Welcome to Episode 161! Brad Feld is one of the world’s leading VCs and Co-Founder of Foundry Group. Brad has made investments in the likes of Zynga, Makerbot, and Fitbit, just to name a few. Brad is also Co-Founder of Techstars, one of the world’s most prominent...
Welcome to Episode 157! Ross Mason is the Founder & VP of Product Strategy of MuleSoft, one of the world’s leading software platforms making it easy to connect the world’s applications, data, and devices. Following over $250m in VC funding from the likes of...
They care about having a senior level executive’s problems solved. Especially, at the most senior levels. Workday solves the problems for the CFO and SVP HR. Salesforce solves the problems for the CRO/SVP Sales. Concur solves a different set of problems for the CFO....
No, in SaaS, a patent application will not help you get funded. This attorney is wrong and selling you something … 99% of SaaS VCs don’t care about patents in general, and even if they do, patent applications are not issued patents. It will take you years for any...
Welcome to Episode 155! Des Traynor is the Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer and VP of Marketing at Intercom, one of the world’s hottest startups that, simply put, makes communicating with customers easy and efficient. They have raised over $115m in funding from some...
We’re TEN WEEKS away from SaaStr Annual 2018. We’re busy little SaaS elves over here at SaaStr HQ eagerly prepping our largest conference to date. This means that there’s the most content variety ever waiting for you in February! Let’s go ahead and highlight a couple...
Generally speaking, look to applications that (x) sell to SMBs — especially very small businesses and individuals — and (y) are successful. SaaS products purchased by individuals cannot incur any meaningful sales or marketing costs. The vast majority of their new...
What does it mean to be a great VP of Product and how do you hire the right person to fill this role in your company? Think of a VP Product like the oil that makes the machine run efficiently and a bad VP of Product like sand that breaks down a machine slowly. Satya...
Generally, I think a “SaaS” company has to have, at a minimum, 60% gross margins. And ideally, relatively modest churn to be SaaS. Otherwise, it’s not really >software< as a service. Mealkits-as-a-service, for example, are too low margin with too high churn to...
No. “SaaS” has, like “Cloud”, become a term that no longer really reflects its current meaning. Time marches on and while “SaaS” used to be a term that differentiated web software from downloaded or on-prem business software, that on-prem/download world has shrunk...
This isn’t exactly true. “Human Capital Management” is one of the largest categories of enterprise software, at $15b+. Innovation will constantly be happening here. Personally, I’m an investor or advisor in many next-generation HR SaaS companies, from Teamable to...
It is sloppy. The ability to patch and deploy at will is almost certainly a good thing in B2C. Google can roll out test features whenever it wants. But in the enterprise, SaaS also encourages sloppiness that often is at conflict with what is takes to ship an...
For many start-ups, AWS took market share from Managed Hosting service like Rackspace. Managing hosting at least took over some of the devops and techops of deploying servers. But … man, it is / wasn’t enough. The servers would go down — and you’d have to bring...
It isn’t significant, but it does highlight an important trend: The Rise of the Decacorn. Juicero was a good product. We have one in the office. I like it! Er, liked it. But Juicero the company burned through a jaw dropping amount of cash and apparently never really...
Welcome to Episode 138! Vineet Jain is the Founder & CEO of Egnyte, the startup that delivers smart content collaboration in the cloud or on-premises. They have raised over $60m in VC funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and one of our...
