The Rise of Private Equity in SaaS: A Gift to Founders

by Jason Lemkin | Feb 25, 2021 | Blog Posts, Exit, Exit Strategy, Fundraising, Leadership | 2 comments

Let’s take a look at a few recent $1B+ “exits”, i.e. sales in SaaS: Pipedrive acquired by Vista for $1.5B Thoma Bravo acquires Sophos for $3.8B Insight Partners buys Veam for $5B Gainsight sells a majority interest to Vista at $1.1B valuation What do...

Plenty of Top SaaS Companies Are Worth a Lot Less Than 10x ARR

by Jason Lemkin | Dec 14, 2020 | Blog Posts, Exit, Exit Strategy, Scale | 0 comments

A reminder that as a start-up, if you aren’t growing at fairly fast rates … your comp is 5x ARR Also a tough realization for bridge rounds, etc. https://t.co/bL5o63pdsB — Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ (@jasonlk) May 14, 2021 So as you’ve seen,...

Would You Rather Own 100% of a Company Worth $100 million or 10% of a Company Worth $1 Billion?

by Jason Lemkin | May 2, 2020 | Blog Posts, Exit, Exit Strategy | 0 comments

Q: Would you rather own 100% of a company worth 100 million or 10% of a company worth 1 billion? This is the greatest question for ambitious founders. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve lived it (a version of it). And I think about it every single day. I remember when...

4 Myths Selling SaaS Into Enterprise

by Team SaaStr | Jan 21, 2020 | Blog Posts, Exit, Sponsored Posts | 0 comments

By Avanish Sahai, Google Cloud VP of ISV & Application Partners At SaaStr Annual, we’ll be sharing stories of how a few of our SaaS partners enable enterprises to change the way they do business. I am a former CXO and current investor and board member in the B2B...

5 Key Steps to Evolving Your Offering Into a Platform with Eventbrite and Stripe (Video + Transcript)

by Louise Lee | Nov 7, 2019 | Blog Posts, Engineering, Exit, Leadership, Metrics, SaaStr Events, Videos

How can a simple offering be transformed into its own platform? Renaud Visage, Co-Founder of Eventbrite, and Romain Huet, Head of Developer Relations at Stripe, know what it takes to effectively evolve your offering into a platform without losing what made offering...

Crossing 100 Employees While Keeping Your Culture Intact with Liveramp and Periscope Data (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | Sep 17, 2019 | Blog Posts, Career Growth & Advice, Exit, Leadership, Marketing, Marketing, SaaStr Events, Videos

How do you create a collaborative, cohesive workplace that scales from your first employees to multiple offices in different locations? How can you ensure the heart of your company’s culture holds strong, and also embracing a spirit of reinvention? This panel of three...

SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with Box and Eventbrite — September 6, 2019

by Deborah Findling | Sep 6, 2019 | Company Culture, Customer Success, Customer Success, Exit, Hiring, Leadership, Podcasts | 0 comments

        Ep. 262: Jon Herstein is the Chief Customer Officer at Box, the company that provides one platform for secure content management, workflow and collaboration. Prior to their IPO, Box had raised funding from some of the best in the business...

The Sendgrid Journey: Scaling From Growth Stage to $2B Acquisition in 4 Years (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | Aug 20, 2019 | Blog Posts, Career Growth & Advice, Exit, Leadership, Marketing, Marketing, SaaStr Events, Videos

Since Sameer joined SendGrid at CEO in 2014, the company has quadrupled its revenue, more than doubled its employees, experienced a successful initial public offering and was recently acquired by Twilio in a transaction valued at approximately $2 billion. In this...

5 Myths That Stop SAAS Companies from Moving Upmarket with Dropbox (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | Aug 13, 2019 | Blog Posts, Career Growth & Advice, Customer Success, Customer Success, Exit, Featured Videos, Leadership, SaaStr Events, Videos

Dropbox Chief Customer Officer Yamini Rangan draws on 20 years of experience to challenge five common misconceptions about SaaS success. From beating the competition to over (or under) relying on Outbound, she offers a practical perspective on the frameworks that are...

“7 Tips and Tricks to having happy customers at Scale” New Relic EVP, Roger Scott (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | Jul 22, 2019 | Blog Posts, Career Growth & Advice, Customer Success, Customer Success, Exit, Featured Videos, Leadership, Marketing, SaaStr Events, Videos

Customer expectations are at an all-time high, making it more and more difficult for companies to please them. Companies who understand their customers well are the ones who rise to the top over their competitors. New Relic, provider of real-time insights for...

Lessons from New Relic: Five Critical Steps to Scaling Enterprise (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | Jun 27, 2019 | Blog Posts, Exit, Leadership, Marketing, Marketing, SaaStr Events, Videos

Erica has led New Relic through massive growth, scaling the company’s enterprise business 10x since she joined the business pre-IPO. Growing a company’s revenues, customer base, team, process, and product doesn’t just happen without major work and strategy. Erica will...

Engineering Your Own “Luck”: The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | Jun 25, 2019 | Blog Posts, Engineering, Exit, Metrics, SaaStr Events, Videos

Building a company made up of distributed teams presents a plethora of complex challenges that can derail productivity and impact employee retention. But with it comes immense benefits and competitive advantages such as the diversification of ideas, speedier product...

SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with Twilio and Flexport — June 21, 2019

by Deborah Findling | Jun 21, 2019 | Exit, Marketing, Marketing, Podcasts | 0 comments

        Ep. 243: Sara Varni is the CMO @ Twilio, the company building the future of communications allowing you to engage customers like never before on voice, SMS, WhatsApp or Video. Prior to their IPO in 2016, Twilio had raised over $250m in VC...

Top 10 Lessons Learned in Getting to $100M ARR with Adaptive Insights (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | May 30, 2019 | Blog Posts, Career Growth & Advice, Company Culture, Exit, Exit Strategy, Leadership, SaaStr Events, Videos

Tom Bogan, CEO of Adaptive Insights, a Workday company, will review the key principles to building a successful SaaS company. From team to vision to metrics to funding and more, these principles provide the framework for high-growth, high performing SaaS companies....

Beyond $1B ARR: Lessons from Zendesk on Why the Cloud is Unstoppable (Video + Transcript)

by Faith Storey | May 14, 2019 | Blog Posts, Career Growth & Advice, Exit, Leadership, Marketing, Marketing, SaaStr Events, Videos

The cloud’s biggest days are yet to come. The rise of the public cloud is driving a massive replatforming of the tech stack and customer experiences for every company. What’s next? A deep dive with Ophelia Brown, Founder of Blossom Capital Want to see more...