Q: What are the most effective ways for early stage enterprise SaaS startups to sell to large organizations with little to no track record? It’s hard. But … it’s not as hard as you’d think. Let me explain. Most forward-looking CIOs (of which...
Q: Why is every tech company raising millions of dollars? Doesn’t anyone bootstrap to exit anymore? I think you may be a “victim” of tech PR. While perfect numbers are hard to get, my look at the data suggests only about 50% more money is going into...
Q: What should we learn from problems Theranos is having? It’s hard to know what the real issues are — if any. But at a more meta-level: Private unicorns should expect real scrutiny. It “feels” like being a private unicorn (worth >= $1...
Q: What do David S. Rose and other prominent angel investors think about the $400M investment via AngelList by CSC Upshot? I think it will be an amazing extra piece of ammunition for Promising and Very Good start-ups. What I mean is this. At least today, in most...
Q: If Elon Musk can manage 3 companies why is Jack Dorsey having such a hard time from media when it comes to direct both Twitter and Square? Stating the obvious, but Elon is not managing two public companies. SpaceX is a monster success, and a huge enterprise …...
A little while back, we did our first SaaStr AMA with Aaron Ross and BJ Lackland and it went pretty well. Â Now we’ll try to productize it. Â We’ll turn this into a “Lunch with …” series where every 2 weeks, we do a Google Hangout AMA with...
Q: How do I explain SAFE agreements to a potential investor who has never invested in startups? I wouldn’t use a SAFE with an investor that has never invested in start-ups. It’s too confusing and too big a learning curve. Most folks understand buying...
Q: Is a 40% Month on Month (MoM) growth for a SaaS business considered an optimistic forecast? If it’s the early days, of course not. One way to simplify all this is this … the very, very best SaaS companies go from $1m to $10m ARR in 5 quarters or less....
Q: Is it responsible to make an investment decision based on founding team racial composition? I think all us of who have been founders know one thing — diversity, broadly defined, is a huge asset. Diversity in thinking. Diversity in backgrounds. Diversity in...
Our friends at Salesforce have put up two videos of the SaaStr sessions at Dreamforce. The first one I did with my co-author and good friend, Aaron Ross. Â I thought this session was pretty darn good, although if you’ve been reading SaaStr for a while,...
Q: How do I make the most of SaaStr Annual as a foreigner? 50%+ will be from outside the Bay Area (2,500+), and a large % from all over the globe … and we’re pretty cognizant of that. More to come, but things we doing: making sure there are tons of places...
Q: Can an SaaS business be established with a low budget or self funding? Yes, though usually (but not always) this approach usually requires starting at the bottom of the market, with small businesses that one way or another don’t require a traditional SaaS...
Q: How likely is it that Twitter will succeed with Jack Dorsey at the helm of the company? I think highly, highly likely. For just one simple reason. 90% of what matters after you are at scale is the management team. The best will want to work for Jack. Heck, I...
Q: Is venture capital profitable besides for the top tier VC firms? Yes — but there are two types of profitable. The very best funds try to return 5x the capital given to them, and occasionally, even do 10x. (Very small funds can do better, but let’s put...
We’re publishing the full series of both the videos and transcripts from all of the SaaStr Annual 2015 sessions (check out the Zenefits and Slack/Yammer posts if you missed them). Today we’ve got Mamoon Hamid, Co-founder and General Partner at Social+Capital, an early...