Did your (former) company lay off employees after they moved to a cloud-based enterprise system?
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...
What do I have to do to have Jason Lemkin as a keynote speaker at an international event?
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...
What percentage of Quora answers do you think are high quality and given by an appropriately qualified person?
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...
Why would Meg Whitman want to work at Uber as their CEO?
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...
In Enterprise SaaS, who should send the recurring invoices, accounting or account managers?
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”....
Did Adobe make the right decision by announcing that they will finally stop updating and redistributing Flash by 2020? Will the Web be prepared for it?
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...
How did Jason Lemkin come across the patent on which he built NanoGram?
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...
How did Elon Musk become so successful?
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....
If you have 2 exits under your belt, do you become a VC, start another company, or retire at 40?
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...
What does Jason M. Lemkin do now?
Too much. We are investing out of an almost $90m set of venture funds. We are running the SaaStr Annual and SaaStr Inc. with a $10m budget for ‘17-’18. We are running the SaaStr CoSelling Space to give post-revenue founders a great place to work and scale together...
Did Jason M. Lemkin invest in Algolia?
Yes, I’ve been fortunate enough to invest thrice. I was the first U.S. venture investor. That investment is up almost 20x. It is a very good company, a great product and a terrific team. I knew within 20 minutes of the first meeting I wanted to invest as much as I...
What will Travis Kalanick do now that he has resigned as CEO of Uber?
My experience-based guess is he will work on, and obsess about, redemption. Even if he doesn’t think of it that way. Ousted CEOs that drove a company to some real level of success end up in a challenging state. The money doesn’t help. And the potential joy from...
Do entrepreneurs have to be driven by money to be successful?
The best very smart entrepreneurs I know are not driven primarily by money. Because if you are wicked smart, there are much better ways to make a lot of money, risk adjusted. Go work at a hedge fund or PE firm and make $2m-$20m a year, every year, once you prove...
What does a typical day in the life of a VC look like?
Dear SaaStr: What does a typical day in the life of a VC look like? The interesting thing is how little time really goes into meeting new startups. For most VCs, most of Monday is used up on administrative matters and seeing pitches for deals that might get done, but...
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