Quora Names SaaStr to Top Writers of 2012
Awesome. Â SaaStr’s been named a Top Writer of 2012 by Quora. You can easily track SaaStr on Quora anytime via the Quora feed at the bottom of any post or SaaStr.com More about the Top Writers of Quora here on Forbes. Pretty cool. Â Thank you for the support....
We’re Still Waiting for a Cloud That Just Works
Did you happen to notice that an AWS outage took down Pinterest, Airbnb, Foursquare and a ton of other web leaders the other day? The root cause analysis: a memory leak. Â = Cascading failures. Â = Doesn’t matter how load balanced you are, it’s all going...
The Shifting Sands of SaaS Relationships. Here’s How to Handle It.
I know why Steve Jobs was so very, very mad at Google and Eric Schmidt. Â Why he pledged to go “thermonuclear”. Â Why he vowed to spend up to $100 billion dollars (Apple’s cash) to “bury Google”. Â It couldn’t have been about Android...
How to Figure Out Your Competitors’ Revenues in About 70 Seconds
A friend of mine who heads business intelligence at a public web company taught me a little hack that does seem to work pretty well to figure out the revenues of any pre-public SaaS/web services company. Â Here is the formula: Take the # of employees the SaaS company...
Trello for Project Management is Pretty Nice
The other day a friend of mine I’m working on a project with sent me a link to Trello. Trello bills itself as project/team collaboration product. Â What I can tell you is it works very nicely. It’s always tough to find any project management tool that works...
Sorry, But Your Start-Up’s Team Isn’t Actually Any More Agile Than the Big Guys. Why You Really Still Can Win.
Perhaps the biggest misimpression/misunderstanding I had about Fortune 500 tech companies and start-ups was that start-ups are more agile at developing product. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Â Every tech leader has tons of talented engineers. Â In fact, every...
One More Reason to Take That M&A Offer – Sponsor Turnover
In the last 2 weeks, I met with two other CEO/founders whose companies had been acquired in the past 12-18 months. Â In some ways their experiences were different than mine. Â One was a consumer internet company acquired by an entertainment company. Â The other was a...
The Pernicious Effect of Dilution in SaaS: The Cold, Hard, Bloody numbers
I remember one of the first things I had to do in the start-up world, years ago, was help prepare the table of 5% Stockholders and Named Executive Officers and Directors for a small public company.  {If you’ve never seen these tables, they are in every public...
Palo Alto is Finally, Totally, Fully Back After 4 Years. What Does it Mean?
Do you remember 2008?  Lots of people don’t seem to, but I do, and it was rough.  The stock market fell 60%.  And never seemed to stop falling.  VCs stopped funding everything.  There was even this little October 2008 memo called R.I.P. SomethingOrOther from...
Do You Scale? It’s Harder in SaaS.
Generally speaking, I think scaling product in SaaS is about 10x easier than consumer internet. Â Not easy mind you, but 10x easier. Â Why? Â Even Salesforce.com only has a tiny fraction of the concurrent sessions of Twitter, let alone Facebook. Â Your SaaS app? Â It will...
Mobile First? The Desktop Still Has Three Good Years Left in It in SaaS
“Mobile First.”  OK, we all get it.  Look what’s happening on Facebook, as the majority of its usage has rapidly transitioned to mobile, throwing at least a wrench  into its browser-based ad model for the time being.  Google, Zynga, etc. the impact...
A Real Life SaaS Case Study: Eloqua. Marketo. Pardot. There Are 3 Different Paths to Success, My Young Padwan.
[note: Updated Modestly in 3/14 with post-IPO data:] I don’t know about you, but I really can’t stand case studies. Â They always seem either contrived (forcing contrasts in companies that aren’t really there) or else too hypothetical, because we know...
Workday is Growing 90% this Year. At $250m in ARR. So Wake Up: You Probably Need to Do A Lot, Lot Better.
I recently was talking to the CEO of a SaaS start-up doing about $40m a year — very impressive. Â I asked him when the IPO was coming, and he shrugged. Â We’re only growing about 33% at this point, because we’re so big, he implied. Â Fair enough. Â I...
Why Zynga was Right to Buy OMGPop and Words With Friends, And What it Means for SaaS
Zynga just keeps getting hammered.  The latest was on preannouncing a big miss for Q3, and an almost complete write-off of its $183m acquisition of OMGPop, the guys behind briefly ultrapopular Draw Something.  Next up may well be a complete write-down of  the $200m+...
Founder SaaStr
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