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McKinsey released a study of high growth software companies entitled Grow Fast or Die Slow. One salient conclusion:

If a software company grows at 20% annually, it has a 92 percent chance of ceasing to exist within a few years.

In other words, software companies must grow quickly to survive. Slow growing businesses suffer from the lack of oxygen that fuels growth. Raising money is more expensive. Hiring becomes challenging. Without the capacity to invest capital in growth or the ability to compete for top talent, the slow growth cycle reinforces itself.

Where is the budget to pay for your SaaS startup’s software coming from? There are three possible pockets. First, they are dollars the competitor you displaced used to collect. Second, the company enlarges the current budget to finance the purchase. Third, the company creates a new budget.

Which budget is an important question. The answer informs product, marketing and sales strategy. It’s also a frequent question investors and employee candidates will ask during their respective processes.

What is the smallest price point at which a SaaS startup can justify building an inside sales team? This is a natural question that many SaaS startups raise as they begin to complement bottoms-up, product-led adoption with assisting customers through the sales process.

There are publicly traded SaaS companies at nearly every price point - even very small ones. At IPO, Wix went public with an average annual revenue per customers of $87. Xero at $167; RingCentral $352.

Over the last year, the amount of series A investment in US startups has fallen by nearly 33% from a high of $6 billion to about $4 billion in Q2 2016. Later stage investments have followed a similar path. Curiously, the series B/Expansion stage market has witnessed remarkable resilience, continuing to increase despite volatility.

The last time I learned a new programming language was 2004. I had been writing in Java for about four years, and then I heard whispers of a new framework called Rails that allowed engineers to write web applications in one-tenth the time of a Java web application. Over the course of a few weeks, I bought an armful of paper books, read them, and worked through the examples. A few weeks later, I built my first Rails application and brought it to work at Google.

There’s a perpetual and roaring debate in Startupland about the ideal founding team. Should the ideal team be entirely computer scientists? How important to success is having an MBA/business person? What about the stories of billionaire dropouts?

To answer that question, I’ve aggregated the academic backgrounds of 30 of the top startups of the past few years and analyzed the make up of each of those founding teams.

Above is a chart comparing the number of “billion” dollar startups by the total number of founders and the share of technical founders. The full dataset is here.

In addition to increasing labor costs, startups in San Francisco are facing monotonically increasing real estate prices. JLL the real estate broker shared their data on the average asking rent in San Francisco from 2007 two 2016, year to date. In 2009, the average asking rent was $31.37. In 2016 that number has more than doubled to $73.05, for an average annual increase of just about 13%.

The next big shift in SaaS is an evolution from software as a service as a displacer to a disruptor. Displacement technologies compete with incumbents on the same buying parameters. Disruptive companies change the way a buyer thinks about solving their need. Most SaaS products today are displacers.

SaaS products initially were viewed as a cheaper, often inferior product to their client/server peers. Five or ten years ago, that may have been true. But today, SaaS companies generate upwards of 15% of all the software revenue and are consistently ousting their older competitors.

Salesforce’s initial public offering in 2003 demarcated the beginning of a new era, the era of Software as a Service. In the 13 years that followed, many startups have followed their path to build innovative software that has transformed their respective industries and sectors. The shift has been revolutionary both in software delivery as well as sales. It’s not an understatement to say everything has changed.

On the prospects list of every SaaS startup, you will find a list of company names and next to them a projected dollar amount projecting the potential revenue from closing the deal. Each line item might represent a sale to team, department or the entire company. Regardless, there is a single champion advocating internally for the company to invest in this software product. If the project succeeds, that person will be promoted.