How many years will it take you to exit? We looked at every SaaS IPO since MongoDB in October 2017. The data is below along with a few observations. It’ll take a decade plus. There have been 73 IPO’s in that period with the last one occurring in December 2021 (Samsara). The median IPO…
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When Allbirds and Warby Parker went public, their prospectuses taught us a lot about omni-channel and ecommerce sales. Key learnings from each are summarized below. AllBirds insights from prospectus There are 27 stores of which 12 are outside the US. You have to have a brick and mortar strategy. “In 2020, our digital channel represented…
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This happens. Occasionally you and your investors/VC won’t see eye to eye or worse yet, you’re sideways with your VC and the relationship is acrimonious or hostile. While I’ve never had a hostile relationship with a founder, certainly there are times where we’ve been in disagreement on major issues or a founder isn’t happy with…
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Average Contract Value is (“ACV”) is a vanity metric that is a byproduct of your business model, not a driver of it. It shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. Here is why: The world’s biggest and best software companies tend to have smaller ACV’s. Below is a data set of 73 publicly traded SaaS companies…
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You probably won’t be a success from day 1. Most founders struggle and may even come close to failure (more than once). The good news: there are plenty of examples of companies that had setbacks along the way, but were still a great success. Docusign is one such success story. Docusign went public in 2018…
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There are countless examples of ‘first to market’ not being a sustainable competitive advantage. Comparing the 2018 public offering of Spotify to Pandora’s original IPO in 2011 is a major example. Below are some excerpts from Pandora’s S1 (official IPO document filed with the SEC) that show its dominance at the time: Pandora is the…
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In software, there are a few ways to measure the health of the customer base and stickiness of the product. Zuora does a nice job of showing four measures of customer health in their S1. Processed Transaction Volume Zuora’s first measure of the overall health of the business is processed transaction volume. According to their…
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One the most important metrics in SaaS is net dollar retention (“NDR”). It tells you what percent of revenue from current customers you retained from the prior year, after accounting for upgrades, downgrades, and churn. For SaaS businesses with annual or multi-year contracts, formulaically it’s beginning of period revenue + upgrades — downgrades — churn…
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I read Trish Bertuzzi’s book ‘The Sales Development Playbook’ and it was by far one of the best sales books I’ve read in a while. The book focuses heavily on building pipeline with SDR teams. This is the second post of a few I’m going to share about this book: there was so much good…
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Below is a list of the VC with the most SaaS IPOs in the past 3 years. The top 3 are serious brand names. They include Accel, Sequoia, and ICONIQ, and Tiger (tied for 3rd). Lots of ties. Once you fall under 5 IPOs, the VC with the same number of IPOs increases. For instance,…
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