Recently I read “Hire Right, Higher Profits” by Lee Salz which focuses primarily on enterprise sales rep hiring. Below are some of the key points of the book along with my commentary. Failure in B2B sales hiring is high. “the attrition rate among B2B salespeople hovers around 25 percent, while nearly 50 percent of…
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If venture funds are begging you to take their money, there is a good argument for raising more capital than you need. Peter Thiel did just that while he was at Paypal, and it saved his company. Recall Thiel was one of the founders of PayPal in 1998. PayPal went on to list…
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Founders usually treat the option pool like gold, as they should. Options represent the stock of a company and if you think that stock has real value, generally the thinking is you shouldn’t hand it out like candy. An article in Business Insider highlighted one CEO that bucked that trend: the CEO and founder of…
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Many young company goes through it: at some point you may have to lay off a chunk of your team to reduce burn. Group layoffs at a startup are particularly challenging because the team is small (less than 30 people), everyone works in the same office, and the impact to the culture can be dramatic. …
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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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One of our companies had a sales consultant audit their sales team and methodology. Our portfolio company’s market has some interesting traits: i) the market is greenfield and almost all homegrown; ii) ‘no decision’ is the company’s primary competitor; and iii) the market as it stands is currently small, but large enterprises are the target…
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SaaS multiples are higher than they’ve been since we’ve tracked the data (Q4 2014): of the 73 SaaS companies we follow, the average public SaaS business is trading at 11.69x revenue while the median is 9.08x. Interestingly, the gap between the average and median has never been larger for the time period shown (2.6x), meaning…
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In any VC portfolio there are going to be companies that need to restructure or pivot. We just had that situation arise for one of our portfolio companies: after raising $9mm+ and a few years of hard work, the team built an incredible technology but couldn’t build a profitable company around that technology. Below are…
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If you’re only talking to us about raising money (Blossom Street Ventures), then you’re doing yourself a disservice. There’s a few things you should absolutely do when raising money: Shop around. Make sure and talk to as many VC funds as time allows. You’re not only looking for a personality fit, you’re looking for…
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We recently got Software Equity Group’s SaaS M&A Snapshot for Q1 2019. SEG is an investment bank focused SaaS companies and they put out fantastic data on what they’re seeing in the market. Key observations from their latest report are as follows: Deal volume is still high. There were 277 M&A transactions in SaaS,…
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