At Atlassian, openness is core to everything the company does: employees can access most information on Confluence; “open company, no bullshit” is one of the company’s five values. But it can be risky. Atlassians knew the company was going public four...
Jeff Lawson is the Founder & CEO @ 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 funding from some of...
Formerly a senior leader at Google, Claire Hughes Johnson is now Chief Operating Officer at Stripe, where she’s helped guide the online payments firm through rapid growth. Stripe today has more than 1,400 employees and processes billions of dollars for millions of...
Qualtrics Co-Founder and CEO Ryan Smith sits down with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin as Ryan reflects on the survey software maker’s acquisition by SAP this year. The company was acquired this November in an $8B deal ahead of its planned IPO. This is...
Welcome to Episode 214! Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. Prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214m in funding from some of the best in...
Alex Western, Managing Director at Think3, talks about the problem he has seen consistently across SaaS startups that have VC funding – overgrowth. Overgrowth normally happens because of misalignment in VC initiatives and founder initiatives. Because VCs want to...
Chief Product Officer at Adobe, Scott Belsky, discusses his beliefs on creating the first mile of your product. His immediate suggestion is to focus on your newest customers. Why? You can learn the most about what problem your product solves or value it provides. Once...
Welcome to Episode 198! Maria Pergolino is the CMO @ Anaplan, the company that allows you to accelerate decision-making with effective planning. Anaplan had a wildly successful IPO earlier this year after raising over $299m in funding from the likes of Meritech,...
Much better the first time than the second. The first time we sold, I had far exceeded any expectations I had as a founder. First, I barely believed I could be a founder at all. And second, with zero life savings and no “wins” to my name, selling for $50m in 12 months...
I was just with a founder who owns 40% of his startup. He just turned down an offer for $500,000,000 to sell his startup to a public company. He is 33. I do not believe he has any life savings. I do not believe his parents have any savings, and he did not come from...
At least for me, it felt great for about a day. Big bottles of champagne, recognition “we did it”, etc. IPO’ing truly is one of the most iconic Silicon Valley and startup moments. It is special. But then, the next day … everyone sort of goes back to work. Although,...
It seems like a pretty good deal for Recruit Holdings, and market correct. If Glassdoor was at about ~$100m ARR growing 30% a year (suggested by press, but I have no actual first-hand data), then public market comps suggest the deal sounds “market” at maybe 7x-9x 2019...
So far, Salesforce has a strong record with its larger acquisitions — ExactTarget and Demandware. Their record with mid-sized ones seems more mixed, but that’s what you’d expect. Mid-sized M&A is the toughest category ($200m+ or so) — they have trouble...
No, but it is moving a bit in that direction. Google paid $380,000,000 to buy Bebop in large part just to get Diane Green to kickstart their enterprise play. She’s brought in a huge veteran team, done a bunch of acquisition, pushed Google Cloud into an aggressive AWS...
Both make sense, but are expensive. Google has made a huge push into more enterprise cloud under Diane Greene. Salesforce would bring it all together. Google has bought a number of smaller players, made a huge PaaS push, gotten G Suite to break through into the...