Taking a company to unicorn status is tough enough as it is, but what about doing it twice? Harry Stebbings, Host of The Twenty Minute VC and SaaStr podcasts, moderates this session with David Steinberg, CEO at Zeta Global, who tells us about the hard-learned lessons...
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...
Possibly. It is worth is to be careful in whom you approach in a large VC firm. Yes, it is all one big firm with shared economics — but partners are judged individually as well (no matter what anyone says) and sourcing and deal flow matter at all but a handful...
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...
This was something I worried about at EchoSign. I visited a Fortune 50 company that previously had a half dozen or more clerks and paralegals storing and managing the 100,000s of thousands of contracts signed and stored each year. They had switched 99%+ of these...
Right now, it’s tough, I’m a bit chained to the desk and focused on the 2018 SaaStr Annual in SF. But we have done some smaller events in London, Shanghai, Los Angeles and New York (2x). We’re hoping to do a bigger event in Paris is 2018. After that, hopefully I can...
As David S. Rose points out, the Quora feed now in 2017 is so good it doesn’t matter. In the early days, I think many of us underestimated just how incredibly strong the Quora feed (and its engineering and product teams) was and would become. In the early days of...
There’s no rational economic reason. She is as wealthy as any human being could ever reasonably dream to be, and has already held plenty of very prestigious CEO roles. But what if you want a chance not just to have been CEO of a few pretty big companies … that are...
If: your customer are happy — i.e., your NPS/CSAT is high — and your app is mission critical and used often (every day or more), then I like accounting to own renewals and invoices. Most SaaS companies approach renewals as something they have to “re-sell”....
Yes. Flash requires legions of very expensive engineers to maintain its many versions on many platforms, and makes Adobe almost no money and has no brand or other value at this point. On a pure dollars-and-cents level, it would have been abandoned in 2011 or so if it...
We in essence ‘bought’ the patents and more importantly, the related IP, from a company we sort of spun-out of. The assets were no longer being used and appeared to have $0 in market value. In return, they and their investors got a lot of stock 🙂 View original...
I don’t know Elon Musk, but he was an intern at the first start-up my co-founder worked at, a super-capacitor startup (that I think failed). I assume this was during college: She would tell me stories. He was quirky, and folks didn’t know what to make of him....
I went through this. I was too tired / burnt to start a third company (unless you count SaaStr, Inc.). Money aside, I was too young to retire. You get antsy after a while. So I somewhat accidentally got into investing. I think it is now going well. I really enjoy...
