We got another great survey from Bridge Group which looks at the SDR teams of 406 B2B businesses. The survey is dominated by SaaS companies, and while it’s well worth the read, our favorite findings are below: The goal should be to fill calendars. Some SDR teams focus on setting introductory meetings for sales…
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Every year The Bridge Group puts together a survey of software sales teams. The latest survey includes data from 253 B2B SaaS companies with median ARR of $22mm and median ACV of $38k. The report is well worth the read and available at their site (bridgegroupinc.com). Below we summarize some of the parts we found…
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Sumo Logic is being acquired by Francisco Partners. Alongside multiples of publicly traded SaaS companies, public SaaS acquisitions are some of the most relevant you can look at for deriving SaaS revenue multiples. These transactions are all cash, the financials are public and audited, and these are all control transactions so the data is about…
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In 2017 we had our first zero at Blossom Street Ventures. I’ll withhold the name of the company, but I do want to share key learnings from that experience. Below is an autopsy of a dead company. Build a product for one market. Our portfolio company built phenomenal technology but didn’t actually productize for a…
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Selecting an investment banker is a lot of work. Below are the things you need to watch for in the engagement letter with an investment banker. Term. The term of the engagement is generally set at 1 year. Anything beyond that is non-market. Note that to run a responsible sales process, it will likely…
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The book ‘Founders at Work’ interviews well known tech founders about their earliest days. It’s well worth the full read, but below I summarized portions that really stood out to me. Note, these stories and companies came up in the 90’s and early 2000’s — we believe in learning from history. Introduction “Perseverance is important because,…
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Entrepreneurs are always looking for “Strategic Investors” — corporate VC such as Intel, Verizon, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Cisco, InQTel, etc. The view is that these investors provide not only capital, but also guidance on the product roadmap, engineering/dev resources, critical introductions, and they’re often customers themselves. Demand for strategic investors lead us to ask: how important are…
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Nicholas Carlson wrote a fantastic book about Yahoo entitled “Marissa Mayer and The Fight to Save Yahoo.” Below I have paraphrased what I found to be valuable sections, verbatim; the full book is definitely worth the read. Allow employs to give feedback, anonymously. The questions were submitted during the week leading up to the FYI…
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Average Contract Value is an important metric in SaaS. If it’s trending up and to the right, it’s a sign that customers are upgrading more than they’re downgrading, the base is getting more “enterprisey”, and you’re really focusing on the ideal customer. However, the last 73 SaaS companies to IPO had a modest median ACV…
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We’ve had the good fortune of learning from and investing in SaaS businesses with excellent customer retention and upsells. Below are some of the key learnings we’ve gathered over time. The Customer Success Team is not the only group in charge of customer success. Preventing churn is everybody’s job, so your engineers should talk to…
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