Thoughts on the Coupa S-1
It’s been a while since I dove into an S-1 and while I almost never get all the way through, here we go with another quick romp through a recent S-1. Coupa, a ten-year old company that sells cloud-based spend management software and who pitches “value as a service” (ugh) recently filed its S-1. Before […]
The Four Levers of SaaS
There are a lot of SaaS posts out there with some pretty fancy math in them. I’m a math guy, so I like to geek on SaaS metrics myself. But, in the heat of battle running a SaaS company, sometimes you just need to keep it simple. Here’s the picture I keep on my wall to […]
The Shifting Sands of SaaS Funding
If you haven’t followed Elizabeth Yin’s newish blog, it’s really great and here. She’s an investing partner at 500 Startups and I got to know her back when she was a SaaS founder herself. We touched on some of the changing bars to getting funded with Christoph Janz’s prior posts … this is a […]
Can the Media Please Stop Referring to Company Size by Valuation?
The following tweet is the umpteenth time I’ve seen the media size a company by valuation, not revenue, in the past few years: Call me old school, but I was taught to size companies by revenue, not market capitalization (aka, valuation). Calling Palantir a $20B company suggests they are doing $20B in revenues, which is certainly […]
Myths of the Headless Company
In the past year or so, two of our competitors have abruptly transitioned their CEOs and both have perpetuated a lot of mythology about what happens and/or will happen in such transitions. As someone who’s run two startups as CEO for more than a combined ten years, been the “new guy” CEO twice after such transitions, sat […]
Raising More Than $20m in Venture Capital? It’s All Good — If You Are Even Better Than Box
For the past few years, it’s been pretty confusing trying to understand what’s going on in SaaS fundraising. Starting in ’13 through mid-’15, rounds dramatically grew in size and pace, and dozens of unicorns were minted. Things then slowed down dramatically in Q1 ’16, as the SaaS public markets crashed … and then recovered in […]
Unicorrection
We’ve had a correction in Unicorn financing that has trickled throughout venture capital. A lot of people lost jobs, opportunity and wealth. You could say this began with the creation of a the secondary market for private equity, and the dust on Chris Sacca’s spurs. But the correction began with Fidelity’s very public markdown […]
Introducing a New SaaS Metric: The Hype Factor
I said in yesterday’s post, entitled Too Much Money Makes You Stupid, that while I don’t have much of a beef with Domo, that I did want to observe in today’s fund-to-excess environment that any idea — including making a series of Alec Baldwin would-be viral videos — can sound like a good one. While I credited Domo with […]
CAC Payback Period: The Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric
Many of the most watched software as a service (SaaS) metrics relate to the cost of acquiring customers. For example, the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio, which (in my preferred definition for enterprise software companies) measures the amount of money a company spends on sales and marketing to acquire $1 in new annual recurring revenue (ARR). I […]
Hacking Demo Days like an SDR
So it took me a little while to grok and figure out Demo Days. They are overwhelming. Too many start-ups presenting, too quickly. Too many charts and graphs with unlabelled X and Y axises. Not enough detail, not enough time, too canned, too polished, not polished enough. But with 20 institutional and angel investments […]
