Archive
Every post, grouped by year.
2026 143 posts
- Concrete, Silicon, & Leverage
- The Ads Model for Prompts Vertically Integrates AI
- AI Productivity Doesn't Mean What I Thought It Means
- The Price of Entry to the Frontier
- Revenue per Megawatt & The AI Model Factory
- NVIDIA's $108b Quarter
- How Long Should an AI Agent Live?
- The AI Bullwhip
- Mainframes became personal. So will your data center.
- Previously Unmanufacturable
- Birds Don't Fly Like Planes. Neither Does AI.
- When Models Learn
- Honestly, Who Buys SOTA?
- The OpenAI Hack & the Question of Intent
- A Winner in Every Category
- AI Harness' ARR Multiples
- The Secret Chat Room
- Spending Like a Hyperscaler
- Racing to Sustain Jevons' Paradox
- AI is a Terrible Ghostwriter
- AWS's Road to a Trillion
- Microsoft Resells the Frontier
- Aftermarket Harnesses
- Yeltsin in the AI Aisle
- Google's Cloud Revenue Converges to NVIDIA's Growth Rate
- AI Engineering Productivity is Anything But Normal
- Open Models Tack Toward the Frontier
- The Blank Slate AI Strategy
- The Harness Is the New Battleground
- The AI Colander
- Three Years In
- 8.9 Million AI Users
- The AI Preflight Check
- The $10B FDE Boom
- AI Worldviews
- Most AI Work Can Wait
- The CIO's Choices are Clear in 2026
- When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
- What If There Is No Moat Yet?
- Full Sail on Asynchronous Inference
- Defending Against AI-Powered Attackers
- The Quietest Part of Startupland isn't so Quiet
- So You Want to Sell Inference
- Databricks Widens the Lead on the Yellow Brick Token Path
- 5x for Free : The Local Coding Stack
- The Golden Age of AI Applications
- A CEO's Cost of Capital Advantage
- The AI Glass Ceiling
- The Substitution Wave in AI
- The Minimill of AI
- Local in Reality
- Intelligence Per Dollar
- The Thriving Ecosystem of Open Models
- The AI Skepticism Map
- Skill Distillation
- Security in the Age of AI Agents: Office Hours with Jonathan Jaffe
- Software After AI
- Agent Gravity : Who's Running Your Agents
- Plastic User Interfaces
- SpaceX's Limitless Ambition : An AI Conglomerate
- The Unsustainable Subsidy
- SpaceX's Confidential S-1 - The $2 Trillion Rocket Ship
- SpaceX S-1: Project Apex and the $1.75T Conglomerate
- Observations on Writing with AI
- The First Derivative of Inference
- What Would AI Email Cost?
- The 6 Messages That Actually Matter
- 2026 Theory GTM Survey
- Localmaxxing
- Securing the Agentic Enterprise
- AI at Discount
- Optimizing Software Factories
- All the AI You Need for 8 Ads per Day
- This Week's Sign the Apocalypse Isn't Upon Us
- Timing Cashflows of Your Sales Commissions and Your Customers
- The $112 Billion Quarter
- Reorganizing Your SaaS Startup's Organizational Structure to Optimize the Customer Lifecycle
- Darwinian Specialization in AI
- The Three Questions in AI Sales
- An Often Forgotten Characteristic About Your Startup's Ideal Customer Profile
- Technical Schematics: AI Tool Evolution
- GPU Spot Prices Surge 114% in Six Weeks
- Competitive Strategy in the Age of AI
- Intelligence About Business
- A $10 Billion Call Option
- A Proactive System of Intelligence for Security
- The Beginning of Scarcity in AI
- Founders, Equip Your Agents
- The AI Problem Matrix
- Emerging from the Mythos
- Pocket Power : From State of the Art to Your Phone in 23 Months
- Tokenmaxxing
- Marketing in the Agentic Era
- Veblen & Jevon Walk Into a Data Center
- A New Axis of Competition
- AI's Bundling Moment
- Cursor, Kimi & the Open Source Imperative
- The Pricing Power of Agents
- The Robotic Tortoise & the Robotic Hare
- The 12x Bet on AI
- Hello, Claude? Are You There?
- One Billion Lost Packages
- The Marginal Hire
- The Org Chart Math Behind AI-Native Speed
- Is This Tomasz's Agent?
- The Sword of Damocles in Software
- Data Center Intelligence at the Price of a Laptop
- Not Prompts, Blueprints
- Would You Buy Generic AI?
- Databricks Overtakes Snowflake
- The Game on the Field Has Changed
- Is AI Doing Less & Less?
- Why Saudi Aramco Isn't a Proxy for SpaceX
- AdSense for AI
- SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic IPOs : A $3 Trillion Stress Test
- A Third, A Third, A Surprising Third
- 9 Observations from Building with AI Agents
- Will I Be Paid in Tokens?
- The AI Acqui-Hire Wave
- The 2026 Rotation
- Can You Fly That Thing?
- How Markets Price AI Risk
- Google's 52x AI Growth
- The Other Leverage in Software & AI
- Building Developer Infrastructure at Scale : Office Hours with Jim Everingham
- Dissecting the Internet's Most Novel Creature
- $281b From One Customer
- A Coxswain on Your Shoulder
- Is Your Margin My Opportunity in Software?
- The Model T Comes to Silicon Valley
- AI Managing AI
- When the Market Questions Relevance
- The Postmodern Data Stack is AI
- Software That Debugs Itself While I Sleep
- A Third Time Up the Roller Coaster
- Dead Companies Walking
- Eleven Steps to the Epiphany[^1]
- Open APIs Are Over
- Trajectory
- The Text Box Isn't Enough
- The Done List
2025 160 posts
- Gross Profit per Token
- My Favorite Books of 2025
- Motive S-1 Analysis: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
- Scoring 2025's Predictions
- Scoring 2025's Predictions
- 12 Predictions for 2026
- Thursday is Podcast Day
- A Flash of Deflation
- The Bifurcation in the AI Market
- Is Your AI Funded by Junk Bonds?
- The Average Founder Ages 6 Months Each Year
- The Two Context Databases Powering Enterprise AI
- The AI Value Gap : Where Does the $7,000 Per Seat Go?
- Streaming Comes into the Fold
- From 10 to 31 Tasks Daily : The Agent Inflection Point
- Top 10 Posts of 2025
- Vercel's AI Sales Agent : 10 SDRs Down to 1 in Six Weeks
- Private Equity : The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups
- The Bacon & the Skillet: When Does the AI Market Congeal?
- The Scaling Wall Was A Mirage
- What 375 AI Builders Actually Ship
- Teaching Local Models to Call Tools Like Claude
- Running Out of AI
- Datadog: As Reliable as Your Golden Retriever
- Are We Being Railroaded by AI?
- A 1 in 15,787 Chance Blog Post
- OpenAI's $1 Trillion Infrastructure Spend
- Small Data Becomes Big Data
- $555B of Cloud Spend
- The Growth Premium Persists in SaaS Valuations
- Product-Market Fit is No Longer Static
- Engineering for the AI-Native Era : Office Hours with Calvin French-Owen
- From Columns to Rewards: Automating the Two Pillars That Drive Modern AI
- Where Is Your AI Running?
- Good Morning & Good Luck
- The Data Pendulum Swings to Consolidation
- Is Token Consumption Growth Slowing Down?
- Congratulations, Robot. You've Been Promoted!
- Building Sales Teams in the Age of AI : Office Hours with Chris Klayko of Databricks
- From Books to Prompts: The Instant Future of Productivity
- Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?
- Data & AI Infrastructure Are Fusing
- Adding Complexity Reduced My AI Cost by 41%
- From A to B Without Inventing Letters
- The Efficient Frontier of AI
- The Math of Hypergrowth: Two Paths to the Same Goal
- Is T3D2 Dead? Has AI Killed It?
- The Post-AI Org Chart
- Beyond a Trillion : The Token Race
- How AI Tools Differ from Human Tools
- Coffee, Omelettes, and Five-Course Meals: A New Software Menu
- Developer Relations at Theory
- 10 Months into AI Agents : Which Are Used Most?
- Two Data Giants, One Revenue Milestone
- What It Feels Like to Build in AI
- A Living Market Map
- The $20/Month Software Revolution
- The AI Tide Lifts Databases
- The Second-Order Effects of AI
- Netflix's New AI Role
- What Will You Reinvent Today?
- A Narrative Violation on a Friday Morning
- Achieving Flow with AI
- When One AI Grades Another's Work
- Explore vs. Exploit in Agentic Coding
- The Groupon Era of AI
- EvoBlog: Building an Evolutionary AI Content Generation System
- Why AI Can't Crack Your Database
- What is Chrome Worth?
- Who is Talking to My Users?
- From Knowledge to Action
- Small Action Models Are the Future of AI Agents
- The AI-Driven Cloud Market Share Shift
- Why Seed Rounds Are Growing as Startups Shrink
- PageRank in the Age of AI
- The AI Search Tipping Point
- The Question I Ask Myself Before I AI
- The Sales Strategy Conquering the AI Market
- Hidden Technical Debt in AI
- The Rise of the Agent Manager
- Budgeting for AI in Your Startup
- The Hungry, Hungry AI Model
- Revenue Comes to Crypto
- Figma's S-1: A PLG Powerhouse
- Voice, Context & Control: The Three Pillars of Useful AI Email
- Why Data is More Valuable than Code
- The Multimodal Lake House : Partnering with Lance
- Fighting for Context
- DuckLake - Subsecond Latency on a Petabyte
- The Data Decacorn Derby
- The Coming Wave of Acquihires
- Partnering with Maze Security
- Patterns Across 5 Years of YC Investing
- The IPO Door is Swinging Open
- Stuck in the Middle of AI Workflows
- What Level of AI?
- How Monte Carlo's Daily Revenue Model Rewrote Their Strategy
- 1000x Increase in AI Demand
- A Banner Year for M&A only Five Months In
- What's in Your Bank's Wallet?
- Theory is Looking for an Investor
- My Prompt, My Reality
- How AI Redefines User Experience
- When Will We Pay a Premium for AI Labor?
- Nobody Wants to Read Your Stuff
- The Impact of AI on Education & What It Means for Work
- A CEO of AI Applications Marks a New Era of AI Competition
- An Explosive New Distribution Channel
- No Asterisk Needed
- 100 Trillion Tokens
- Semantic Cultivators : The Critical Future Role to Enable AI
- When Every Employee Becomes an Agent Boss
- A 1600% Improvement in Sales to Lead Conversion
- Tokenization as a SaaS Liquidity Option
- Rabbits on Firetrucks Redux
- Integrations as Competitive Advantage
- Social AI
- Speed Running a 50 Year Old Software Category
- My Bottleneck with AI
- Beyond ARR: How Monte Carlo Reinvented Their Business with Daily Revenue
- The Impact of Tariffs on Series As
- What do Tariffs Mean for Startupland?
- A Founder's Guide: Essential Sales Advice for Startups
- Welcome, Bryan and Philip!
- The Great Liquidity Shift
- The Price of Distinctiveness
- The Digital Hot Dog : Marketing in the Age of AI
- The Third UI : The Rise & Fall of the Keyboard
- The Implications of the Wiz/Google Deal
- Halving R&D with AI & the Impact to Valuation
- The Mirage in the Software Clouds
- This Analysis Cost 27 Cents
- Positioning Startups in the Age of AI
- How Much Is A Venture Firm Worth?
- Why War & Peace Is Killing Your Data Budget
- A Founder's Guide: Essential Management Advice for Startups
- Lopsided AI Revenues
- Four Marketing Principles That Redefine Markets from Klaviyo's Former CMO
- The Complete Guide to SaaS Pricing Strategy
- AI Fluency : The Next Interviewing Skill
- Auctions in AI : Cost of Capital as a Strategic Advantage
- The AI Elbow's Impact : What Reasoning Means for Business
- Theory is Looking for a Head of AI
- Fast-Track Your Growth: GTM & Marketing Office Hours for SF Founders
- Faster Sales Cycles & Software Buyer Confidence
- AI Impact Curves
- Google's Future in Search & AI
- $1.2b of Revenue in 30 Days
- It Pays to be an AI Company
- $13b Run Rate & Doubling
- Darwin's Finches in AI
- The AI Cost Curve Just Collapsed Again
- Top Themes in Data in 2025
- Top Themes in Data Transcript
- What DeepSeek's Newest Model Means for AI
- From Blank Canvas to a Brilliant Presentation with AI
- Why Synthetic Data Is the Secret Weapon for AI Startups in 2025
- Building GTM for AI : Office Hours with Maggie Hott
- Tech's $370B Paradox: Why Cash-Rich Giants Might Not Lead 2025's M&A Race
- Back to Text: How AI Might Reverse Web Design
2024 120 posts
- 2025 Predictions
- My Favorite Books of 2024
- Desktop, Touch, Browser, Now AI? The Next OS in Computing
- The Intelligence Imperative: How AI Went From Feature to Foundation
- Finding the Midnight Snacker : Agentic Marketing
- I Use AI 100 Times Per Hour
- Top 10 Posts of 2024
- Why I Let AI Grade My Writing (Just Like My AP English Teacher)
- The Year Algorithms Learn to Act
- Theory Two
- My Little Library
- 75 Cents per Month
- Small but Mighty AI
- The Post Election Surge is Unevenly Distributed
- I Talk to Robots While Driving
- The White Collar Revolution
- Profit Dollars per GPU Dollar
- Trends in the Post-Modern Data Stack
- My AI Rube Goldberg Machine
- Productivity One Year from Now
- AI Prompts as PRDs : Why Prompts Will Become Important IP Assets
- The Premise of a New S-Curve in AI
- Why Lifetime Value is Relevant Again in Software
- A Challenge to SaaS Orthodoxy
- How M&A Fosters Innovation
- Fulfilling Crypto's Original Promise
- Where is the Budget for AI Coming From?
- Would You Listen to AI Generated Podcasts?
- Interwoven with Initia
- AI Advantage for Startups : Changing the Workflow through Services
- Will We See a Better Exit Market Next Year?
- Writing Software for Robots
- 2024 Theory Ventures Go-to-Market Survey: Optimism Rises Amid Changing Market Dynamics
- The New Software GTM Playbook
- The Rarity Shibboleth
- The Challenge of the AI Demo
- Which Design Era Are We In?
- The Dislocation Between Public & Private Web3 Markets
- Higher Levels of Abstraction
- What Has Your GPU Done For You Today?
- AI Public & Private Premia for AI Companies
- Things that Used to be Impossible, but are Now Really Hard
- The PostModern Data Stack
- Snowflake's 4 Areas of Investment in AI
- The Ghost in the Machine : Invisible Ads in Generative Search
- The 3 Attributes of an Attractive Market for AI
- Rewriting the RFP for AI
- The Battle for AI Gravity
- Agentic Systems' Sales Cycles
- The Future of Blockchain Data : Our Investment in Allium
- Punctuated Equilibrium in AI : Is it Better to Be A First Mover or A Last Mover?
- No SaaS! How AI Agents Will Change Software Pricing
- AI Pricing Strategies for SaaS Companies Offering Copilots
- Select avg(Moby Dick) limit 2 sentences
- The First of Your Newsletters
- The Four Barriers to AI Adoption
- 2024 Theory GTM Survey
- How Much Revenue Must a Company Generate to IPO?
- The Series A Crunch or the Seedpocalypse of 2024
- What about Human Training?
- Databricks' Accelerating Growth
- Apple's AI Challenger Sale
- One Line of Code Can Wipe a Billion Rows : Investing in Tobiko
- Is the Software Market in Trouble?
- The AI Trust Fall
- NVIDIA
- Chatting With Her - The ChatGPT App on Mac
- AI Spending Patterns : It's Not What You Think
- BI's Third Form : Office Hours with Benn Stancil
- Are AI Companies Valued Differently Than Non-AI Companies?
- The Fastest Growing Category of Venture Investment in 2024
- A Series of Unfortunate Decisions
- The Capex Conquest in the Cloud
- Massive Acquisitions in Software Startups
- When 1% Market Share Shifts Represent $5b of Market Cap
- Partnering with Dropzone: Automating Security Operations with AI
- A Shift in LLM Marketing : The Rise of the B2B Model
- Modern Data Architectures : Jordan Tigani of MotherDuck on Office Hours
- Are Software Companies Good Businesses?
- The Most Profitable Software Company in Q1 2024
- The Market Size Mistake
- My Favorite Uses of AI
- Extreme PMF : Sustaining Success with Scale
- SUI Generis : Office Hours with Evan Cheng of Mysten Labs
- The Art of Product Management in the Fog of AI
- Micromanaging AI
- This Message Will Self-Destruct in 33 Seconds
- Rubrik S-1 - Burning the Boats in Data Security
- AI in the Hands of Software Buyers
- Selling AI : Category Creation of a Different Flavor
- To Be or Not To Be an Agent
- AI SaaS Companies Will Be More Profitable
- Analyze All the Things : Data Omniscience with Omni
- The Vector Computer Company
- Why Databases Won't Charge for Storage in the Future
- The Opposite of a Good Idea is a Good Idea
- Looking into the Future of BI With Colin Zima
- What Happens When AI Performance Asymptotes?
- 3 Key Marketing Tactics for Early-Stage Startups: Lessons from a Former Klaviyo & Lightspeed Executive
- What If LLMs Change the Business Model of the Internet?
- The Secrets to Building Vibrant Communities in Web3 Open-Source
- The First $100m ARR AI Security Company
- Nobody Knows : Steel & Blockchains
- One of the Biggest Public Offerings in 20 Years
- Building a $20b Behemoth : Office Hours with Steven Goldfeder of Offchain Labs
- The Sudden Repricing of Startups in Early 2024
- AI Design Patterns
- Standard Issue AI
- Experience as a Status Symbol
- The Fastest Growing Software Sectors in 2024
- AI Drove the Largest New Bookings of Any New Product
- Dissecting Delegation: Diving Deep on The Missing B-School Class
- 5th Grade Outlining in Mrs. L's Class : Metawriting before the Age of AI
- From Prompt to Paper in 60 Seconds
- The Class Missing from Business School
- Open Source Models : What Can We Determine from Download Patterns?
- The 10x Salesperson
- Gordian Knots in Software Engineering
- Make Hay When the Sun Shines : Liquidity in Startup Exits
- 2024 Predictions
2023 114 posts
- Why Startup M&A in 2024 Will Rebound
- Data Product Teams : Best Practices for a Modern Data Team
- Synthesis as Brilliance : Worldly Wisdom from Charlie Munger
- Step-Ups & Duration : The Shape of Things to Come to the Series A in 2024
- How to Improve Your LLM : Combine Evaluations with Analytics
- In Like a Lamb, Out Like a Lion
- Top 10 Posts of 2023
- Snow Angels Come Early to Data : Snowflake's Strength Spells Success for Startups
- Managing Data as Product : Office Hours with Philip Zelitchenko
- The New Threat to a Data Leader's Career
- Who Took a Bet on You?
- Sudden Disturbances in Rapidly Moving Objects : The Implications of the OpenAI Fiasco
- How Much Does it Cost to Use an LLM?
- The First Mac Predates Modern Central Banking
- The Software Industry's Productivity Boom: Analyzing Revenue per Employee Trends
- Purchasing Patterns in Software : Positivity Punctuating Q3
- Top 10 Trends for Data in 2024
- Only The Dogged Thrive : More Good News in Startupland
- What's Measured is Managed : Earnings Surprise in Public Software in Q3 2023
- How Much Should Quotas Increase Next Year?
- The Impact of Anti-trust on M&A in Startupland
- Gas Gas Revolution
- AI Reaccelerating Cloud Growth
- Top 10 Trends in Data & AI at the Impact Summit
- The Convergence of Data & Software Engineering in the Age of AI
- Outbound Marketing Fury : Office Hours with Raj Sarkar
- What Loom & Klaviyo Indicate about Exit Valuations
- The PLG Trap : Lessons Learned from Oliver Jay, former CRO at Asana
- The Promise and Pitfalls of Chaining Large Language Models for Email
- SaaS Competitive Advantage Through Elegant LLM Feedback Mechanisms
- Centaurs & Cyborgs : The Jagged Frontier of AI
- Artisanal Emails
- Avoiding the PLG Trap : Office Hours with Oliver Jay
- Cisco & Splunk Continue the Trend of SaaS Take Privates
- Building Applications with AI - Lessons from LangChain, Hearth, & Context.ai
- Building a Generational Business Databrick by Databrick
- 4 Key Takeaways from the AI Panel at Saastr 2023
- A Little Yellow Book in the Corner Bookshelf of a Coffee Shop
- Whispers of the Future
- The Rise of Data Lakes in Software Architecture
- The Evolution of Open Source Business Models
- Context.ai - Unlocking Insight into LLM-Based Applications
- A New Marketing Behemoth Klaviyo : How 7 Key Benchmarks Stack Up in the S-1
- Around the World in 21 Days
- The Dawn of AI : Pricing Power & Profits in NVidia's Business
- Mean Reversion: When Will Startup Investing Return to Normal?
- Seizing the Moment: Strategies for Startups to Outmaneuver Competition in a Turning Economy
- Teaching a Computer to Ghoti
- Surprising Data Points about the Venture Capital Market
- How Will a Venture Capital Recovery Feel? Observations from 2008
- Busting the Myth: Higher Funding Doesn't Mean Faster Hiring in Startups
- What the New Relic Sale Means for SaaS
- The Paradox of AI and Data Roles: How Automation Will Increase Demand for Data Professionals
- Signs We've Touched the Bottom
- The Pilgrims Raised 4 Rounds of Financing
- Operating in the Dark
- Producing Charts with AI
- The Fracking of Information
- There is No Such Thing as Series A Metrics
- What 70m Thread Users Mean for B2B Marketers
- How Markets Value Software Companies in 2023
- Picking Teams in AI
- MotherDuck - DuckDB in the Cloud
- Marketing Teams as Hedge Funds
- Does an AI Premium Exist in the Fundraising Market?
- What if Every SaaS App Spoke English?
- Web3 in SaaS Clothing
- The AI API : The Twilio Moment for Machine Learning
- How Much More Efficient Should a SaaS Startup Be When Using AI?
- Observations Using LLMs Every Day for Two Months
- When Will SaaS Budgets Increase Again?
- The Publicly Traded Company Worth 250x More in 10 Years
- High-Flying SaaS Startups' Surge Won't Change the Valuations in Ventureland
- How Should You Staff Your Startup in 2023
- Which AI Model Should You Pick for Your Startup?
- Seeking a Distribution Advantage with AI
- Tinkering with LLMs
- The Greatest Profitability Turnaround in Software History
- When 1 is Bigger than 4 for AI
- Every Customer is a Design Partner - Leading Your Sales Motion with Sales Engineering
- Microsoft's Billion Dollar AI Business
- Software Spending Growth Will Accelerate by 40% in 2023, But it Doesn't Feel that Way
- Why Every Startup Needs an AI Strategy
- How Much will the US Early Stage Venture Market Contract in 2023?
- ChatGPT & Taylor Swift
- Economics in the Sometimes Strange World of Web3
- The 4 Questions Startups Should Ask Themselves about Building with Generative AI
- Theory
- The Change in Burn Multiple for Startups in 2023
- Usage as the Moat in AI
- The Typical Startup Saw a 24% Increase in Sales Cycle in 2023
- The Hardest Round to Raise in 2023
- How to Build Your Startup like Google & Stripe
- Take a Breath
- 2023 Go-to-Market Survey - Understanding How Startups Have Shifted in 2023
- How ChatGPT Will Restructure Engineering Teams & Create Opportunity for Startups
- Pulp Nonfiction : What I Learned Writing a Blog Post with ChatGPT
- Magical Metrics with Omni
- The Implications of Increased Regulatory Scrutiny for Startup Acquisitions
- Which Customer Segments are Healthiest During the Downturn?
- A Flare Across the Clouds : Cloudflare's Earnings Report
- Venture Capital, Withering & Dying
- The Compounding Advantage of a Big Chip Stack in a Downturn
- Predicting Cloud Growth Rates for 2023
- When AI Favors the Incumbents
- The Future of Startup Office
- Microsoft as a Mirror - What We Can Expect for SaaS in 2023
- How Layoffs in Startupland Differ Between B2B & B2C Companies
- Is the Suite Strategy Right for Your SaaS Startup?
- The Most Acquisitive Acquihirers in Software
- Rabbits on Firetrucks : Generating Images for B2B Blog Posts Using AI
- 2023 is the Year of _________
- The Startup M&A Market Fell 94% Year over Year - But One Segment Thrives
- Sizing the Web3 B2B Software Market
2022 124 posts
- My Quest for Speed - Learning to Use My Computer the Fastest Way Possible
- A $30B Software Company from a $15m Investment
- From a $200k Annual Burn to Raising $80m+ : Notes from Office Hours with Fredrik Haga
- Five Predictions for 2023
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Sand Hill Road
- My Favorite 10 Books of 2022
- What the $6B Coupa Acquisition Means for Software Startups
- PLG & Profitability : More Product Doesn't Necessarily Mean Greater Profits
- Top 10 Posts of 2022
- Napoleon's Influence on the Modern Data Stack : hyperdimensional Analysis with Malloy
- The Uniswap Token Launch : Tokens as CAC Part II
- The Most Successful Web3 Launch in 2022
- The Best Time of Year to Raise for Your Startup
- A New Chapter
- My Laptop is Faster than Your Cloud : Announcing MotherDuck
- Office Hours with Fredrik Haga of Dune : What is the Future of Web3 post-FTX?
- Soft in the Middle - Examining Your Startup's Org Chart
- What the FTX Fiasco Means for Web3
- Losing a Month of Runway to Inflation
- Cutting R&D to Grow GTM Spend : Is it Happening Across Software Companies?
- Sales Efficiency through Covid : Reading the Tea Leaves for Startups
- Grey Skies in Cloud Earnings
- 9 Predictions for Data in 2023
- Would You Leave the Cloud to Improve Sales Efficiency by 11%?
- Five Pillars of PLG with Carilu Dietrich
- Antifragility as a Competitive Advantage in 2022
- How Low Could Valuations Go?
- Office Hours with Carilu Dietrich - Marketing for Hypergrowth Companies
- Just How Troubled is the Bay Area Startup Scene?
- 10 Predictions for Data at the Impact Summit
- Pipeline Supply Shocks in SaaS Sales
- Are We Seeing the Beginning of SaaS Consolidation?
- The State of Web3 in 2022 through Data
- Figma's 50x ARR Multiple & What it Means for Startup Fundraising
- Your Customers' Profitability is Your Startup's Future Health
- Systematizing Go-To-Market Hiring
- Web3 Users Are Just Like Web2 Users
- 200% NDR: What Does it Take to Achieve this Stellar Milestone?
- Why We'll See More New Types of Web3 Apps in the Next Year
- Don't Look Now But Web3 Companies are Beginning to Trade Like their Web2 Counterparts
- Fundraising in 2022: Where We Are & Where We're Going
- Pipeline Analysis Playbook
- Omni - A Big Step Forward in the Decade of Data
- How to Structure a Startup Sales Team for Optimal Land & Expand
- The Trillion Dollar Empire that Started with a Coupon
- Growth is No Longer the Best Predictor of a Software Company's Value
- Do PE Acquisitions of Public Startups Imply We've Hit a Pricing Bottom?
- Messaging: the Bottleneck for Web3
- The Math Behind Starting a Successful Software Startup
- How Much Should You Expect Your Startup to Slow in 2022? About 21%.
- Office Hours with Bill Binch: Structuring Sales Teams for Success
- The Health of Cloud Spending in Mid-2022
- How to Structure Your Sales Compensation Plan to Deliberately Undersell
- How Important is Your Software to Your Customer? It's Time to Find Out.
- Spot the Difference
- PE in VC in 22
- The Bid/Ask Spread in Venture Capital
- A Masterclass in Sales Development from Lars Nilsson at Snowflake
- The Missing Letter from the English Alphabet
- 1% of Salesforce's Revenue Makes a Unicorn
- Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy
- The End of Web3
- Office Hours with Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Sales Development at Snowflake
- When AI Becomes Table Stakes
- Asking Users to Complete Tough Mudders to Use Your Product
- Coinbase & Uniswap: How 7 Key Benchmarks Stack Up
- The Web3 Marketing Stack: The Next Big Wave in Crypto
- Defending a Startups Greatest Asset through Recession & Recovery
- How VCs Value Rainbow Foals in 2022
- Bezos' Shareholder Letter in 2000
- The Most Popular Financing Round in 2022
- What's Better than a Cookie? A Wallet - How Crypto Will Revolutionize Marketing
- Office Hours with Lee Kirkpatrick, former Twilio CFO on Managing through Turbulence
- The New Key Competitive Advantage for Web3 Startups
- Is a 10% Reduction in Staff a Layoff?
- Top 10 Insights from the 2022 Startup Sentiment Survey
- The Macroeconomic Signal to Watch for Software & Infrastructure Startups
- Office Hours for 2022 Market Conditions Market Survey Results
- The Largest Software Acquisition in History
- 2022 Startup Market Conditions Survey
- Lessons from Watching a Great CEO Operate
- So You Want to Improve Your Sales Efficiency
- The 4 Startup States During a Recession
- Five Mid-Year Predictions for Web3
- How Much Further Can We Fall?
- Cash Flow Shockwaves
- 5 Key Data Points about the Early Venture Market in Q1 2022
- Product-Market Fit in Different Capital Environments
- The Critical Question Facing Web3 Infrastructure Startups
- The Three Eras of Startup Valuations
- Imagine You're a Venture Capitalist...
- The Rhyming Protocol Wars of 2022
- Revenue, Revenue Everywhere. Not a Dollar to Count
- Free SaaS Enabled Marketplaces - A Novel Go-To-Market for Software Startups
- Four Fundamental Innovations of Web3 that Will Upend Web2 Incumbents
- $112m of Market Cap per Engineer
- Inflation and Deflation in Web2 and Web3 Startups
- Startup Self-Repricing as a Recruiting Tool
- The Spicy Future for Data
- The App Store Model Comes to Web3
- Usage Based Pricing: 3 Questions to Ask Before Leaping
- Guess the Startup Answers
- Guess the Startup
- The Three Types of Customer Success Teams
- The People Roadmap for Startups
- The Future of Money
- Rediscovering the Power of the Command Line
- 1/9/90 in Crypto
- The Next Key Innovation in the Shift-Left Movement
- Why Early Valuations Might Surge in 2022
- The Sales Sandwich
- 10 Lessons Learned after $5B of M&A
- Will Your Startup Borrow More in 2022?
- The New Discipline Web3 Software Companies Must Develop
- If You Had $10k to Invest, Which Stock Would You Buy?
- Intensity Oozes from these Pages
- How Much Money is Flowing into Crypto?
- Why You Should Expect Your VP Product to Sign Up for a Lead Quota
- Dremio - A Foundational Component of the Modern Data Stack
- How Will the 52% Correction in the Stock Market Impact the Startup Fundraising Market?
- Is Compensation Stagnation to Blame for the Great Resignation?
- How Correlated are the Web 2 and Web 3 Software Markets?
- Do Data Startups Command a Premium in the Fundraising Market?
- The Top Sectors of Web3 in 2022 by Revenue
2021 75 posts
- My Favorite Books of 2021
- Five Predictions for 2022
- Mark-to-Market Rounds - What Will Your Startup's Strategy Be?
- Tokens as CAC - Are Crypto Companies More or Less Efficient in Acquiring Customers?
- The Fifth SaaS Correction
- Partnering with Mysten Labs to Build Foundational Infrastructure for Web3
- How Stripe Scaled - Notes from Office Hours with Claire Hughes Johnson
- Samsara S-1: How 7 Key Benchmarks Stack Up
- Words Like Loaded Pistols
- Justifying Token Equity Multiples using GDP Data
- The Need for Two Types of Payback Period Calculations
- The 100x ARR Multiple
- Using the Reversal Mental Model to Invest Better
- Hex - The Best Product for the Technical Analyst
- Spot.ai - The Future of Video Intelligence
- The Two Cap Tables of Crypto Companies: What They Are and How They Relate to Each Other
- Passive Investing in Venture Capital and the Parallels to Public Equities
- Redpoint Office Hours with Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO at Stripe
- Why You Should Repeat Yourself, A Lot
- Crypto Companies Insider Ownership is Approaching that of Classic Startups
- Height - The Project Management Tool for the Modern Worker
- The IMPACT Conference on the Modern Data Stack
- GitLab S-1 Analysis: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
- Scaling and Measuring an Effective Developer Relations Organization
- What is the Product the Customer Buys Before They Buy Yours?
- How Will We Value a Crypto Token?
- Benchmarking Amplitude's S-1: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
- Per Seat or Per Use Pricing: A Framework for Evaluating the Right Strategy for Your Startup
- You'll Never Login the Same Way Again
- Preset Cloud - The Visualization Layer for the Modern Data Stack
- The Secret to Recruiting Quickly and Retaining Your People
- The Optimal Pricing Strategy for Your Startup - Office Hours with Madhavan Ramanujam
- The Velocity of Money in Startupland
- Can You Guess This Business's Name?
- The Decline of Venture Debt at the Early Stage
- Data Meshes, Apache Iceberg & Project Nessie - Novel Ideas in the Data World
- The Journey From Fortune 100 Executive to Startup Entrepreneur
- The Next Step Forward for Conversational Intelligence - Chorus & ZoomInfo
- My Mental Model for the World of Crypto
- Innovation in the Financial Markets: Seventy Years of Hedge Funds
- The Great Game of Risk Played in Category Creation, and Why the Winning Strategy is Aggression
- The Productivity Implications of Working from Home Across 150,000 Employees
- The Figures that Will Move the Venture Capital Market in the Next 3-5 Years
- Executive Recruiting as Competitive Advantage - The 3 Knock-On Effects of Failed Executive Hires
- The Inflationary Forces in Startupland
- The One Force that Will Govern How We Return to Work
- Never Raising, Always Raising
- How to Cut a Path through the Jungle of Regulatory Compliance
- Covid's Impact on Software Sales Efficiency
- Would You Work for This Person?
- The Identity Crisis Facing Open Source Companies in the Cloud
- UIPath S-1 Analysis: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
- The Importance of Building & Maintaining Great Developer Documentation
- How Selling Has Changed Post-COVID, and How it Will Change Again Afterwards
- This is the Most Ridiculous Use of Money Management I've Ever Heard. What is Wrong with You?
- How Much is 20% More NDR Worth to Your SaaS Startup?
- The Feedback Loops in Data that Will Change SaaS Architecture
- The Four Types of Startup COOs
- The Most Popular Startup Domain Suffixes - .com, .co, .gg - Which is Best for Your Business?
- The Most Effective Tools and Techniques for Selling Today - Office Hours with Jim Benton
- How Much Should You Bet To Maximize Your Investments, or Your Company's Odds of Success?
- Eliminating Data Downtime with Data Observability - Why We Partnered with Monte Carlo Data
- How to Be a Great COO: Lessons Learned Leading a Unicorn to Success
- A Common and Critical Mistake When Forecasting Next Year's Bookings
- The Five Flavors of ARR - New Definition, Same Great Multiple
- The Secret to Keeping Your Software Running and Keeping Customers Happy
- Information as Surprise - Harness Claude Shannon's Key Idea
- Internal Communication - Why it Matters More than Ever & How to Succeed
- Cloud Data Lakes - The Keystone to the Decade of Data
- The Fastest Growing Sectors of Startup Fundraising in 2020
- The Art of Doing Science & Engineering
- The Missing Insight Around Software Multiples for Valuing Companies
- Information Cascades - How Many Rational People Can Make Logical Decisions and Yet Still Create a Bubble
- The Next Chapter for StackRox
- Why Remote Work Changes the Nature of Leadership, and the Kinds of Leaders to Recruit in Startups
2020 99 posts
- Why Fast Learning Curves are So Important to Startups
- 5 Predictions for 2021
- Do You Lose Sales Opportunities Because of Sales Execution or Product Insufficiency?
- The Three Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Startup's Head of Sales
- Where to Start if You're Curious about Macroeconomics Today
- Top 10 Learnings from Startups to a $100M+ ARR General Manager, Linda Tong
- Building a Product-Led Growth Machine: Office Hours with GC Lionetti
- It's Supposed to Be Hard. You're Changing the World.
- Voodoo, Obsidian & Zettlekasten - A Modern Way of Taking Notes
- How a Merger of Salesforce and Slack Would Change the SaaS Landscape
- The Supercharger Boosting Startupland Fundraising and Exits
- From Hyper Growth to Hyperscale: What I Learned Managing Small and Massive Teams
- More Activity Means More Business. Don't Overthink It.
- How Developer Marketing Parallels Consumer Marketing
- The Parallels in the Culture Between the Two Category Defining Companies
- How Many Technologies Can a Company Adopt at Once?
- Your Startup is a Series of Cycles
- Why IPOs, Direct Listings, and SPACs Will Flourish in Startupland
- Just How Inaccurate are Quarterly Venture Capital Activity Reports?
- The Mispricing of Software Companies
- The 4 States of an Engineering Team
- Notes from Office Hours with Kimbre Lancaster on How to Run Successful Virtual Events
- Redpoint Office Hours with Medha Agarwal & Shopify’s Kaz Nejatian
- How to Predict the Forward Multiple of a Software Company
- Why Burnout Should be a Topic at Your Next Board Meeting, and What to Do About It
- How to Maximize the Impact of Your Website When Targeting Two Personas
- Can You Still Make Money Starting a SaaS Company?
- Your Responsibility as a Manager is to Hire 7 People
- Redpoint Office Hours with Kimbre Lancaster on Hosting Successful Virtual Events
- A Quick Diagnostic to Determine if Your Sales & Marketing Teams are Aligned
- Asana S-1 Analysis - Comparing One Productivity Powerhouse to Another
- Why Startups Should Establish Qualifying Signals for Sales Teams Early On
- Month Zero Cash-on-Cash Payback - A Metric for Judging Sales Team Growth
- Redpoint Office Hours with Tyler McNally from Gainsight
- Conflicting Data on the State of the US Early Stage Market
- The Secret to Productive Group Meetings over Video
- Inside Rounds Have Become a Sign of Strength at the Series B
- The Five Important Trends in Data, and the One Megatrend Powering Them All
- How to Recruit a Marketing Team with Great Product Marketing and Demand Generation Abilities
- The Best Economic History Books According to Readers
- The Unforeseen Benefits of Online Events
- An Economic History of the US in Five Stock Market Crashes
- What I've Learned about Modern Monetary Theory
- Cloud Data Lakes - The Future of Large Scale data analysis
- The Fundraising Market Two Quarters into COVID
- Office Hours with Adam FitzGerald, Hashicorp, on Developer Evangelism
- Two Charts that I've Been Wondering About
- Top 10 Learnings from the Redpoint 2020 GTM Survey
- What is the Structure of the Typical SaaS Company as it Scales?
- How Should You Structure Sales Teams for Optimal Performance?
- How Predictive is SDR/BDR Quota Attainment of AE Quota Attainment?
- SaaS Office Hours Go to Market Survey Edition & Which Metric Should Your SDR/BDR Team Use?
- How to Transform Your Board Meeting with Written Narratives
- Notes from Office Hours with Hollie Wegman
- Where are Most Unicorns Headquartered?
- California Dreaming - Is Silicon Valley Still the Best Place to Start a Company?
- Office Hours with Hollie Wegman
- Three Little Puzzles about Infinity
- How Would You Manage Your Business Differently if Shelter-in-Place Lasted 18 Months or More?
- Why is the Stock Market Only Down 15%?
- The Fundraising Market Has Changed, But Not in the Way I Thought
- Redpoint 8 - Our Eighth Early Stage Fund
- Benchmarking Sales Prospecting Volumes, Deal Terms, and Meetings in the Coronavirus Era
- Bullwhip and Base Rates - The Two Major Forces Impacting Startups in Q2
- Narrative Economics and the Power of Stories
- What Customer Demand and Your Startup Balance Sheets Imply about Your Startup's Strategy
- Surveying Sales Leaders - How Coronavirus is Impacting Quotas, Bookings, and Budgets
- Why Margin Matters Now in Startupland
- Questions about Returning to Work
- The Startup Sectors Most Impacted by the Coronavirus
- The Next 30 Years of Geopolitics - What Could They Look Like
- Observations about Silicon Valley Two Weeks into Quarantine
- What do Google Search Query Trends Reveal about the Changes in How We Work?
- Data Lake Engines - The Essential Layer of the Next Generation Data Architecture
- What Will this Crisis Accelerate in Your Ecosystem?
- Six Startup Disciplines for Challenging Times
- Estimating the Impact of the Coronavirus on Growth
- What Could the Venture Market Look Like in the Coronavirus Era
- Notes from Office Hours with Lisa Lawson
- What I Expect in the Next Few Months in Startupland
- The SaaS Marketing Scorecard - How Does Your Marketing Operation Rank?
- The Impact of the Coronavirus on Software Valuation Multiples
- The Great CEO Within
- Why Your Startup's Org Chart is Limiting Your Growth
- The Strategic Importance of Competition
- One of the Most Frequent Errors in Sales Planning and Forecasting
- When You Have an Advantage, Speed Up the Game
- Office Hours with Lisa Lawson
- How Our Journey with Snowflake Began
- Mental Models for Hiring Salespeople at Startups
- Simpson's Paradox in Measuring Net Dollar Retention Rate
- Cloud Prem Architecture - The New Way of Serving the Enterprise with a Hub and Spoke Data Model
- Has VC Become So Big It Must Be Disrupted?
- Trust is at the Core of Software Marketing
- What is a Best in Class Payback Period for a Software Company in 2020?
- Growing Product and Engineering Orgs from Zero to IPO
- The Redpoint 2020 Go To Market Survey
- The Health of the US Venture Market in 2020
- B2B vs B2C: How Should Your Sales Team Be Allocated to Maximize Success?
2019 86 posts
- 5 Predictions for 2020
- The Top 10 Posts of 2019
- How Much Turnover in Your Sales Team Should Your Startup Expect?
- Product Launches Become the Operating Cadence of a Startup
- Benchmarking Your Sales and Customer Success Teams
- The 13 Critical Questions to Answer about Your Startup's Product Marketing
- The Most Frequent Mishire in Startups
- Notes from Office Hours with Nick Mehta
- Office Hours with Anthony Kennada on Category Creation on Nov 14
- The Rise of the Founder-CEO
- A Decade Long Mac User Tries Out Windows for the First Time in 15 Years
- Welcoming Travis Bryant, Again!
- What I've learned about IPOs and Direct Listings
- On Humility and Making Better Decisions
- Design and Open Source: A Potentially Powerful Combination
- The Radically Different Early Stage Fundraising Market
- The Early Discipline of Remote Startups
- The State of the Startup IPO Market
- Office Hours with Nick Mehta of Gainsight Oct 9
- Little Known Facts about the VC Industry
- That Will Never Work
- The SaaS Correction of Late 2019
- The Siren Song of ROI Based Pricing
- A Mental Model for Prioritizing Your Startup's Energies
- If You Have Great NDR Retention, Should You Increase Your Marketing Spend?
- Benchmarking DataDog's S-1: How 7 Key Metrics Stack up
- Which Categories of Seed Startups are Thriving? Which Aren't?
- The 37% Rule: How to Decide When to Stop Wondering and Start Deciding
- One Call to Make Before Picking Your Startup's Headquarters
- A Clever Hack to Reading More Books
- Notes from Office Hours with Guillaume Cabane
- The Strategic Question at Seed Today
- Private Equity as an Exit Option for SaaS Startups
- Observations from the Enterprise Tech 30 List
- Why Churn Rates Can Spike When Your SaaS Startup Experiences Hypergrowth
- Adding Engineering Metrics to the Redpoint SaaS Metrics Template
- 100k+ ACV SaaS Companies: Do Their Metrics Differ from Other SaaS Companies?
- The SaaS Valuation Environment in Mid-2019
- Mattermost's $50M Series B
- Theory SaaS Startup Key Metrics Template
- Office Hours with Guillaume Cabane on June 27
- Setting the Salesforce/Tableau Acquisition in Context
- Why Product Innovation Slows After the Series A
- Looker Joins Google Cloud
- As Your Sales Team Scales, Focus on Your Middle
- The Benefits of and Questions Facing Remote and Distributed Startups
- Before You Raise a Round of Funding, Ask Yourself This Question
- Define the What But Delegate the How
- The Fundraising Environment in 2019 - Three Major Shifts
- How to Develop Best in Class Sales Efficiency
- What a Valuation Implies About a Business
- Benchmarking Slack's S-1: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
- A Random Walk Down Sand Hill Road
- Office Hours with Travis Bryant
- The Four Strategic Questions Facing AI Agencies
- Hustle As Strategy
- Viewing Valuation as a Discount of Future Value
- Do SaaS Startups Still Require Less Capital than 10 Years Ago?
- Five Reasons to Sell End-to-End Products in Early Markets
- Benchmarking Zoom's S-1: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
- Puzzles, Not Problems
- Benchmarking PagerDuty's S-1: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
- Where Have All the Angels Gone?
- Should Your Startup Employ Both Assisted and Unassisted Trials to Acquire Customers?
- The Free Trial Survey on the Saastr Podcast and Hitting a Blogging Milestone
- AI Superpowers - A History of Chinese Startups and the Implications for the Future of Startupland
- A Lasting and Enduring Gift
- Should Your Startup Differentiate On Pricing?
- In Defense of Troublemakers
- Answering Readers' Questions about the Free Trial Survey
- A Common Mistake in Hiring Plans
- 1.01^365 = 37.7
- Top 10 Learnings from the Redpoint Free Trial Survey
- A New Architecture for Next-Generation Software Companies: Announcing Mattermost
- The Two Things You Need From Early Customers that Matter More than Cash
- Sharing the Learnings from the Redpoint Free Trial Survey
- What Makes a Great Leader?
- Infinity Wells and Deep Work
- How Many Managers Will You Need This Year?
- How Much ARR Can a CSM Manage?
- Serving the People First Enterprise
- Eugene Wei's Novel Mental Models for Technology
- Welcome, Travis Bryant!
- Your Company is a Product Used By Your Employees
- Why Share Repurchases Create Large Opportunity Costs for Early Stage Startups
- Series A SaaS Startup Benchmarks for 2018
2018 67 posts
- Just Where Are SaaS Companies Priced After the 2018 Correction?
- Predictions for 2019
- 5 Most Popular Posts of 2018
- My 10 Favorite Books of 2018
- Reducing Page Load Times by 90%
- Which is More Important: New Account Growth or Account Expansion?
- Creative Selection - An Inside Look at Some Key Moments at Apple
- Selling Your Product While You Build It
- A New Way to Calculate a SaaS Company's Efficiency
- The Four Stages of Sales Compensation Structures in Early Stage Startups
- SAP Buys Qualtrics; 2018 Catapulted to $65B in $1B+ M&A Volume
- Red Hat's Acquisition - A Triumph of Open Source
- SaaS Freemium/Free Trial Survey is Here
- Normalization of Valuations in the Public and Private Software Markets
- What Does AirBnB's 'Shares for Hosts' Idea Imply for Blockchain?
- In Early Markets, Services Can Be a Competitive Advantage
- Our Investment in Gremlin - Leveraging Chaos to Create Resilient Systems
- Three Observations About the Adobe/Marketo Acquisition
- How the Economics of Professional Services Have Changed in Software
- Elastic S-1 Analysis - Another Open Source Monster
- Access is the Scarcest Commodity in Startupland
- How SaaS Companies are Valued
- How Long Should Your SaaS Software Trial Period Be?
- Jacob's Ladder in the Startup Fundraising Market - How Startups Today Skip a Round of Fundraising
- Why Your Startup Doesn't Invest Sufficiently in its Differentiators
- The Startup Founder's Almanac
- Lessons Learned from 20 Years at the Leading Edge of SaaS
- Does Winner Take Most in SaaS?
- A Deeper Dive into the Dynamics of the Seed Market
- Why Series As are Much Easier to Raise in 2018 than the Past 5 Years
- What I'm Grateful For
- The Three Layers of Management
- Our Investment in Kustomer
- The Blockbuster Software M&A Market of 2018
- Seven Strategic Rationales for the Microsoft/Github Acquisition
- When You Hire an Executive, You're Hiring a Network
- The 5 Forces Driving Startup Valuations Today
- The Most Important Book You'll Read All Year
- When Will the Next Wave of UI Advances Happen?
- An Ode to the OKR - How to Motivate Greater Ambition in Teams
- A Crypto-Trading Uber Driver and a Billionaire's Spat over Candy - On The Importance of Sticking to Your Strategy
- The Challenge of Uncertainty
- Separating The Quality of the Outcome and the Quality of the Decision
- The Effect of Flush Private Markets on Software IPOs
- Why I Overestimate My Contribution to My Team
- The Disappearance of the Fundraising Demo
- How to Reach More People with Content Marketing by Changing How You Write
- The Importance of Time Value of Money for Startups
- The Salesforce/Mulesoft Acquisition is a Bellwether for the 2018 M&A Market
- Where are We in the SaaS Valuation Cycle?
- Is Geographic Dispersion of Seed Dollars Really Happening?
- Why Does Your Sales Team Lose Deals?
- The Clearest Articulation of a Marketing Roadmap
- Dropbox S-1 Analysis - The King of Freemium
- The ROI of Cash Burn for SaaS Startups
- Startup Best Practices 27 - How to Use Options to Retain Key Employees in Your Startup
- Things to Consider When Designing Your Startup's Logo
- The Impact of Blockchain on SaaS
- Clarity of Purpose - The Competitive Advantage of Focus
- Expanding Your Time Horizon To Scale Your Startup
- The Best Bit of Advice on Writing I've Received
- How to Identify a SaaS Market that Machine Learning Will Disrupt
- Yearning for the Vast and Endless Sea
- Ten Year's Worth of Learnings About Pricing
- An Era of Fundamental and Massive Change - The Capital Markets Innovation of the ICO
- 7 Predictions for SaaS in 2018
- Jettisoning the Assumptions of Last Year
2017 109 posts
- Premoney vs Postmoney - Which is a Better Technique for Negotiating?
- Meetings Shouldn't Be Boring
- Managers Must be Insane to Brainstorm in Groups
- How Quickly Does Headcount Scale in the Fastest Growing Software Businesses?
- The Parallel Between Cryptocurrency and Continentals
- An Antifragile Thanksgiving
- False Competition - Why Defining Axes of Competition Matters
- Disagree and Commit - A Management Principle for Highly Functioning Teams
- The False Confidence of the LTV/CAC Ratio for Early Stage SaaS Startups
- The Latent Purchasing Power in the SaaS Acquisition Market
- Just How Disruptive Are ICOs to the Classic VC Model?
- The Implication of Secular Increases in SaaS CAC
- The AI Agency - A Novel GTM for Machine Learning SaaS Startups
- Important Changes in Revenue and Profitability Definitions for SaaS Companies
- The Rising Stakes in SaaS
- How to Decide With Speed and Conviction
- Monte Carlo Simulations of Inside and Outside Sales Teams in a SaaS Startup
- Shopify S-1 Analysis - Smiling All the Way to $10B
- Decision-Making Auditing
- How Much Should A SaaS Startup Invest in Sales & Marketing?
- Ownership - A Defining Trait of a Leader
- Should You Consider Emotional Intelligence When Hiring Your Startup's Team?
- The Challenges of the Platform Go To Market
- The Theory and Data Underpinning Sales Commission Plans
- Hiring for a Discipline You Know Little About
- Maximizing Productivity on My Commute
- Has SaaS Become Commodified?
- The Volatility of Multiples in the Public SaaS Market
- The Limiting Factor of Voice and Dictation Adoption
- Why Cash Conversion Cycle Matters for Your Startup
- When, If Ever, Should Profitable Bootstrapped Startups Raise Capital?
- Three Big Ideas on Technology Innovation Cycles
- How to Decide When To Move Upmarket
- Labor Arbitrage Comes to Silicon Valley
- How Developed is Global Venture Capital Market?
- The Quickest Way to Estimate How Much Your Startup Needs to Raise
- Self Service Data
- The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
- The Best Book on the Fundamentals of Selling
- Patterns in Startup M&A Processes
- The Five Questions You Need to Answer About Your Startup's Strategy
- Gratitude
- Prioritizing Your Startup's Roadmap
- Adoption Chain Risk - The Importance of Selling to Everyone in Your Startup's Supply Chain
- What the Online Advertising World Can Teach Us about the Evolution of Machine Learning in SaaS
- Why Amazon's Acquisition of Whole Foods Matters for Startupland
- How to Tell If You're a Great Manager
- The Intense Power of a Strong Company Culture
- SaaS Fundraising in 2017
- Apprenticeship
- Plant Trees You'll Never See
- The "Hiring The Buyer's Role to Sell" Fallacy
- Ethics in Machine Learning - An Opportunity for Startups to Lead
- Startup Best Practices 26 - Choosing Your Startup's Competitive Strategy
- The Unbundling of Excel
- Bias Against Creativity
- Data Middleware - The SaaS Ecosystem's Response to Fragmentation
- Hiring for Bookings Capacity in Sales
- The Challenges of Raising Your Series B
- The Price Anchoring Effect of Distribution Platforms
- The Challenge of Performance Pricing for SaaS Companies
- The Bustling IPO Market of 2017
- When Statistics Will Mislead You
- A Spike of Venture Debt in Startups
- My Algorithm is Better than Yours
- A Tale of Two Go To Market Strategies
- Is There a No Man's Land in SaaS ACVs?
- When Machine Learning Just Isn't Enough
- The Four Dimensions of a Demand Generation Portfolio
- SMB or Enterprise - Which is the Better Go To Market in SaaS?
- The Asset Allocator in Chief
- Startup Best Practices 25 - Bounding the Unknown Unknowns
- Managing a User's Trust with Machine Learning SaaS Software
- Benchmarking Cloudera's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Most Important Thing I've Learned about Writing
- Customer Operations - An Idea for Maximizing Efficient Growth in SaaS Companies
- Creating Tension in Your Startup's Marketing Positioning
- When Should You Sell Your Startup?
- Lies Managers Tell Themselves to Avoid Firing Someone
- 5 Charts on the State of the Seed Market in 2017
- The Three Types of SaaS Value Propositions
- The Best Content Marketers in the World
- When to Innovate With Your Sales Process
- A Product Manager's Guide to Moving Up Market
- Startup Best Practices 24 - Marketing Your Product with Novel Framing to Maximize Sales Success
- We are Lent into Each Other's Keeping
- The Narrowing of SaaS Valuations
- Psychology for SaaS Startups
- Startup Best Practices 23 - Leveraging The Illusion of Explanatory Depth in Interviews
- Three Strategies for Engendering Negative Net Churn in Your SaaS Startup
- Benchmarking Mulesoft S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- How to Improve Your Decision Making by Learning from Computers
- How Machine Learning Can Benefit Your SaaS Startup
- One of the Hardest Things to Do in Sales
- Announcing our Investment in Chorus
- Against All Odds in Startupland
- Modesty, First Principles and Opportunities for Startups
- Which to Prioritize - Churn or Growth?
- How Much Money Should I Raise for My Startup?
- The Software Startup Sectors Raising the Most Capital in 2017
- The Biggest M&A Multiple in Software History
- Is Machine Learning Overhyped?
- One of the Greatest Entrepreneurial Stories Ever Told
- Using Chat in Content Marketing - Observations Several Months In
- The $100M ARR Customer
- What I Learned from Complete Burnout at Work
- How Does Your Startup's Management Spend its Time?
- Which Round Will Be the Hardest to Raise in 2017?
- Benchmarking AppDynamics S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
2016 134 posts
- The Top 6 Posts of 2016
- Just How Global is the SaaS Startup Phenomenon?
- When to Increase Your SaaS Startup's Burn
- When is the Right Time for Your SaaS Startup to Train its Sales People?
- What is Your SaaS Startup Worth in an Acquisition?
- Implications of Monoclouds for as-a-Service Startups - Why Differentiation Matters More than Ever
- Winning with Data Available on Audible
- The Important SaaS Accounting Changes Coming in 2017
- How Much to Compensate SaaS Sales Teams for New Sales, Renewals and Expansions
- How Should You Allocate Your Startup's OpEx between Sales and Engineering?
- How to Create Competitive Advantage for Your Startup with Proxy Metrics
- What Percentage of Revenue Should SaaS Startups Spend on Payroll?
- The Customer Support Experience of the Future
- How to Build Auction Pressure in Acquisitions and Financings
- Trends in Early Stage SaaS Fundraising Market of 2016
- The Limitations of Data and Benchmarks
- Task List Zero - When Inbox Zero Isn't Enough
- Why Demand Generation Can Be So Challenging For Startups
- Your Startup's Competitive Advantage
- What is the Optimal Contract Length for Your SaaS Startup?
- The Challenge Facing Deep-Learning Powered Startups
- How Big is a Typical Software Company Acquisition?
- What Can You Remove from Your Product?
- The Characteristics of the Most Attractive SMB SaaS Companies
- Are SMB SaaS Companies Valued Differently than Mid-Market SaaS Businesses?
- What's the Maximum Rate of Growth for Your SaaS Startup with Paid Customer Acquisition?
- The Pressure to Move Up Market Facing SMB SaaS Startups
- Startups as a Second Language
- How Should I Think About My SaaS Startup's Burn Rate
- Startup Best Practices 22 - Explicit Risk Bundles and Mitigations
- Designing a Sales Quota Structure at the Earliest Stages of a SaaS Startup
- How Much is Your SaaS Startup Worth?
- 3 Marketing Insights from a World Class SaaS Marketer
- A Breakthrough in Human Computer Interaction
- Success Has 1000 Fathers and Failure is an Orphan
- Why Understanding Startup History is a Competitive Advantage
- The Resurgence in Public Market SaaS Valuations
- Event Driven SaaS - The Workflow of the Future
- The Biggest Areas of Underinvestment in SaaS Sales Teams
- The Clandestine Statisticians Who Changed the Course of the War
- Median Startup Valuations and Down Rounds in 2016
- Fighting and Leveraging Inertia in Sales
- The Most Successful SMB SaaS Acquisition Channel Ever Built
- A Structural Pricing Competitive Advantage in SaaS - The Three Part Tariff
- The Quirky M&A Environment for SaaS Companies in 2016
- How Fast Does a SaaS Startup Have to Grow to Survive?
- Which of the Three Software Budgets Does Your SaaS Startup Target?
- The Smallest ACV to Justify an Inside Sales Team at a SaaS Startup
- Flux in the Fundraising Market
- Learning to Code in a Whole New Way
- Dream Teams: The Characteristics of Billion-Dollar Startup Founders
- The Increasing Costs of Real Estate for Startups in San Francisco
- The Next Big Shift in SaaS
- How Healthy is the SaaS IPO Market?
- You're in the Business of Selling Promotions
- The Two Ingredients of Mastery
- How Many Inboxes Do You Have?
- The Decline of New SaaS Company Formation
- The Four Factors to Consider When Developing Your Startup's Pricing Strategy
- Mitigating Myopia in SaaS Marketing
- The Impact to Startups of the LinkedIn Acquisition
- The Key Ingredient to Disrupting with Machine Learning
- Subverting Systems of Record with Chat Bots
- When to Scale Sales for Your SaaS Startup
- The Beginning of Consolidation in SaaS
- Comparing Two Ways to Build a SaaS Sales Team
- Start with the Premise that Everything is Noise
- The 3 Types of Channel Strategies for SaaS Startups
- What Average Contract Value is Best for a SaaS Company
- The Decentralization of Venture Capital
- Is A/B Testing A Good Idea for SaaS Startups?
- The Leading Predictor of Series A Valuation for SaaS Companies
- Are You Spending Enough Time on Your Startup's Go To Market?
- SaaS Companies Are Changing their Growth Strategies
- The Rising Importance of Reseller Channels in SaaS
- A Key Moment in Time for Vertical SaaS Startups
- Is the 2016 Economy a Risk to SaaS Companies?
- Land, Expand, Retain
- Five Charts on the State of the Early Stage SaaS Market in 2016
- The Secret of Exceptional Teams
- There are Only 3 Pricing Strategies for Your Startup
- Just How Far Along Are We In SaaS?
- Have VCs Changed Their Seed Investment Strategies?
- Party Rounds in Seeds - Just Getting Started or Has the Clock Struck Midnight?
- Five Questions About The Future of Chatbots
- All New Ideas are Combinations of Old Ideas
- Inside-Outside-Bias in Startups
- The Optimal Seed Round Strategy - Timing and Size
- The Future of Machine Intelligence
- Inflation and Deflation in the Startup Fundraising Market
- Q1 2016 Startup Investment Trends
- Winning with Data
- The Craft of Management
- The Equation that Governs Your Sales Team's Effectiveness
- Seizing the User's Point of Maximum Intent
- Startup Best Practices 22 - Using Scenario Planning for Strategic Decisions
- Your Customer's Top 3 Priorities
- Disruptive Innovation in SaaS by Competing with Non-Consumption
- The Future of Collaboration - Instant Data
- In Every Great Product There's a Bit of Magic
- From Modest Roots to $10.7T in Market Cap
- A Technology Innovation Leading to a Go-To-Market Advantage
- Authenticity in Leadership
- The Strategic Shift in Revenue for SaaS Startups as They Scale
- What's Really Happening in the US Venture Fundraising Market in Early 2016
- Resilience and Telos in Entrepreneurs
- The Startup Office of the Future
- What Pricing Implies About Product Market Fit for Startups
- Not All Revenue Dollars Are Created Equal
- Benchmarking Exceptional Series A SaaS Companies
- Hacking Your To Do List with Your Calendar
- The Impact of a Changing Venture Environment on Startup Fundraising Terms
- SaaS Office Hours in New York - A Q&A on the State of the SaaS Market
- The Power of Open Source to Solve the Data Fragmentation Challenge
- Venture Debt for SaaS Startups
- The Other Payback Period that Matters in SaaS
- How to Become Profitable Faster in SaaS
- Mr. Market and the SaaS World
- The 57% Drop in SaaS Valuations
- The Nature of Leverage in Fundraising Conversations Has Changed
- With Smart Software, Sell Ironman Not Robocop
- The 12 Things I Know About You
- Chained Probabilities in Startup Business Models
- The Question to Ask Before Starting a Company in 2016
- The New UI for SaaS - The Question
- 3 Questions for Startups to Answer for Themselves in a Volatile Fundraising Environment
- When Data Confounds Our Intuition
- The Metric that Matters for Startups in 2016
- The Downward Pressure of Public Markets on Startup Valuations
- The State of the Startup Fundraising Market in 2016
- How Your Startup's Org Chart Changes Your Product
- How Many Funnels Does Your Startup's Product Have?
- When Startup Compensation Isn't About the Money
- The Hottest Startup Sectors in 2016
2015 159 posts
- A Rich Library of User Onboarding Analysis
- Is Now a Good Time to Start a Company?
- Building the Machine - Organizational Design in Startups
- Are You Present?
- Steady and Persistent Growth to $5.5B in Market Cap - The Ultimate Software Company
- Pricing for SaaS Enabled Marketplaces - When to Go Free
- A Framework to Maximize Your Startup's Hiring Success
- Startup Best Practices 21 - Your Startup's Recruiting Scorecard
- The Tech Press Cycle and Unicorns
- The Biggest Buyers of Software Companies in 2016
- Startup Best Practices 20 - Managing Oneself
- SaaS Office Hours with Maia Josebachvilli on Strategic and Tactical Recruiting Metrics
- 4 Lessons For SaaS Startups From Optimizely's Early Days
- The Right Kind of Mania
- How Much Cash Should Your SaaS Startup Burn?
- Benchmarking Atlassian's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- 2015 Software Startup IPOs and M&A - What Does the Data Imply for 2016?
- SaaS Office Hours at Redpoint with Pete Koomen
- 3 Go-to-Market Insights from Kenny van Zant at SaaS Office Hours
- What is the Optimal Quick Ratio for Your SaaS Startup?
- The Next Major Technology to Shape SaaS
- What Quota Attainment Reveals About Your SaaS Startup's Go to Market
- The Most Transformational Force in US Society
- Startup Best Practices 19 - Recognizing the Breaking Points of Your Startup's Management Structure
- SaaS Office Hours with Kenny van Zant
- Five Words of Wisdom from SaaS Office Hours with Bill Macaitis
- How Much Should You Pay Your SaaS Startup's Sales People?
- Using Vaporware to Validate a Product Idea and Generate Demand for Your Startup
- 5 Mistakes SaaS Startups Often Make with Pricing
- The Turbulence in Startupland
- Startup Best Practices 18 - Collaborating with Your Customer During Your Sales Process
- 8 Customer Discovery Questions to Validate Product Market Fit for Your Startup
- SaaS Office Hours at Redpoint with Bill Macaitis
- The Essential Go To Market Math for Beating Your SaaS Startup's Growth Targets
- The Indicators of True, Strong Customer Demand for a SaaS Product
- Startup Best Practices 17 - Strategic Planning Using Your Startup's Fundamental Equation
- What 10x More Seed Capital Means for Founders
- Data Network Effects in SaaS Enabled Marketplaces
- Data Design Patterns - The Building Blocks of a Data Driven Culture
- The Importance of Payback Period for SaaS Startups
- Do Vertical SaaS Companies Benefit from Higher Sales Efficiency?
- Vertical SaaS Startups Require Different Go To Market than Horizontal SaaS Companies
- Why Skillful Fundraising is a Huge Competitive Advantage
- Why Bottoms Up Selling is a Fundamental Shift in SaaS
- Four Important Data Points about Purchasing Behavior in SaaS
- What SaaS Startups Miss in User Onboarding
- The Impact of the Stock Market on SaaS Valuations in 2015
- Startup Trends from YCombinator's Demo Day
- The Number One Objection in the Sales Funnel
- The 3 Ways Culture Enables Startups to Scale
- Lessons from the 8 Great CEOs
- Startup Best Practices 16 - Option Pool Planning
- The Magic of Email Snooze
- The Implications of Raising a High-Priced Round
- Why Startups Are Growing Faster Today than Ever Before
- How the Changes in UX Assumptions Create Opportunities for Startups
- When Do SaaS Startups Hire Their First VP of Sales
- Benchmarking Netsuite's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- What's Really Happening in the World of Bitcoin Investment
- If You Chase Two Rabbits...
- Why Consumer Startups Dominate the Megaround Market
- We Must Strive to be Ourselves
- The Best Goal Setting Frameworks
- Take Your Startup to the Limit
- How Similar is the Fundraising Environment Today to 2000?
- At Some Point, You Have to Move Out of Your Parent's Basement
- The Fastest Growing Areas of Startup Investment in 2015
- Startup Best Practices 15 - Start With the Why
- Startup Investment Trends in 2015
- The Most Successful SaaS Sectors
- The Increasing Fragmentation of SaaS
- Five Charts on the Second Seed Market
- Trends In Startup Acquisition Market in 2015
- Three Data Points on Email List Unsubscribe Patterns
- Startup Best Practices 14 - Slash and Burn Your Calendar
- The Beauty of Bottoms Up SaaS Businesses
- The Impact of Interest Rates on Startup Fundraising
- Which Open Source License Should Your Project Use if You Want to Raise Venture Capital?
- The Early Winners in the Consumer Hardware Wave
- The Disruptive Effect of Open Source Startups
- Startup Best Practices 13 - Patience with Unit Economics
- Startup Best Practices 12 - Customer Success Compensation
- How an $11B SaaS Company Measures Churn
- Benchmarking ServiceNow's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Expanding Role of Marketing in SaaS Companies
- Why We're Only Just at the Beginning of SaaS
- Welcome, Mina!
- Unpacking the Deep Diagnostic Value of LTV/CAC for SaaS Startups
- Startup Best Practices 11 - The 9 Box Matrix Talent Model
- When Should Your SaaS Startup Offer Professional Services
- The Health of the SaaS IPO Market
- Should You Take Cash or Stock to Sell Your Startup?
- The Risk Sales Discounts Impose to Startup Burn Rates
- A Very Unusual Book about Startup Culture
- The First Generation of the Talent Software Wars
- The 4 Teams Within Customer Success Organizations
- From $800k to $274M in 4 Years - The Story of Ariba
- The Decreasing Follow On Financing Success of Startups
- The First Mobile-Only SaaS Company
- How Great Unit Economics Enables Startups to Weather the Storm - The Story of WebEx
- Startup Best Practices 11 - Practice Negotiations Before the Meeting
- Which is a More Efficient Way to Build a SaaS Startup - Bottoms Up or Top Down?
- What an Acquisition of Salesforce Means for Startups
- How to Make Pretty Charts
- A SaaS History Lesson – The First SaaS Company's Exceptional Journey
- How Important Is It For a SaaS Startup to be Profitable?
- Measuring Bookings, MRR, Revenue and Cash for Your SaaS Startup
- Why the Bubble Question Doesn't Matter
- The Innovator's Solution for SaaS Startups - The Flywheel SaaS Company
- How Faster Sales Cycles Become a Competitive Advantage
- How Many Unicorns Sell Each Year?
- Hacking the Performance Evaluation
- The Gamble of the Private IPO
- The Innovator's Dilemma for SaaS Startups
- Are SaaS Startups Today Worth More than Ten Years Ago?
- Startup Best Practices 10 - Building Your Startup's Institutional Memory
- The Runaway Train of Late Stage Fundraising
- 3 Key Ingredients of a Sales Compensation Plan
- The 5 Key People in a SaaS Sales Process
- The Best Book on Building a SaaS Sales Team
- The SaaS Company that Grew from 0 to 4M Subscribers in 2.5 Years
- The Forces in Tension in the SaaS Fundraising Market
- The 5 Marketing Channels of Great SaaS Companies
- Why Your Startup's Churn Rate Affects Your Company's Ability to Plan Its Future
- The State of the SaaS Fundraising Market
- The Most Important Thing Has Never Been the Numbers
- Sales Funnel Optimization for SaaS Startups
- The Sudden Growth in Series A Round Sizes
- Trends in the Startup Acquihire Market
- The Compounding Returns of Content Marketing
- The Seed Investment Market in 2015
- Modeling Your SaaS Startup's Revenue Growth Effectively
- Creating the Strangely Familiar
- The Three Dimensions of Content Marketing Strategy for Startups
- Challenging Your Customers During Your SaaS Startup's Sales Process
- The Data Behind the Rule of 40%
- The Rising Costs of Scaling a Startup
- A Single Report to Measure the Health of Your Startup's Sales Team
- Why Managing For Progress is So Important
- The Employee Productivity Patterns of Billion Dollar SaaS Companies
- The 4 Types of Customer Success Organizations
- A Simple Tool to Organize, Remember and Deliver Your Important Presentations
- Benchmarks for Employee Stock Based Compensation in SaaS Startups
- Five Things I've Learned about Content Marketing Strategy
- Five Bits of Management Wisdom from Pixar
- Benchmarking Salesforce's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Compression in SaaS Valuations
- The Fundraising Patterns of Unicorn SaaS Companies
- The Characteristics of the Most Successful Teams
- The Increasing Growth Rates of SaaS Companies
- Are SaaS Startups Less Profitable than they Used to Be?
- Benchmarking Xero's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Rising Table Stakes in SaaS
- My 2 Favorite Gadgets from 2014
- The Sales Motions of B2C2B Companies
- Benchmarking LinkedIn's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- B2C2B Startups - Why Selling with Internal Influencers is so Powerful
- 3 Questions about Founders as CEOs in SaaS Companies
- The Sudden Shift in SaaS Product Pricing
2014 180 posts
- A Surprising Source of Traffic for Breakout Content Marketing
- How Customer Success Meaningfully Reduces Cost of Customer Acquisition
- Why the Time to $1B in Valuation for Startups is Decreasing
- The Importance of Segmentation for Your SaaS Startup
- The Concur Acquisition in Context: A SaaS MegaExit
- The Importance of Mindfulness When Managing a Startup
- Benchmarking Box's Updated S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Acquisition Environment for Startups in 2015
- The Technology Sectors that Create the Most Value
- When Will the Tech Bull Market End?
- The 2014 Class of SaaS IPOs
- Brutal Intellectual Honesty
- Nailing Your Startup's Value Proposition
- The Fundamental Unit of SaaS Growth
- How Much Should Your Startup Spend on Customer Account Expansion?
- Why 2015 Will be a Great Year for Startups
- How Important are Professional Services to Your Startup?
- Why Negative Churn is Such a Powerful Growth Mechanism
- Benchmarking New Relic's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- A Unique Chronicle Of A Billion Dollar Company
- Why Your SaaS Startup Needs a VP of Customer Success Sooner Than You Might Think
- The Most Effective Questions to Use When Interviewing Candidates
- Why It's a Great Time to Raise a Seed Round
- The 7 Factors to Consider When Pricing Your Startup's Product
- Why Series A Startup Founder CEO Equity Stakes Have Grown 40% in Five Years
- The Meteoric Acceleration in Series A Valuations
- The Stability of the Current Tech Market
- One of the Best Business Opportunities in the Next Decade
- Four Important Data Points on Measuring Your Startup's Customer Happiness
- The Impact of Investor Geography on Your Seed, Series A and B Check Size
- Using Statements of Work to Accelerate Sales Cycle and Align Sales, Customer Success and Marketing
- The Obscure Economic Idea Behind SaaS Pricing Challenges
- The 9 Marketing Disciplines of Great SaaS Companies
- Why Revenue Isn't the Most Important Financial Metric for Startups
- The Fastest User Interface
- Benchmarking SaaS Startup Efficiency with Revenue per Employee Metrics
- The Four Key Trends of the Startup Acquisition Market
- Benchmarking WorkDay's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Key Financing Attributes of Startups in the Billion Dollar Club
- Why Personas Are Critical Product Development and Go To Market Tools for Startups
- The Unexpected and Uneven Evolution of the Startup Fundraising Market
- Second Seed Rounds: How They Impact a Startup's Ability to Raise a Series A
- Come Work on the Redpoint Software Team!
- The Valuable Startup Equity That's Not Captured in Your Cap Table
- Benchmarking MobileIron's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- How Much Cash Should Your Startup Burn?
- Startup Best Practices 9 - Structuring One on Ones to Maximize Your Team's Success
- The Three Frameworks You Need to Create Powerful Presentations and Tell Compelling Stories
- Benchmarking Tableau's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- What You’re Making Is In A Perpetual State Of Almost Right Up Until The End
- Startup Best Practices 8 -Getting the Most from Your Team By Preventing Burnout
- Benchmarking Veeva's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Innovations Free Compute and Storage Unleash
- A Collection of Uncommon Points of View on Startups
- The Optimal Price to Maximize Sales Efficiency for a SaaS Startup
- Benchmarking Zendesk's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Best Way to Benchmark a SaaS Startup
- Benchmarking Hubspot's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Impact of a Startup's Location on its Acquisition Potential
- Not A Conventional Company
- The Four Kinds of Social Capital that Matter When Building Products
- Benchmarking Consumer and SaaS Companies' Path to IPO
- The Three Most Important Trends in the Seed Fund Raising Market
- Are Tech IPOs Dying?
- The Most Important Investment a Startup Can Make
- Why Customer Success? Why Now?
- 4 Major Competitive Trends in Mobile App Stores
- The B Corporation - A Novel Structure for Mission Driven Startups
- The Challenge Facing Mobile-First SaaS Companies
- What the Public Markets Trends Say About the Fundraising and M&A Environment Startups
- The Secret Ingredient to the Best Startup Fundraising Pitches
- Building a Performant Customer Success Organization
- How to Retain Your Startup's Best Employees
- What Q2 Tech Earnings Reports Say About the State of the Technology Market
- The Best Advice I've Ever Received
- How Much is Your Business Worth?
- The Coming Wave of Venture Capital and What It Means for Your Startup
- Lessons from Interviews of Pre-Eminent VCs in 2000
- How to Maximize Your Organic Twitter Content Marketing Efforts
- Data is Useless Unless You Can Act on It
- One of the Greatest Opportunities to Learn
- Trends in the Startup Acquisition Market
- How Vibrant is the Hardware Startup World?
- An Exceptional Story with Exceptional Data
- The Importance of Hometown Investors for Startups
- The Marketing Math Behind Scaling a SaaS Salesforce
- The Insularity of Silicon Valley
- Why Smart Watches Could be a Huge Trend in Mobile
- The Five Forces Shaping the Fundraising Market
- The Hottest Startup Sectors
- The Disruption Debate is Focused on the Wrong Ideas
- The 3 Minute Technique for Brainstorming Your Startup's Product Roadmap
- The Great Unbundling of Email
- How Much Should Your Startup Spend to Grow?
- The Optimal Seed Round Construction to Maximize Series A Success
- The Impact of VCs in Seed Rounds in Seven Charts
- The Riskiest Investment a Startup Can Make
- The Hidden Costs of the Switching Products in the Consumer Web
- Salesforce's Marketing Secret - The Fourth Marketing P
- The Common Characteristics of Successful Freemium Companies
- The Impact of Varying Sales Hiring Strategies on SaaS Startups
- The Common Language of Great Teams
- The Five Letters that Will Change the Data World: BYOBI
- Confessions of a Perpetual Freeloader: When to Jettison the Freemium Tier
- A Surprisingly Powerful Mechanism for Growing a SaaS Startup
- What's Wrong with the Internet of Things
- How the Fund Raising Market Will Evolve in 2014
- The Workplace of the Future
- The 4 Challenges Facing Customer Success Teams in SaaS Startups
- Ruthlessness and Grit in Startups
- Startup Best Practices 7 - How to Use Andy Grove's Stagger Chart to Build Predictability
- The Worst Time of Year to Raise A Seed Round
- 9 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read
- The Current State of the Consumer Internet Market
- A Framework for Maximizing Startup Marketing Effectiveness
- Surprising Trends in Startup Founder Equity Stakes
- What's Happening to the SaaS Market?
- The Surprising Compensation Trends of Startup Executives
- Quantifying the Cost of a Bad Hire
- Quantifying a SaaS Startup's Revenue at Risk
- How to Determine Which Price is Best for Your SaaS Startup's Product
- The Challenges SaaS Businesses Face Communicating their Financial Health
- The Power of a Coach
- The Investment Patterns of SaaS Companies in Sales and Engineering Over Time
- The Correction in SaaS Company Valuations
- The Great Keyboard Layout Debate
- Do Startups Require Less Capital to Succeed than 10 Years Ago?
- The Financing Trends of Billion Dollar SaaS Companies
- Subscriber Cannibalization and Other Mysteries in Content Marketing
- My Surreal UberX Experience
- Reflections on YCombinator Demo Day: How the Seed Market Has Changed
- Startup Best Practices 6 - Avoiding the Bike Rack Effect
- Benchmarking Box's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
- The Hardest Round to Raise for Startups
- The Machinery of Blogging
- Are VC Mega-Rounds the New Normal?
- How Fast Must a SaaS Startup Grow to Raise a Series A?
- SaaS Startup Balance Sheets: How Much Cash & How Much Debt to Raise
- How Quickly Does a SaaS Startup Have to Grow to Go Public?
- Why There's Never Been a Better Time to Found a SaaS Startup
- The New Market Places
- A Moore's Law for Data
- Great SaaS Companies Focus on Behavior Change
- Do More Competitors in a Sector Decrease Fundraising Success?
- The Four Key Steps in Startup Fund Raising Processes
- The Things You Do Often Create the Things You Believe
- Which Acquirer Pays the Most for Startups?
- Why the WhatsApp Acquisition Changes Everything
- What to Look for When Hiring a Head of Marketing for Your Startup
- The Impact of a Startup's Location on Its Ability to Raise Capital
- How to Combat Inaccurate Data and Faulty Statistics When Making Decisions
- Why Startups Face Increasing Competition in Raising Series As and Bs
- How Your Startup's Sector Affects Your Ability to Raise a Series A
- Using Data to Pick the Optimal Name for Your Startup
- The Minimum Size Seed Round to Maximize Series A Follow On Investment
- Do Larger Seed Rounds Lead to Bigger Series As?
- The Optimal Average Customer Value for SaaS Startups
- Military Strategy Applied to Startups
- The Three Key Forces Shaping SaaS in 2014
- The Technology that's Taking Data Science by Storm
- The Maximum Viable Churn Rate for a Startup
- The Best Times of Year to Raise Capital for Your Startup
- The Go-To-Market Challenges of B2D Companies
- Using Data to Demystify Data Science
- How One Startup's Engineering Team Cut their Engineering Release Times in Half
- What the Nest Acquisition Means for the Internet of Things
- Three Important Trends in the Startup Exit Market
- The Average Value of a Tech Company is Decreasing
- Why Everything I Thought I Knew About Churn Is Wrong
- The Two Key Skill Sets Startups Must Develop To Grow
- Why Quotas Aren't the Most Important Number for Startup Sales Teams
- The Importance of Seasonality in SaaS Startups
- My Thoughts on CES - The Six Trends on the Show Floor
- The Three Doors to SaaS Success
- How Healthy is the Public Technology Market?
- Should Your Startup Adopt a New Management Style?
- Startup Best Practices 5 - Effectiveness, not Productivity
- The consumer forces shaping enterprise innovation
- Frequently Asked Questions
- A Startup’s Step-by-Step Guide to Working with Recruiters
2013 214 posts
- Startup Best Practices 4 - Managing Monkeys
- Revenue per Employee Benchmarks of Billion Dollar Companies
- The 10 Most Important Metrics in a Startup's Financial Statements
- A 47 Year Old Prediction Comes True
- Using Price & Demand Curves to Inform Startup Product Roadmaps
- How Much Does It Cost to Take Your Startup Public?
- The Typical Billion Dollar Startup Acquisition
- What Bitcoin and Internet of Things Startups Have in Common
- The 10 Most Important Metrics in a Startup’s Financial Statements
- How to Hire a Head of Customer Success for Your Startup
- How to Grow Huge: Proprietary Distribution Channels
- Startup Best Practices 3 - How to Structure a Sales and Marketing Team
- The Tablet-First Retail Startup
- The Most Effective Way of Visualizing Funnels
- The Next Big Opportunity in Mobile Advertising
- Startup Best Practices 2 - Startup Team Sizes
- The Language of the Web
- How Much Cash Does Your Startup Need To Go Public?
- This Message Will Self-Destruct in 48 Seconds
- Startup Best Practices 1 - Situational Management
- The Missing Startup Design Pattern
- The Secrets Behind Content Sharing Widgets
- Why the Petal Diagram Isn't the Best Competition Diagram for Startup's Pitch
- The Ratio of Engineers to Sales People in Billion Dollar SaaS Startups
- How I Built a Performant and Measurable Content Marketing Engine
- The First Form of Communication that Changes Depending on Who is Using It
- The Future of Journalism in the Touch Era
- The Single Biggest Determinant of Startup Valuations at IPO
- How Mobile is Disrupting Even the Most Successful Internet Products
- The Most Important Feature In KitKat No One is Talking About
- The Three Churn Mitigation Strategies of SaaS Startups
- Quick and Dirty Product/Market Fit Validation: Can You Hit Your Quota?
- The Unexpected Compensation Trends of Post-Series A Startup Founder/CEOs
- Dream Teams: The Characteristics Of Billion-Dollar Startup Founders
- The Internet Subscription Startup is Winning
- Anticipatory Commerce: the Evolution of Intent on the Web
- A Startup's Rosetta Stone - How to Succinctly Communicate the Details of a Business
- The SaaS Valuation Bubble
- What a Dog and a Monkey Taught Me About Management at Google
- Silicon Valley's Library
- Using Gaming Product Hacks to Maximize Freemium SaaS Growth
- How Much Should Your Startup Spend on Managing Churn?
- The Two Characteristics of Seamless Mobile Payment Experiences
- The Optimal Blog Post Length to Maximize Viewership
- Why Customer Success Is An Essential Part of Every SaaS Startup
- Sales Efficiency Benchmarks for SaaS Startups
- The Simplest Brand Health Question For Your Startup
- How APIs Will Evolve
- Using Twitter Recirculation to Maximize Content Marketing Effectiveness
- Deserve is a Toxic Word
- Which of the Five Types of Data Science Does Your Startup Need?
- The 3 Competitive Defenses of Enduring SaaS Companies
- The Single Best Content Marketing Channel for Your Startup
- What Your Startup’s MRR Figure Is Hiding
- The Developer Economy: Power to the Coders
- A Five Year Android User Switches To iOS
- Using The Friend Paradox to Maximize Your Effectiveness at Startup Networking Events
- Sexism, Statistics and Space s How Disruptive Startup Ideas Are Discovered
- Which Half of Your Startup’s Emails Are Wasted?
- How To Take Exceptional Notes and Be Productive with Paper
- Interpreting Cohort Data - The 3 Key Analyses for Measuring Your Startup’s Product Performance
- How Wordpress Used VideoConferencing and IRC to Change the World
- Google F1 and The Cascade of Innovation New Databases Create
- Crossing the People Management Chasm - A Necessity of Startup Growth
- Six Key Benchmarks for Your SaaS Startup
- The VC Firm of the Future
- The One Best Metric for Your Startup to Maximize
- The Best Content Marketing Campaign in the Last Year - Do VC Blogs Actually Lead to Investments?
- You’re Not Finished Selling Until You Change Your Customers Habits
- Not Sharing the Opportunity to Learn is a Cardinal Sin
- How Web Development Techniques Are Infiltrating Mobile Apps
- The Part They Don’t Tell You About Startup Team Building
- Mobile Social Networks: The New Customer Acquisition Powerhouse
- The Series A Is Overloaded
- The Sales and Marketing Spend Strategies of Billion Dollar SaaS Companies
- Analyzing Twitter Ad Performance for the Last 9 Months
- Marketing’s Technical Liberation
- The Fundamental Challenge of Your Startup’s First Hire: Leading and Learning at the Same Time
- Choosing a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Startup
- Your Startup’s Three Horizons
- The Seed Investment Patterns of Billion Dollar Startups,w
- The Seed Investment Patterns of Billion Dollar Startups
- The Founder’s Null Hypothesis
- Announcing Redpoint’s $16M Series A Investment in Looker
- Cohort Analysis for Startups - Six Summary Reports to Understand Your Customer Base (With Code)
- Anticipatory Computing - The Next Big Thing Is Enabling Laziness
- Great Startup Product Design Is Telepathic
- The 3 Different Strategies of Venture Funds
- Community Marketing: Starting A Movement For Your Product
- Maximizing the Value of Investor Referrals
- How CrowdFunding Embodies Amazon’s Product Management Process
- Why Support Software Is the Future of Work Email
- Framing Your Startup’s Sales Pitch: Focus on Value, Not on Cost
- Product Market Engagement: The Missing Step in Lean Startup Methodology
- Product Market Engagement: The Missing Step in Lean Startup Methodology
- Your Startup’s Office Is Missing a Room
- The Three Phases of Startup Sales
- The Five Characteristics of An Ideal SaaS Company
- Data, Data Everywhere, Not a Second to Think
- Why Starting a Company Is Completely Irrational
- Peak Smart Phone - What Happens to the App Economy When Smartphone Penetration Reaches 100%?
- The Compounding Returns of Content Marketing - The Data Behind Why Persistence Pays Off in Blogging
- Throwing in the Towel on Google’s Go: What Programming Taught Me About Sales
- The Startup Sector That’s Quietly Booming
- The First Rails App I Built at Google
- How to Analyze Your Startup Like A VC in 15 Minutes Or Less
- Debunking the Myths of Social, Viral and Community
- Debunking the Myths of Social, Viral and Community
- It’s Time to Start Worrying About the Next Round for Your Startup
- A Formula For Innovation
- Piecing Together A Quilted Social Network: Does M&A Work for Social Nets?
- The Return of Venture Backed Hardware
- The Library in Building 42
- The Most Effective Price Discovery Question for Your Startup
- Why PRISM May Herald a New Golden Age for P2P
- The Bewildered User at the Center of the Legal Firestorm
- The Most Under-Appreciated Startup Team Member
- The Dawn of the Voice-to-Text Era
- Why You Should Be Measuring Time To Utility For Your Product
- The Data Behind Why Google’s Play Is So Much Harder For Startups To Crack Than the iOS App Store
- Elon Musk’s Genius: Understanding the Cost of a Screw and the Value of a Photo
- Block and Tackle Product Marketing
- Startup Pricing - How to Manage Channel Conflict
- A Startup’s Guide to Maximizing Last Mover Advantage
- Antagonism is the Heart of the Consumerization of IT Movement
- Investing in the Consumer Web is Dead
- You Shouldn’t Start an Ad Tech Company, But If You Do…
- The Future of Human Data Interaction
- Coding and Cooking: The Connection between Jacques Pepin and Database Migrations
- Social Network Alchemy: The Five Ways of Turning Users Into Gold
- Your Startup’s API Could be Its Disruptor
- Redpoint is Hiring a Consumer Analyst
- How Will I Enable Greatness Today?
- The Greatest Challenge to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is Unbundling
- Reverse Engineering Your Startup’s Success
- Three Counterintuitive Points about SMB SaaS
- Hiring Your Startup’s First Salesperson
- The Secret to Growth Hacking
- What Today’s Revolution in Publishing is Missing
- The Antidote to Burnout is Progress
- Building Content Strategy by Segmenting and Analyzing Twitter Followers
- Design’s New Frontier: The IRL Era
- Out of My Depth
- The Twitter Game, Google’s Bin and Other Force Multipliers
- Activity Based Pricing - When Is It The Right Choice for Your Startup?
- The Android-First Social Network
- Mastering Feedback Loops in Startups
- The Defining Characteristics of Successful SMB SaaS Startups
- The Two Key Ingredients in Great Connected Consumer Products
- Founders, Equip Your Champions
- Here’s to the Grinders
- How To Price and Sell Your Startup’s Product
- Startup Judo - The Secret You Should Know Before Starting a Company
- A Startup’s Three Visions
- The Power of Team Work in Startups
- Anatomy of a Reference Check
- What I’ve Learned about Blogging in 3 Years
- Breaking Down a Typical VC/Startup Diligence Process
- Your Startup’s Top 3 Priorities
- The 7 Questions A Startup Should Answer in their Fund Raising Pitch
- The 11 Risks VCs Evaluate
- How to Align Founder and VC Incentives - Why Fund Size Matters
- Your Startup’s 10 Most Important Metrics
- Why Freemium Negates The Leaky Bucket Myth
- Mobile Productivity for Normal People
- Why the File System Wars Will Trigger a Wave of Consumer M&A
- The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
- Which Data Biases Challenge Your Startup?
- Measuring Dark Social Using Google Analytics
- A Startup’s Guide to Outsourcing
- Social Proof - The Most Formidable Force Driving Content
- Why Branding Is the Next Essential Startup Competency
- Machine Learning in Consumer Products
- Strikes and Gutters
- How To Measure the Success of a Blog
- Crafting a Pricing Plan to Maximize Freemium Growth
- Crawling - The Most Underrated Hack
- Searching for Eric Schmidt
- A Letter to the Editor
- Boiling a Billion Frogs
- The Relationship Between Margins and Acquisition Prices
- Every Damn Day
- Matching Marketing Tactics to The Sales Funnel
- The Five Key Dynamics of the Seed Market in 2013
- What SaaS Businesses Can Learn from the News Industry
- How Competition Strengthens Startups
- Building A Money Machine
- Salesforce’s Disruptor Won’t Be A CRM Company
- There’s A 10x Hidden In That Tweet
- The Voice of the People is Data
- Why Humility is Essential for Every New Startup Hire
- Freemium Businesses Switch the Hunter and Farmer Sales Roles
- The Religious Debate About Data
- Valuations in the Series A and Series B Market are Booming
- How to Optimize Every Decision in Your Life and Accomplish Nothing
- The Most Important Principle of Start Up Fund Raising
- The Power of Market Places
- What I Learned From a Two-Year Fund Raising Process
- The Cost of Bad Data is the Illusion of Knowledge
- The Failure Fetish Fallacy: Learning is at the Core of Startup Land
- Discovering, Honing and Exploiting Your Startup’s Strengths
- The biggest professional challenge of my career: communication
- How to nail your product market fit and sales pitch with a value proposition diagram
- Why To Do Lists Are Failing Us
- The product qualified lead (PQL)
- What my high school chemistry class taught me about startups
- How to succeed despite your every effort to fail
- The startup hardware M&A market will be vibrant in 2013
- A CEO’s epitaph
- Observations of the LinkedIn Influencer program
- The new marketers
- To Sell is Human
- We should be living in the future already
- Fundamentals of communication
2012 87 posts
- Year in review: Best of 2012
- Tablets: the third platform
- The myth of the generalist
- Changes in the rules of the [startup] game
- Email and meetings aren’t work
- End of the year startup checklist
- Great startup management teams are built with interlocking parts
- The software customers don’t see
- Performance marketing for startups with R
- It all starts as a hobby
- The one ideal characteristic of your startup’s first customers
- Willing to be misunderstood
- The dumbest guy in the room
- Education sales vs execution sales
- Startup playbook - Reverse-engineering Clay Christens’s market disruptions
- Data on the “seedpocalypse”
- VC consumer investment trends by sector and stage
- VC investment trends in the consumer web
- The cognitive burden of unbundling
- A Startup’s Two Financial Plans - the Board Plan and the Stretch Plan
- Financial planning for startups
- Segmenting customer pipelines
- Great products are like ducks
- The stewards of vision and culture
- Partnerships for startups - Key deal terms
- Incremental Innovation is Just As Powerful as Disruption
- Distribution partnerships for startups
- Honest cultures in startups
- The trinity of product design
- The culture of data science
- The idea factory
- Mobile OS trends in five charts
- A great entrepreneur can come from anywhere
- The challenges facing startups serving K-12 education
- Systems Thinking for Startups
- The future of search
- What to look for when hiring a data scientist
- You want to start a company. Now what?
- Gigabytes under management
- Demo to term sheet in 3 hours
- Great products turn motivation into capability
- No startup is an island - The three ecosystems startups should develop
- Culture is the biggest growth driver for social services
- Data science in freemium businesses
- The value of a patent to a startup
- Faking it + grit + inspiration = ?
- Learning from Amazon’s Startup Judo
- Four lessons for optimizing Twitter
- Entrepreneurship growth: perception vs reality
- Founders, teach your employees statistics
- My approach to building a hiring pipeline
- Sushi, passion, and entrepreneurship
- A six-step framework to make strategic decisions
- Should founders join incubators?
- The startup love affair
- The Heyday of SaaS - quick observations from Dreamforce
- A startup’s transition from product development to growth
- Data isn’t a business model - it’s much more important
- The Secret to SMB SaaS Distribution
- Must startup founders be charismatic?
- Mechanizing business development with social media
- Choosing market segments on customer profitability
- Social network design and urban design
- Profitability and the IPO Market
- Using metrics to build communities
- How the NYTimes avoided disruption
- Building auction pressure in financings
- Death by a thousand small features
- The tension between predictability and creativity
- Consumer investment fatigue
- Simplicity. Quality. Inspiration.
- Radio Ga Ga
- On negotiation
- How much is a social media click worth?
- The most important question a startup can ask
- The Freemium Game Plan
- Segmenting the SaaS Market for Sales
- All Great Managers are Alike
- The Path to Exponential Growth
- Loyalty with a tinge of betrayal
- The 3 Kinds of Startup Metrics
- Facebook’s new feature: your top 7 friends
- Why did Apple’s unwillingness to compromise finally succeed?
- Stories, not sentences
- Are We Investing Enough in Our Managers?
- Defining a Personal API
- Successful SMB SaaS Companies Have a 2 Step Value Proposition