If your SaaS startup were to trade in the public markets today, what would it be worth? The true answer is we don’t know, but we can approximate it by comparing it to the other publicly traded SaaS companies and benchmarking the business by its growth rate.
The chart above shows the median multiple of public SaaS companies by growth rate bucket, 25%-49%, 50%-74%, and 75%+ trailing twelve month revenue growth rate. Each color represents a different year.
Jeff Wiss has managed demand generation and corporate marketing for some iconic software companies. MySQL, the most valuable open-source acquisition; Zendesk*, the $3B leader in customer support software; DataStax, The business commercializing Cassandra; and most recently Duo Security*, an Ann Arbor-based trusted access company that has some of the most sensational SaaS metrics I’ve ever seen.
Recently, I had a chance to talk to Jeff and learn about the unique strategies they employ to drive one of the fastest growing and most efficient SaaS companies in the market today. These are three of the insights he shared with me about Duo’s marketing and customer acquisition strategies.
It’s no secret I believe speech is the next input mechanism. We are in the Voice-to-Text Era. I wrote in late 2014 that speech is the fastest user interface, and the newest speech recognition experiments confirm it.
Andrew Ng, a luminary in the world of machine learning, and his teammates at Baidu, Stanford and University of Washington have developed Deep Speech 2, a neural network based speech recognition system. They tested the speech and accuracy of the system and compared it to people typing on their mobile phones.
Success has 1000 fathers and failure is an orphan.
I heard this aphorism in my first year as a venture capitalist having forgotten it. There’s a lot of wisdom to it and I think it’s most applicable when interviewing. I remind myself of the same each time I speak with a candidate for a role.
When I see a sterling resume, I know that I am susceptible to confirmation bias. Top-tier university. Highly competitive first job out of school. Early employee at a unicorn company. All those things are fantastic leading indicators that a candidate might be a wonderful hire or a founder of a new company. Many times those leading indicators do indicate a high performance person. But these markings also reinforce confirmation bias and can contribute to overconfidence in a hiring decision.
I met an entrepreneur last week with an amazing command of technology history. He spoke about the way the Xerox Alto has influenced graphical design over the past forty years. I learned a lot. For this first computer’s monitor has a portrait orientation, not a landscape orientation? His knowledge of history provides him a huge competitive advantage because he understands why things have evolved a certain way and the assumptions that underpinned previous decisions.
In February, public SaaS companies had fallen 57% from their highs. The enterprise value to forward revenue more than halved from 7.7x to 3.3x. This ostensibly random valuation correction has triggered a flurry of consolidation in software, with nearly $70B+ worth of exits year to date in 2016. Over the last six months, however, forward multiples have reverted to the mean.
A senior SaaS executive once told me, “Reports sell software.” In a top down sale, that’s absolutely true. The CEO wants better predictability of bookings so she’ll buy a CRM tool to gather the data. Classically, software has been built for that mantra.
First, a company buys a database. The sales people, marketers or customer care staff continue working as normal. But after the purchase, these teams are burdened with an additional step of updating the database when they’ve finished their work, so a report can be generated.
Sales teams are the tip of the spear for SaaS companies. They close accounts and book the revenue. Many sales teams often find themselves confronting the same issues. Mike Anello and Kane Hochster, two HBS students, researched this topic by surveying more than 30 VPs of Sales. The survey included both rising and seasoned leaders across a range of revenue ranges but with a concentration in earlier stage startups.
They operated from a clandestine apartment in Harlem, a block from Columbia University at 401 West 118th Street. A cell comprising 18 of the most respected American mathematicians and statisticians spirited datasets up the stairs, analyzed them, and stole to Washington DC on military aircraft to present the results of their rumination to the admirals of the Navy and the Marines, the generals of the Army, Marines, and Air Force during the Second World War. Allen Wallis, Director of SRG said of his team, “This was surely the most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized.”
Average Series A valuations have hovered around $15M for the last 9 quarters. Series B rounds have settled into $50M, while Series C rounds have rebounded to $100M. Later stage rounds, however, have fallen by 50% from their high of $400M to just under $200M.
However, in the early stages the frequency of down rounds (e.g., a Series D with a smaller valuation than a Series C) aren’t at historic or even six year highs.