Bookings vs. Billings in a SaaS Company
Financial analysts speak a lot about “billings” in a public SaaS companies, but in private VC-backed SaaS companies, you rarely hear discussion of this metric. In this post, we’ll use a model of a private SaaS company (where we know all the internal metrics), to show how financial analysts use rules of thumb to estimate […]
The Question that CEOs Too Often Don’t Discuss with the Board
Startup boards are complex. While all board members own stock in the company their interests are not necessarily aligned. Founders may be motivated by a vision to change the world, to hit a certain net worth target, to see their name in an S-1, to make the Forbes 500, or — and I’ve seen crazier […]
The Strong Shall Inherit the Nasdaq
I wrote this post on Feb 3, 2016 — and like clockwork two years later, its timely again. The Dow Jones and Nasdaq are tanking and people are out with stories of imminent end. This too shall pass The unicorn, the billion dollar startup, is finally dead. The same columnists and magazines that turned every startup funding […]
The One Best, “Secret” Hack to Getting Venture Funding
I am fairly confident there are at least 10,000 Medium posts, 20,000 WordPress articles, and over well over 1,000,000 Tweets on How to Get Funded. It bores me personally, but I know it’s an important topic. Raising money for many CEOs is one of the their top 5 priorities. Without venture capital, I’d be nowhere. […]
Small Checks From Large Venture Funds: Maybe One is Enough
Apologies in advance to my friends and colleagues that will disagree and/or dislike this post. But anyhow … The world of venture fundraising has changed again dramatically the past 24 months. 250+ new seed funds have been raised (wow!) in the past 24 months. That really is crazy. And Big Funds have added even more […]
Don’t Let Product Management Turn Into “The Roadmap Guys”
At many enterprise software companies product management (PM) ends up defaulting into a role that I can’t stand: The Roadmap Guys*. Like a restaurant with one item on the menu, the company defaults into ordering one thing from product management: a roadmap pitch. “The VP of PM is in Boston and Providence this week, can […]
Simple Rules to Make It Easier To Build Your Startup’s Board Deck
As someone who has assembled many startup board decks over the years, I thought I’d offer some advice to executives who contribute slides to board decks that should make it easier for the point-person to assemble, improve the deck’s appearance, and avoid any painful and/or embarrassing mistakes in the process. Marketing folks, who both build […]
The SaaS Rule of 40
After the SaaSacre of early 2016, investors generally backed off a growth-at-all-costs mindset and started to value SaaS companies using an “appropriate” balance of growth and profitability. The question then became, what’s appropriate? The answer was: the rule of 40 [1]. What’s the rule of 40? Growth rate + profit should be greater than or […]
A Look at the Tintri S-1
Every now and then I take a dive into an S-1 to see what clears the current, ever-changing bar for going public. After a somewhat rocky IPO process, Tintri went public June 30 after cutting the IPO offering price and has traded flat thus far since then. Let’s read an excerpt from this Business Insider […]
The Strategy Compiler: How To Avoid the “Great” Strategy You Couldn’t Execute
Few phrases bother me more than this one: “I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy. We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.” Huh. Wait minute. If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy. Maybe it was a great strategy for some other […]
