Dear SaaStr: What Sales Comp Plan Should I Use For Our Very First Sales Rep?
Dear SaaStr: What Sales Comp Plan Should I Use For Our Very First Sales Rep? At the end of the day you have to solve for two things: A plan that gives the reps a living, fair wage; and A plan that you know and feel is accretive to the company. Sales reps have to be...
5 Interesting Learnings from Guidewire at $1.24 Billion in ARR: A $1.7 Billion AI Acquisition, Its Lowest Churn Ever, and 10x ARR for a 25-Year-Old System of Record
Guidewire sells core systems to property and casualty insurers: policy, billing, and claims. It was founded in 2001. Its buyers are some of the slowest-moving in B2B. In a year when the market repriced anything that looked like legacy software, it still trades at...
The $300 Billion Software Debt Wall: The Big B2B Defaults Unfortunately Haven’t Even Started Yet
The big defaults for software debt … are unfortunately yet to come @wsj “Solera, a maker of software for vehicle maintenance, has about $8 billion in loans coming due in 2028 and 2029. Vista Equity Partners, which acquired the company in 2016, had planned an initial...
5 Interesting Learnings from Anthropic’s S-1 at $16.3 Billion in Half-Year Revenue: 900% NRR, $6.6M in Revenue Per Employee, and a 10% Adjusted Operating Margin
Anthropic filed its S-1 this morning. It plans to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ANT,” and the share count and price range haven’t been set yet. Largest IPOs in History, by Deal Size 1. Anthropic...
5 Interesting Learnings from Braze at $910 Million in Revenue: A $5.66B Sale to Salesforce, 26% Growth, and Operating Expenses Up Just 6%
Salesforce is buying Braze for $5.7B. That’s 6.8x revenue. 🎁 A gift for Braze holders. It traded at 3.7x on Monday. Look at the rest of GTM: HubSpot 3.1x (growing 20%)Klaviyo 3.1x (growing 26%)Monday 2.3x (growing 22%)Adobe 3.8x Real growth, and still 2-4x revenue...
5 Interesting Learnings from Bending Spoons at $2.8 Billion in Revenue: 126% Growth, 3% Organic Growth, and $1.08 Billion of ARR Bought in 37 Days
Bending Spoons is worth about $34 billion. It buys B2B companies at 2.3x to 2.7x ARR. Since August it has paid 2.7x ARR for Airtable and 2.3x for Miro. That is $1.08 billion of ARR for $2.64 billion of enterprise value, signed 37 days apart. Its own stock trades at...
Atlassian’s Head of AI: We Bolted AI Onto 20+ Apps, Almost Didn’t Ship Chat, and Flipped Our Hiring Toward Juniors
Sherif Mansour has been at Atlassian for 17 years. He runs AI across the product portfolio and owns the product management craft, which means 450 PMs. Atlassian has more than 20 apps. Six were built in the gen AI era and the rest are years old. More than 5 million...
It Takes 12 Years to IPO. Then Another 2-3 for Your VCs to Get Liquid. And Founders Can Generally Only Sell About ~4% a Year.
An IPO should be Plan A. It’s the best outcome for almost everyone on the cap table. But founders, employees and even a lot of VCs treat the IPO date as the liquidity date. For most of the cap table … most of the money comes years later. Start the clock at...
5 Interesting Learnings from Cloudflare at $2.8 Billion in Revenue: 36% Growth, a 20% Layoff, and a Stock at 50x Revenue
Cloudflare latest quarter reported of $696.1 million, up 36%, which annualizes to $2.8 billion. Three months earlier, it had cut more than 1,100 roles, about 20% of the company, and the stock dropped 23%. In Q2 growth accelerated, and the stock jumped 17% after hours....
Why Okta Tripled on … 11% Growth. 5 Interesting Learnings From One of the Biggest Re-Ratings in B2B This Year: 14% cRPO Growth, 30% of Bookings From New Products, and ~50x Forward Earnings
Evidence the SaaSpocolypse is over? Okta is a good place to start. In April, Okta was one of the most hated names in B2B. On April 10, traders were rotating out of weaker software names, and Okta was setting a new 52-week low below all of its major moving averages....
5 Interesting Learnings from GitLab at $1.13 Billion in Revenue: 24% Billings Growth, $20M of Flex in Six Weeks, and 400 Basis Points of AI Margin Cost
Four months ago GitLab looked like the clearest AI casualty in public B2B: The stock was in the high teens. In May the company announced it would cut roughly 14% of its workforce, about 350 people, exit 22 countries, shrink its geographic footprint about 37%, and...
Being a System of Record Helps With Retention. But Alone, It Won’t Equal Growth
The other day ServiceTitan shut off Podium’s integration for roughly 1,000 shared customers after a nine-year partnership. LinkedIn and X mostly framed it as a breakup. It’s really a case study in what owning the record can and can’t do for you....
What’s Truly “Great” Now in B2B + AI Per ICONIQ? 115% Growth at $100M+, 55% Gross Margins, and $655K in Revenue Per Employee
ICONIQ just published The Pacesetter Index. It replaces their Enterprise Five Scorecard, and shows the real growth rates and metrics for the top venture-backed startups. Not the average. But to be clear, what most VCs want to fund, The pool: the top public software...
5 Interesting Learnings from ServiceTitan at $1.14 Billion in Revenue: 21% Growth … But a Back Half Guided to Mid-Teens, and a 30% One-Day Stock Price Drop
“Vertical SaaS for The Traders” leader ServiceTitan reported its fiscal Q2 2027 on September 8 (quarter ended July 31, 2026), and the quarter itself was relatively strong: Revenue of $292.8M, up 21%, ahead of their own 18% guide and ahead of consensus....
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