So averages can be a bit misleading, especially once you are looking at the Best of the Best. The SaaS companies that actually IPO’d. But those ones are the ones we have great data on. And how old is the average SaaS CEO at … founding? The answer is 33:...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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,...
A little while back on LinkedIn and Twitter we put together a list of things that later, once you are successful, even very successful, you’ll regret. It got a lot of engagement from the SaaS veterans out there, so I thought it would be worth digging in more on...
So this is the time of the year when founders step down. Often quietly. Folks recover a bit from the end-of-year push, reflect, and sometimes … decide it’s time to bring in someone new. A CEO to take things to the next level. Etc. And even more of us think...
Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, a ways back joined us for the first time joined us at our first big digital event, SaaStr Scale. It was a great deep dive on what it’s really like scaling an emerging leader in a category everyone previously thought was small. ...
"We all need more hackers on our team. Marketing hackers, sales hackers, product hackers. We lost too much of that. People that want to do the work because they enjoy the work." @searchbrat @zapier @kippbodnar @HubSpot @jasonlk pic.twitter.com/dUudpe9s2Q...