Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Common Mistakes Made by Less Successful Entrepreneurs? Mistakes less successful (but not total failure) entrepreneurs make: They can’t control the burn rate. You can slow down time if you raise a bunch of VC money, but you can’t stop it. They hide from tougher metrics. High churn, lower-than-hoped margins, low NRR,…
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Dear SaaStr: How Much Should I Talk About the Competition in a Pitch Deck? The best startup pitch decks almost all have great competition slides. Why? Because the best CEOs: Respect the competition. Even if they plan to destroy them. Know the space cold. Even in the early-ish days. See and can explain the whitespace they…
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So last month, two companies I’ve invested in: both crossed $5m in ARR both also grew at the exact same rate last month MoM both also basically have the same ACV (~$50k) both have about the same number of folks on the sales and marketing teams, respectively both have a somewhat complex sale one difference:…
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Discover the best ways for a seed-stage startup to pitch to investors and successfully fundraise from Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel.

The top SaaStr content you might have missed for the week of April 22nd, 2024.

Why do founders leave after their companies are acquired? There are many nuanced answers, but in the short and medium term, it’s incentives. Acquirers use 3 incentives to get founders to stay: Sticks. If you leave, you lose X% of the consideration. Acquirers try to put 30%-40% of the founders’ consideration at risk, if they…
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So you raised your first real VC round? Congrats! Mostly. It’s all Feel Goods right after a round closes. It can seem like nothing has changed but the bank account. But in reality, a lot has changed. Expectations have changed. So a few thoughts if you haven’t raised venture capital before: 0. First, this may sound…
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What’s the toughest part of running a startup? A partial list: Recruiting. This is always hard, forever. Co-founder Conflict. Hopefully, you don’t have this. If you do, boy it’s hard. Almost running out of money. Happens to almost all of us. Not fun. Loneliness at the top. Tough indeed. Having to rebuild the team every…
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Mike Tamir, Head of AI at Shopify, and Rudina Seseri, founder and Managing Partner at Glasswing Ventures, level-set about where we are in the cycle for Enterprises adopting AI and the critical work being done at Shopify to leverage AI and solve real problems.

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Start a Successful SaaS Company? I think there are approximately 2 ways to get a new SaaS app off the ground: Option 1: Hustle into The Enterprise. In almost every category of software, there are gaps. Painful gaps. Generally, several gaps that any buyer has and would pay, say, $5k…
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We’re gearing up for 2024 SaaStrEuropa.com in London on June 4-5, which will be awesome. 3,500+ of the best in SaaS and Cloud together in London! See You There! But then comes The Biggest Non-Vendor SaaS Event of the Year! SaaStrAnnual.com 2024 on Sep 10-12 in SF Bay!! 12,000+ of the best founders, CEOs, CTOs,…
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So there’s one topic you have to be ruthlessly honest about as a founder: are you falling out of product-market fit? The reason you have to be ruthless is while sometimes falling into product-market fit can happen relatively fast, e.g. with a magic feature … falling out takes time. It takes time for customers to churn,…
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Dear SaaStr: When Do VCs Try To Replace Founders as CEOs? You’re worried about a bunch of VCs replacing you. That’s fair. You should be. It happens. Regularly — but not usually. A few high-level things to think about. First, if you really screw up, shouldn’t you be replaced? Second, if you don’t end up…
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So the #1 OG vertical SaaS leader is Veeva. A core CRM, data and Cloud platform for the life sciences industry, it started off as a “Salesforce for Pharma” and expanded from there. It raised less than $10m before it IPO’d, and fast forward to day, it’s at $2.5 Billion in ARR, and is very…
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Dear SaaStr: What Happens if a VC Loses All Their Money on an Investment? It’s OK — if it’s not too much. As long as the founders did everything they possibly could to make it work. Everything. And were honest. There are two types of losses for VCs and professional investors: losses than fit into…
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