It’s easier than ever to start a business, but harder than ever to become the biggest. It’s also expensive. We did an analysis looking at the amount of capital raised by 127 tech companies prior to going public. These are some of the biggest players in their respective industries. The overall theme of the data…
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We looked at the time it took to exit for 127 publicly traded tech companies. Specifically, we used their S1’s – a securities filing a company makes before IPO – to find out the year each company was founded and compared it to the last year financials were released as a private company. The data…
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We did an analysis looking at product/R&D spend at 123 successful startups that ultimately exited via IPO. Specifically, we compared product spend to revenue in the full year prior to IPO, the year before that, and when available 2 years prior so we could see trends. What we found was interesting. The data and observations…
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SaaS Capital, a lender to software businesses, put out an excellent research piece which examined the performance of publicly traded SaaS businesses during the recession. The 3 page research report is well worth the read, and we decided to summarize some of the findings. Below is the data and under that are observations. The…
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Recently we spoke to Austin Eudaly, founder of Tom & Sheri’s Products, Inc. which produces a premium wrinkle releaser spray for clothing for consumers. Founded in Dallas where the company also does the bottling, Tom & Sheri’s is off to a strong start. Austin shared with us his experience and insight in starting an ecommerce/CPG…
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Software Equity Group just released their quarterly view of the SaaS market. SEG is a well respected M&A advisory firm and investment bank, and their quarterly review of the SaaS market is well worth the read. Below are the key take-aways from the report: Growth continues to be strong. The median revenue of the…
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We follow 59 publicly traded internet companies in different industries including social media, marketplaces, content distribution, gaming, ecommerce, payments, and new hardware. The one thing these companies all have in common is that consumers are a customer/critical constituent in the business model. Given the diversity of industries, the multiples vary. Below is the data along…
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Recently I read “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” by Sarah Lacy. It’s a fantastic book about the re-emergence of Silicon Valley after the tech bubble in 2001. The book is well worth a full read and I highly recommend it. Below are snippets of the book we found most informative. MySpace was sold too…
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Recently I read Nicholas Carlson’s fantastic book on Yahoo entitled “Marissa Mayer and The Fight to Save Yahoo.” Below I have paraphrased what I found to be valuable sections – the full book is definitely worth the read and there are a lot of learnings on what to do and what not do when growing…
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Below is a continuation of a recent blog post about a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Chris was one of the premiere FBI Hostage Negotiators in the world, and his tactics could be useful for negotiating with customers, vendors, and of course your VC. The original blog we wrote highlighted some…
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