Three $3B B2B Acquisitions in 30 Days: Intercom/Fin, Cognite, and MaintainX. They All Bought the Same Thing: Data for AI
Three $3B B2B Acquisitions in 30 Days: Intercom/Fin, Cognite, and MaintainX In about a month, three B2B companies recently were acquired for right around $3 billion each. On the surface they have nothing to do with each other: Salesforce bought Fin (the company...
The PE Software Backlog: Will 1,000+ Unicorns Ever Get Sold or Go Public?
Per the Wall Street this week, private equity will need about nine years to clear its backlog of unsold portfolio companies. And that’s the conservative version. Bain’s 2026 Global Private Equity Report puts the whole industry at roughly 32,000 unsold...
It Doesn’t Really Matter When Your Competitor Gets Acquired. (Except It Means You Weren’t.)
There’s a common bit of advice we entrepreneurs and execs always get: worry less about the competition, and more about growing your own business. It’s good advice. But goodness — it’s hard to follow sometimes. Between your competitors’...
The Investments Where I’m Going to Lose All My Money
So when I started writing venture checks in 2013, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a strong start: First was Pipedrive co-leading seed, then acquired for $1.5B cash Second was Algolia leading U.S. seed, now at $200m+ ARR and an IPO candidate Third was...
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Know If It’s The Right Time to Sell My Company?
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Know If It’s The Right Time to Sell My Company? First off, the axiom that companies are bought, not sold, is mostly right. 95 times out of 100, you can’t wake up some morning and just go sell your start-up. Unless there are...
Dear SaaStr: What’s It Like to Have Your Company Acquired by One of the Tech Giants?
Dear SaaStr: What’s It Like to Have Your Company Acquired by One of the Tech Giants? It’s a lot of change. The pressure is mostly or at least partially off. Unless there is a huge earn-out or retention payment tied to performance, the pressure is off. Not all of...
The Big 3 IPOs Will Dwarf Everything Else Since 2000. Combined.
SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1. OpenAI just closed the largest private funding round in Silicon Valley history at $122 billion. Anthropic is targeting a potential October listing. The Big 3. PitchBook put it in one line: these three listings would...
The Great Myth of the Liquidation Preference: Yes, It Matters. But Not In Many Scenarios.
If you’ve raised venture capital—or even just read about it—you’ve heard the warnings about liquidation preferences. It’s a common grouch on LinkedIn. “The VCs get paid first!” “You could build a $100m company and walk away with...
“The Dumbest Idea I’ve Ever Heard” — How Own Became a $2B Salesforce Acquisition
A SaaStr AI deep dive with Sam Gutmann, CEO of Own, on building a billion-dollar backup company by saying “no” to almost everything. He joined Harpinder Singh (Partner, Innovation Endeavors) to share the whole story — and his top mistakes. And come...
Meritech’s Look at 2025 Exits: M&A at $587B Hits a Decade+ High … But IPOs Were a Whimper
The quick summary: 2025 was slated to be a massive year with the IPO window “blown open” by some accounts. In reality, it barely cracked open — only 6 pure-play software IPOs all year. But M&A came roaring back with $587B in volume, the largest in the...
Yes, M&A is Back. But Confirmed 3x+ Returns Have Collapsed to Just 7% of Deals. Here’s What That Means for Your Exit.
There’s been some epic M&A in the past 12 months. Nvidia paid $20 billion for Groq. Google closed its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz. Google paid $2.4 billion just to hire Windsurf’s CEO and license their tech. Palo Alto Networks is buying CyberArk for...
The Quirky Math Behind M&A Pricing in Tech: Why $125M ARR Can Be Worth $2B+… And Then Disappear
M&A pricing can be a weird thing Meta buys Manus for $2B+ at $125m ARR Then likely … abandons all that revenue. It is a distraction, and in the end, immaterial to Meta’s revenues. Whatever Meta does with it, it likely won’t be investing more in the current product...
Dear SaaStr: When Should You Sell Your Startup?
Dear SaaStr: When Should You Sell Your Startup? Having been through the acquisition process 4x — twice as a founder, twice as a start-up exec, here’s my list of when and if to sell. Don’t take it literally. Most startups never get a single good...
My Biggest Fear in Investing Now: The $100,000,000 ARR Slowdown
So it’s a bit funny, when we started SaaStr we rarely talked about the stage beyond $100m ARR. That’s what it took to go big and IPO. HubSpot, Box, Zendesk, etc. all IPO’d at around that stage. Growing very, very quickly. But around then. Helping you get to $100m...
Founder SaaStr
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