionality is good. Align what you think you can achieve with the capital you raise. Embrace it.

Venture Capital 248

Venture Capital Startup Banking B2B 248

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2022

They’ll take you through their own personal experiences, from creating a scalable product strategy to building an enduring company that puts people and purpose before profit. Jason Lemkin, Founder & CEO @ SaaStr and Aileen Lee, Founder & Managing Partner @ Cowboy Ventures sit down to discuss the current state of venture capital.

Venture Capital 256

Venture Capital Enterprise Cloud Pricing 256

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2022

Paddle’s Senior Product Manager, Allissa Chan, and Chief Strategy Officer, Patrick Campbell, share their experience of scaling a bootstrapped startup. Venture capital-backed companies update their pricing once every 2.8 Some startups need constant cash infusions to achieve growth. Lever #5: Monetization.

Payments 130

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Venture Capital 130

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2022

The 10x Rule: What Raising $1 of Venture Capital Really Means. The profitable growth strategy every marketer needs to understand with the CMOs of Box, Salesforce & Attentive. 7 Secrets to a Successful SMB GTM Strategy with PayFit and Accel. A 2:1 split is most common. Much more here. It’s not as fun anymore.

New CTO 251

New CTO CTO SMB Venture Capital 251

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2020

“The Current State of Venture Capital and Cloud with Byron Deeter, Bessemer Venture Partners” We did this session right after Covid-19 hit, and a lot has changed just in the few weeks since then, but this is still a terrific discussion on what’s really happening in Venture Capital right now.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Scale Cloud Scaling 270

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

There may be times, maybe even many times, in the earlier days when you look at VCs and Venture Capital and think — that’s the easy way. You will likely always have to do what they say, and execute their strategy. There is very little of this in a venture capital firm. Strategy is not enough.

Venture Capital 325

Venture Capital Investment Acquisition Strategy 325

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 26, 2020

Nathan Heller published an article called Is Venture Capital Worth the Risk? It’s a well-researched critique of the venture industry. If you have ideas for how to improve venture capital for founders, please tweet me or send me an email with the link above. First, venture capital has become much bigger.

Venture Capital 196

Venture Capital Merchant Services Innovation Finance 196

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 24, 2017

After last week’s post, Is There a No Man’s Land in SaaS ACVs , a founder asked me to highlight some of the go to market strategies in different segments. They haven’t raised venture capital. Without the expense base of an inside sales team, Geotab requires less cash. The tradeoff is somewhat slower growth.

Sales Hiring 186

Sales Hiring Strategy Venture Capital Marketing 186

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2021

Rather than burn dictating when to raise capital, founders elect to raise when inbound interest arrives, or immediately before launching to sell the dream rather than the metrics, or at other strategic inflection points. The conversation of how long capital will last, which was ubiquitous is mostly debating during seed rounds, if at all.

Software Review 364

Software Review Venture Capital Cloud Pricing 364

SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2023

Later stage venture capital has evaporated, and budgets are at least under more scrutiny. And what the top competition often does is play to win by acquiring the Incremental Customer, the harder ones to get, and even play Dominant-Dominant Strategy. It’s just your growth rapidly decays, usually in just one quarter.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 277

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

Also, as Peter Drucker has said : “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Many start-ups think they need to net venture capital to jumpstart their growth. Both venture capital and private equity firms can make enticing partners as you scale your business, but each provides vastly different benefits.

Scale 209

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 209

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2023

SaaStr 632: CRO Confidential: How To Adapt Your Sales Strategy To The Current Sales Environment with Sam Blond and Hannah Willson, SVP of Sales at Modern Health  2. SaaStr 631: What Is Going On In Venture Capital in 2023 with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin and 20VC Host Harry Stebbings    4.

Sales Recruiting 130

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Venture Capital Sales 130

Andreessen Horowitz

MAY 6, 2024

For Founders Make It Make Sense Venture capital is where innovation meets investment. It is important to sit down with subject matter experts in venture capital to get a better understanding of the tech industry and early-stage investing processes.

Technical Review 97

Technical Review Innovation Technical Cofounder Development Team Review 97

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2023

The company raised $455m in venture capital, but has used only $15m, growing nearly entirely on profits. Quoting from the S-1, “Our go-to-market strategy is primarily product-led, and we attract the majority of our new customers through inbound channels, such as word-of-mouth, agency partnerships, and platform integrations.

Benchmarks 167

Benchmarks Venture Capital Marketing SMB 167

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2023

So acquirers can start to see you as a $100m-$200m product line for them, using the existing product, existing customer bases, existing go-to-market strategies. A nice example of a sale at this Local Maximum is Pardot selling for $100m to ExactTarget — on zero venture capital. More on that here.

Acquisition 361

Acquisition Venture Capital Generative AI Scale 361

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2023

The company raised $455m in venture capital, but has used only $15m, growing nearly entirely on profits. Quoting from the S-1, “Our go-to-market strategy is primarily product-led, and we attract the majority of our new customers through inbound channels, such as word-of-mouth, agency partnerships, and platform integrations.

Benchmarks 153

Benchmarks Venture Capital Marketing SMB 153

SaaStock

MARCH 8, 2019

Today Carman is Founder and Managing Partner of Click Ventures, the globally renowned Hong Kong venture capital firm. Jessie provides invaluable know-how to portfolio companies on cash flow, fundraising, and financing strategies. She has led marketing and communications and strategy at Samsung and PwC, among others.

VP of Engineering 264

VP of Engineering CTO Coach Venture Capital SaaS 264

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2023

Venture fundraising should not be done because it can be done. You should only raise Venture Capital if you (x) have to, or (y) it’s “cheap”. This is the mistake so many founders made in the Boom Times of late ’20-early ’22. If you need VC $$$ to survive, don’t worry about it. It is what it is.

Venture Capital 252

Venture Capital Pricing Investment Revenue 252

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” .

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Marketing Venture Capital 274

SaaStock

MARCH 1, 2019

What is far more valuable is a focused market strategy beyond initial scattered foray. Stage: Venture Capital, Angel. For its near 30 years of existence, JAFCO Asia has turned into one of the leading venture capital firms in APAC. Stage: Corporate Venture Capital. Stage: Venture Capital.

SaaS Payments 190

SaaS Payments Venture Capital Telecommunications Payment Services 190

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2023

In this SaaStr Annual session, Zendesk’s VP of Startups, Kristen Durham, shares insights into selling to startups and lessons to build your strategy. So they laid out a strategy that can be broken down into four pieces: Target : Find channels to reach high-growth startups. Why Seek Out Startups?

Startup 207

Startup Scale SMB Venture Capital 207

SaaStock

JANUARY 30, 2019

It is a venture capital firm based in Brazil and Silicon Valley. Its partners boast diverse venture experience and have previously invested in more than 70 companies. It supports them with their go-to market strategy, marketing, sales, customer success, and business development. Stage: Early Stage Venture, Seed.

Venture Capital 155

Venture Capital SaaS Healthcare Finance 155

SaaStr

APRIL 11, 2023

Silicon Valley Bank specialized in venture capital-backed startups, primarily in tech. Understandably, the collapse of a venture bank where companies could lose billions of dollars was staggering. Over the years, he shifted into consulting with early-stage founders on go-to-market strategies and sales.

Banking 211

Banking Sales Hiring Venture Capital Communication 211