Recently I read Nick Bolton’s book “Hatching Twitter.” It is the story of Twitter and it is fantastic. Below I paraphrased some of my favorite sections, but if there is any book about startups to read, this is it. One of the founders had started Blogger. “Ev explained that Google had approached Ev…
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I cringe writing that title because we’re believers in cash efficiency and achieving cash break even. However, when we looked at 129 tech companies at IPO, 93 of them were not profitable (72%) and 79 were not generating positive cash flow (61%). The data and additional observations are below. Ecommerce, Hardware, and Gaming…
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Net dollar retention is the most important measure in SaaS. There are two ways to measure it: gross dollar retention and net dollar retention. Gross dollar retention looks at how much of the customer base you’ve kept year over year without including upgrades. For companies with annual contracted recurring revenue, it can be summarized as ARR…
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We recently had the chance to catch up with Chris Wood, one of the founders of Clario Medical Imaging, about his successful exit to Intelerad. Clario Medical Imaging is workflow management software for radiologists. Learnings from Chris’ story are below. At first, Clario was unsuccessful. Clario started in 2005. The company had the license…
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When a startup founder shepherds his company to a successful exit (IPO), what are the paydays like? We dove into major tech IPO’s since 2018 to find out. Note that paydays aren’t necessarily what the founders took home at the IPO (shares are usually subject to a 6 month lockup), rather they’re what the founder…
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We recently got Software Equity Group’s SaaS M&A Snapshot for Q3 2020. SEG is an investment bank focused SaaS companies and they put out fantastic data on what they’re seeing in the market. They’re also a great firm if you’re looking for a banker (softwareequity.com or I can make an intro). Key observations from their…
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If you’re a startup on angelist, crunchbase, or have had publicity, chances are good that VC are emailing you about raising money. Here are some tips to maximize the benefit of these inquiries: Emails from decision makers are good. Knowing principals, managing directors, and original founders at venture funds is a good thing. These…
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Below are some of the things investors say to early stage companies that is just wrong. “Don’t take the first offer you get.” While true, this is a very misleading statement to make to a crowd of early stage founders. It’s wrong to make early stage founders believe they will get all kinds of…
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We’ve invested in 23 companies since our founding and we’ve seen some CEO’s use their time much better than others. In our view, below are the tasks a CEO should prioritize. Partnering. One of your priorities should be to build partnerships with bigger companies. The reasons: i) larger partners ultimately become strategic acquirers that…
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How many clicks does it take someone to actually purchase your product? How many steps are between your customers’ dollars and your product? Do everything you can to make the purchasing process as frictionless as possible, because extra steps and friction are costing you sales. While that seems obvious and intuitive, in practice companies…
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