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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I just read 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. Excerpts from the book are below. Create warmth by using first names. “I’m…
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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…
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Valuations for SaaS came down in July, but are still high: of the 76 SaaS companies we follow, the average public SaaS business is trading at 9.25x revenue while the median is 8.31x. The data is below. Negative EBITDA, positive cash flow. The median SaaS business had trailing twelve month revenue of $314mm,…
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This post was originally published in June, but is updated in the section entitled “part 2” A good friend of mine named Joe Shiraz is taking his company, ServiceBot, through an accelerator based in Memphis that is backed by Start Co and ServiceMaster, one of the largest home services companies in the nation. The…
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Dow Jones just released their Q2 2018 venture capital funding report showing trends in venture investing. Below are the trends we found most pertinent as well as our commentary. VC invested $99bln. VC are investing more than ever. Over the past 12 months through Q2 2018, VC have invested $99bln in US startups, which…
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At the link below is one of the best startup post-mortems I’ve ever read. It’s by a founder of a company called Moz. The business had fantastic growth out of the gate, took on major VC money, tried to scale too quickly letting hiring and costs got ahead of growth, and ultimately they had to…
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We recently got Software Equity Group’s SaaS M&A Snapshot for Q2. SEG is a boutique investment bank focused on M&A for SaaS companies and they put out fantastic data every quarter on what they’re seeing in the market. They close 8 to 10 deals per year with transactions ranging in size from $15 million to…
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