Avoiding the Ten-Year Stock Option Trap (and Other Stock-Option Considerations)
I’ve increasingly spoken to startup employees who find themselves in a difficult trap. Let’s demonstrate it via an example: Say you joined a startup in September 2009 as an early employee and immediately received a stock-option grant of 400,000 shares with a strike price of $0.10 when you joined. The company, while having experienced some […]
Stopping Inception Churn: The Prospective Customer Success Review
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had flat refused to implement. (Huh?) […]
Career Decisions: What To Look For In a Software Startup
So, you’re thinking of taking a job at a startup, but are nervous about the risk, perhaps having trouble telling one from another, and unsure about knowing what’s really important in startup success. In this post, I’ll share what I consider to be a great checklist for CXO and VP-level positions, which we’ll try to […]
SaaS in Africa: 10 Things We Learned From Scaling to 1M Users (Video + Transcript)
Join Anish Shivdasani, CEO of Giraffe, as he provides unique African experiences learned from scaling to 1M users. Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020. Anish Shivdasani, CEO @ Giraffe FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW How’s it guys? You guys good? How’s everyone feeling? Yeah, great. Awesome, man. It’s […]
If Your Enterprise Customers Want An SLA — Just Give It To Them. You Owe Them That Much.
Many start-ups and even larger SaaS customers are reluctant to provide a Service Level Agreement — an SLA — that says they will, well, stay up. It’s not our fault, they think. What if Amazon goes down? Or our email provider? That’s not our fault. The lawyers tell you to try to not to do […]
All Platforms Have Their Favorite Partners. Be One Of Them If You Can.
Recently I was catching up with an exec from a SaaS company well in excess of $100m ARR. One of the key platforms their app integrates with has started to … slow down their access. Slow down access to new features, to semi-documented APIs. Slow down access to their team. In fact, the partner’s sales […]
When scaling for high growth, make sure you hire cogs that can design wheels
One of the many things that stuck with me from the excellent annual Sequoia Capital Founder/ CEO summits was an astute comment about scaling growth stage companies by Sequoia partner and early President/ COO of VMWare Carl Eschenbach that went something like this: Think very carefully about whether you want to hire someone who grows […]
Appearance on the Twenty Minute VC: Financing Thoughts, The Private Equity Sales Process, and More
Famed venture capital podcaster and now venture capitalist at StrideVC, Harry Stebbings, released a new episode of the Twenty Minute VC podcast with me as his guest. (iTunes version here.) Harry’s interview was broad-ranging, covering a number of topics including: Financing lessons I’ve learned during prior bubble periods and, perhaps more importantly, bubble bursts. The […]
The Rule of 40 — Down, But Not Out!
Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett of Battery Ventures recently published the 2019 version of its outstanding annual software round-up report. I highly recommend this report — it’s 78-pages chock full of great data about topics like: Why Battery is long software overall The four eras of software evolution The five forces driving software’s accelerating growth […]
Do these five things to get badass BD SaaS partnerships done
Last year, Jeff Clavier asked me to present at Uncork Capital’s (formerly SoftTech VC) CEO summit on how to do BD deals with large software companies. I was then CEO of an Uncork portfolio company, but the content here draws on my prior experience as GM at largeco (in this case, SuccessFactors/SAP) when I was […]
