Enfusion is a smaller software company that went public in 2021. Below are some of the highlights from their prospectus. The key learnings we took away: you can be small and go public (the last business to go public with revenue this low was Livongo, a few years ago), and dont structure contracts the way…
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Gitlab is a software company that went public in 2021. Below are some of the highlights from their prospectus. The key learnings we took away: you might have to sunset smaller/early customers, intentional transparency can be an asset (stop being so secretive), freemium is their way with land-and-expand to follow, smaller/lower risk releases are good,…
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Amplitude is a software company that went public in 2021. Below are some of the highlights from their prospectus. The key learnings we took away: charge for the value you’re providing, not just by user; upsell by expanding use cases for the client; drive unlimited usage at the customer to make yourself sticky; and international…
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On Monday Thoma Bravo announced the acquisition of Anaplan for $10.7bln. Below we highlight all the acquisitions of public SaaS companies since December 2020. 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…
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ForgeRock is a software company that went public in 2021. Below are some of the highlights from their prospectus. The key learnings we took away: this is a software company that transitioned to SaaS from perpetual license, pricing is not per-user, 3:1 ARR:loss ratio which is good in our view, sales are global, and upsells…
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In our view, it’s wrong to price SaaS contracts on a per user basis. Instead, a value based approach should be taken whereby the customer will see a 20x+ return on your software while you also earn 3x to 5x on your S&M spend to acquire the customer. Once you’ve figured out the price, delight…
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We looked at how long it took 224 publicly traded tech companies to exit. Specifically, we took the difference between the founding year and the last year financials were released as a private company. The data is below and organized between SaaS companies (153) and Other Tech (71). SaaS takes a long time. On median…
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Definitive Healthcare went public in 2021. While it may not be a household name in SaaS, there are some learnings from their prospectus. Below we summarize the highlights. It was a 10 year journey. “We were founded in 2011 by our CEO, Jason Krantz. Mr. Krantz founded the company to provide healthcare commercial intelligence that…
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In 2017, we had a death in the portfolio. Once all the employees left, the only remaining assets were some patents, servers, domains, and a lot of code. Eventually we managed to sell that intellectual property (“IP”). Here is what we learned. Set expectations. The value of IP is a small fraction of what the…
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Freshworks is a SaaS company that went public in 2021. Below we summarize the major points which we found interesting for running your SMB focused business. Freshworks is large and growing, and unprofitable. “total revenue was $172.4 million and $249.7 million in the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively, representing a year-over-year growth…
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