The Rise of Private Equity in SaaS: A Gift to Founders
So David Cummings beat me to the punch on a piece I’d being meaning to write for a long time on the Rise of Private Equity in SaaS. You can read his piece here on 2 recent Private Equity deals in SaaS in Atlanta, partial/full buyouts of two SaaS companies for $55m and $160m, respectively. […]
The False Choice of Prepaid vs. Monthly Contracts
In scaling the cash-flow side of SaaS, there’s almost nothing more powerful than annual contracts combined with prepaid cash. It’s just such a huge benefit. You get all the cash up-front, and your churn almost by definition goes down. Because the earliest chance the customer has to churn is 12 months hence. So get pre-paid annual deals whenever […]
Big Companies Don’t Churn. They Quit You.
“Churn” is a term we all use in SaaS as a core metric, but its roots, as near as I remember and can tell, come from our B2C colleagues. In a low-end subscription model for a tool, not a solution (e.g., semi-commodity storage, semi-commodity hosting, etc. etc.), individuals and small businesses, often paying on their […]
Why I Usually (Not Always) Prefer Customer Success to Report to the CEO
Ah, who should Customer Success report to? It’s not super simple. There are generally 3 options in the early and middle days: CEO VP of Sales (once you have one) VP of Something Else. Finance sometimes. Product on occasion. Other “business” co-founder. There are clear Pros and Cons to reporting to a VP of Sales. […]
What You Want to Hit: 50 and 20 at 10 (million in ARR)
The first SaaStr post that got widespread distribution was this one — “Want to Understand SaaS? If Nothing Else — Understand That It Compounds.” The excerpt here: “What does this mean, that SaaS compounds? It means it’s really, really hard to get revenues going. You close a customer for $120 in annualized revenue, you only […]
The 10-Year (And Longer) Customer
Salesforce likes to talk about “Customers for Life”, and while that’s sort of catchy, it’s a little hard to grok what it really means. It finally sunk in for me a bit the other day. At EchoSign, now Adobe Sign, there’s a large group of well-known customers that I closed, Back in The Day … […]
Byron Deeter + Kristina Shen, Bessemer Venture Partners: The State of the Cloud: 2017 Edition (Video + Transcript)
In this talk with Byron Deeter and Kristina Shen of Bessemer Venture Partners, we get an illuminating glimpse into the state of the cloud for 2017-2018. They run through what 2016 was like – M&As were at a record high; IPOs were at a record low – and let companies know what they should know […]
The Two Things to Do. When You Don’t Know What to Do.
There may come a time, or two, in your company when you just don’t know what to do. You aren’t growing fast enough. or The competition seems to be getting the best of you. or You can’t raise financing. or You just lost an important deal. Or maybe more than one. or That great new […]
How Get Better at Recruiting. (We All Need To).
Recruiting is tough. I certainly don’t do it well enough. But to be a great CEO, you need to find a way to force yourself to be a great recruiter. Let me share some learnings, and what I do now to force myself to be a better recruiter. And what I wish I’d done better […]
Top Sales Lessons Scaling to $100m ARR: A Discussion with Zendesk, Atlassian and Optimizely at NextWorld Capital
The other day NextWorld Capital put on an outstanding event for SaaS founders and executives on Scaling to $100m ARR. I was asked to moderate a panel with three great speakers and SaaS companies — but with very different sales models. Atlassian is famously sort of traditional sales rep free (outside of its channel partners, and […]
