Are layoffs now just institutionalized in Silicon Valley? And if so, what does that mean? Instacart was one of the 3 Tech IPOs to go out late last year, along with Klaviyo and ARM. And then crushed the last quarter, with $800m of revenue and a stunning $200m of...
Rajeev Dham and Karan Singh, Partners at Sapphire Ventures, and Jane Lee, Vice President at Sapphire walk us through how to double your “Magic Number,” a shorthand for your SaaS sales and marketing efficiency. In recent years, the average Magic Number and benchmark for go-to-market efficiency has dropped from .7x to just .3x. How has the happened? And what can founders and revenue leaders do to turn around their budgets for efficient growth?
Dear SaaStr: What Is The Best Indicators of Product Market Fit at an Early Stage SaaS B2B Startup? This is a rough metric, but I’d say from experience working closely with 25+ SaaS companies … if you aren’t growing > 10% a month after $10k in MRR or so … then you...
So this is a simple post, in many ways, but I think an important one for leaders. These days, it seems like even more folks are quitting, not working out, etc. etc. We all saw the Cloudflare sales rep on social media not work out. And there were so many comments,...
Building off the popularity of our AI Day at last September’s SaaStr Annual, we’re bringing it back online this March on Wednesday, March 27th for a completely live, digital event that will bring the global SaaStr community together with the brightest innovators in Artificial Intelligence for a day of digital content. (And don’t worry we’ll be bringing it back to the Annual this September too.)
Dear SaaStr: How much money do the best SaaS inside sales AEs make? You can back into it. Ultimately, in most SaaS startups, the sales reps will take home about 20% of the total deal value they close. Maybe 25% if SMB sales and/or a startup is very well funded. At...
Sign you are going upmarket the right way: Every quarter you have a new largest customer — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin 🇮🇱 (@jasonlk) February 24, 2024 There’s a fun — and very lucrative and rewarding — exercise I like to go through with most of...
Dear SaaStr: What does “old-school” series A funding mean? Most likely: trying to buy 15-20%+ of a company, that is reasonably capital-efficient, and has at least product-market fit and some early traction, that hasn’t done endless seed rounds before...
So 2023 was a strange year, with many of the biggest, public Cloud and SaaS leaders on a tear, from Microsoft to Cloudflare to Palantir — but at the same time, so many startups and especially those in traditional B2B struggled to grow. The best of the best...
Dear SaaStr: What Is The Average Time it Takes a VC to Make an Investment Decision? For hot seed and even Series A investments? 20 minutes into the first face-to-face meeting. The average VC basically makes the initial decision to tentatively invest very quickly —...
So in the era of 2021, the time of 1,000 unicorns, it seemed like everyone and anyone someday, just might be a decacorn someday. And then in 2022, the markets crashed hard in SaaS. Since then, overall, SaaS multiples have stayed relatively low, at 6x ARR on average...
So there’s kind of a mean exercise I do at board meetings. It doesn’t sound mean, I do it very kindly. But I’ll be honest, it’s a bit of a trick question. A VP of Sales will do a deal review and talk about how they closed a new epic logo for a small initial deal that...
Dear SaaStr: What Kind of Background Checks Do VCs Do on Entrepreneurs They Fund? It varies. Everyone does some background checks, or least they did outside of the Boom Times of late 2020 through late 2021. And some do very in-depth ones with lots of “off sheet”...
“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. We had a great one last time with Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, Venture Partner at NEA. Check that out here. This week...