Dear SaaStr: How Do You Build a Real Exit Strategy?
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Build a Real Exit Strategy? First, bear in mind acquisitions are relatively rare. The vast majority of startups will never get one strong acquisition offer. Still, it’s not random. I’ve been through it twice as a founder and about...
2026 Is The Biggest IPO Year In History. But Take Out SpaceX And Right Now It’s One of the Worst.
A good year for IPOs. A bit less so for their performance. And not a year at all for SaaS. Per PitchBook there has been $1,786.8 billion in US VC-backed IPO value through July 28. That’s not a record. That’s five prior years stacked on top of each other...
The PE Software Backlog: Will 1,000+ Unicorns Ever Get Sold or Go Public?
Per the Wall Street this week, private equity will need about nine years to clear its backlog of unsold portfolio companies. And that’s the conservative version. Bain’s 2026 Global Private Equity Report puts the whole industry at roughly 32,000 unsold...
Why “No” in M&A Usually Means “No Forever”
“Time kills deals.” Everyone says it. It is especially true in M&A. On 20VC x SaaStr a little ways back, we were discussing OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN. The outreach happened in January. Fidji was new as head of apps, thought it would elevate...
Dear SaaStr: How Much Do Founder-CEOs Own at Time of Exit?
Dear SaaStr: How Much Do Founder-CEOs Own at Time of Exit? It can vary a lot, of course. If you never raise venture capital, the founder-CEO might own 50%, or even 100% in some cases. The founders of $10B+ Mailchimp still own 100% of the company, for example. But, on...
Dear SaaStr: When Should You Sell Your Startup?
Dear SaaStr: When Should You Sell Your Startup? Having been through the acquisition process 4x — twice as a founder, twice as a start-up exec, here’s my list of when and if to sell. Don’t take it literally. Most startups never get a single good...
Nasdaq Reaches Another ATH. Nvidia Tops $5T. But Navan’s IPO and JAMF’s $2B Exit Show B2B Still Isn’t Easy.
Times are good But Navan IPO’ing at ~$5B at ~$800M ARR run rate And JAMF selling for ~$2B at 3x ARR Well, they do make me wonder about some VC rounds these days — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) October 31, 2025 The Nasdaq hit another all-time high this...
Who Will Buy The SaaS Companies?
We’re sitting on a really big problem in SaaS nobody wants to talk about much. The exits … are no more. For years, we had a predictable exit playbook: Build a solid SaaS company to $20M-$50M in ARR Maintain decent growth, and … The buyers would come. Private...
AI SaaS Leader Moveworks Sells for $2.85 Billion. But Do Most of Their Investors Make Any Money?
So the headline is incredibly impressive. AI Support / Agent leader Moveworks at $100m+ ARR sells to ServiceNow for $2.85 Billion, a 20x-25x ARR exit and a huge, huge price in absolute terms. It’s ServiceNow’s largest acquisition … ever. A huge exit. But do the...
Top 10 Learnings On What Getting Acquired is Really Like From Ex-Head of M&A at Own, Rackspace, NetApp and Yahoo!
So few having been doing M&A and acquiring start-ups for longer than Steve Mitzenmacher. He’s been heading M&A since early days at Yahoo!, then NetApp, then Rackspace, and then mos recently at Own Backup. And then Own was acquired itself … for...
The Real Data on What it Takes to Go Big and Eventually IPO with Meritech Capital
What's the real bar to IPO today? per @MeritechCapital: 1⃣$400M+ ARR2⃣Growth of 30% or higher YoY (50-60% is even better)3⃣A valuation between $3-5B 4⃣Net revenue retention of 110-120% (and trending up)5⃣Strong SaaS gross margins6⃣Clear path to profitability...
Pitchbook: There Are 300+ SaaS StartUps Waiting to IPO
So one question many are wondering about: just how many scale-ups are really getting ready to IPO? Pitchbook has a new analysis. They count 600+ start-ups with metrics far enough along to IPO: And they count 294 SaaS start-ups ready to IPO at the end of 2024, so...
A 10 Point Checklist To Use When You Sell Your Company. Bookmark It.
So we’ve written a lot over the years in terms of learnings on what to do when your company is acquired, from a deep dive with Ben Chestnut on what he learned from selling Mailchimp for $12 Billion in cash to Intuit, to the secrets of M&A from one of the...
Dear SaaStr: If a Startup Raises $40 Million and Fails to Sell The Company, Do Founders Typically Exit With a Severance Package?
Dear SaaStr: If a Startup Raises $40 Million and Fails to Sell The Company, Do Founders Typically Exit With a Severance Package? Very rarely in a failed start-up, irrespective of the amount raised, will the founders end up with anything. If the start-up has raised a...
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