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After a startup attains product market fit and begins to exceed the first breaking point of the startup management structure around 10 employees, it’s time to codify the company’s values. The values of the company are the most concrete way for a business to determine whether candidates might make good employees.

At two separate SaaS Office Hours recently, we heard similar stories from Maia at Greenhouse and Pete at Optimizely. At both Optimizely and Greenhouse, one member of the management team began the values definition process as the company began to scale.

Last night, SaaS Office Hours at Redpoint welcomed Maia Josebachvilli, the VP of People and Strategy of Greenhouse. Maia is a thought leader in human resources. Specifically, she champions a metrics-based approach for developing world class recruiting teams. Because of her position, Maia has observed recruiting patterns in hundreds of companies, and has developed best practices for startups.

Maia reports these five strategic recruiting metrics to the executive team each quarter. These metrics resemble the diagnostics sales teams use to understand their funnel, and provide similar visibility into the efforts and successes of the team.

Just 25 months ago, Aileen Lee coined the term unicorn in her post Welcome to the Unicorn Club and last week the Economist declared these Unicorns “Gored.” Over the span of those two years, the Unicorn press cycle has swung from euphoric apotheosis to bleak nadir.

The rise and fall of unicorns in the press isn’t a unique phenomenon.

A company’s narrative moves like a clock: it starts at midnight, ticking off the hours. The tone and sentiment about how a business is doing move from positive (sunrise, midday) to negative (dusk, darkness). And often the story returns to midnight, rebirth and a new day…

In 2015, startups benefitted from a vibrant fund raising market. In 2016, I believe they will enjoy a very active acquisition environment. The roughly 60 or so publicly traded software companies hold more than $380B in cash and short term investments on their balance sheets. Though Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle possess 75% of that cash, 14 other companies have cash reserves of greater than $500M.

If we examine the M&A activity measured by number of acquisitions announced through November 28, 2015 across the largest 18 businesses, we can see Google and Microsoft have become increasingly acquisitive over the past few years, with Microsoft setting nearly doubling the number of acquisitions since Satya Nadella took the helm as CEO.

It’s the end of the year, time for performance reviews, self-reflection, and planning for next year. In addition to preparing our goals for our teams and our businesses, we should prepare goals for ourselves. Oftentimes, it’s easy to let the company’s ambitions drive our OKRs. But there’s something more to consider.

In 1999, Peter Drucker, the greatest management thinker of the twentieth century, wrote short book called Managing Oneself. In it, he stresses a critical idea:

On December 2, SaaS Office Hours at Redpoint will welcome Maia Josebachvilli, VP of Strategy and People at Greenhouse, a fast growing recruiting software company. Before Greenhouse, Maia founded Urban Escapes, a DC-based startup she sold to LivingSocial. Maia is especially well known for her thought leadership in developing best in class recruiting metrics. She was also selected for Inc’s 30 under 30.

As we learned at SaaS Office Hours with Pete Koomen, after a startup is found product market fit, the company’s most important initiative is building the machine that builds the machine. Maia has developed a series of different strategic and tactical metrics for talent acquisition to help startups develop terrific recruiting funnels and optimize their processes for growing as quickly as possible.

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. Then he joined his co-founder, Dan Siroker, also an APM at Google to found three companies, the last of which is Optimizely.

As Pete shared with us, the idea of Optimizely was borne from a need Dan saw when managing the teams to build Obama’s fundraising websites during his first campaign. Dan and his team wrote code to fine-tune sign-up flows, and the experiments meaningfully improved fundraising performance. During YCombinator, after Pete and Dan had been accepted with a different ecommerce idea, that the two founders jettisoned the first idea and instead pursued the website optimization concept. Famously, they tested the idea by calling two advertising agencies and asking them to pay $1000 a month for early access to a product that didn’t yet exist (but soon would). Now 400 people strong, Optimizely is the leader in A/B Testing.

In 76 years, the British cycling team have recorded only one gold medal. In 2002, pushed by new head coach named Sir Dave Brailsford, the team implemented philosophy of continuous incremental improvement. And the results were astounding.

In the last two Summer Olympics, the British cycling team has won seven of a possible 10 gold medals at each event, a remarkable transformation. But, it wasn’t a 1% improvement on any arbitrary metric. Rather, the team identified the top factors performance, and focused on single-digit improvements in those. There were three: strategy, human performance, and continuous improvement. and the team spent years refining strategy unique to each race, optimizing the diet and training of each athlete, and experimenting, experimenting, experimenting.

As the temperament of the fundraising market shifts, particularly in the later stages, the question of how much a startup should burn will become increasingly important. We’re living in a historic period of very inexpensive venture capital. These cheap dollars have fueled spectacular companies with record-setting growth rates. In such an environment, growth at almost any cost is handsomely rewarded. But we’re observing the ecosystem starting a correction - particularly in the late stage of the market. And so burn rates will matter more and efficient growth will be prized again.

Founded in 2002, the Australian software maker Atlassian is an exceptional company in many regards. But foremost, Atlassian is one of the best examples of flywheel SaaS companies yet. Atlassian counts 1600 employees and sells five products JIRA (bug tracking software), Confluence (project management), HipChat (internal chat/collaboration), BitBucket (code repository) and JIRA Service Desk (help desk software. Yesterday, Atlassian filed their F-1, a document preceding their IPO, and revealed how efficient a software company they have built. In 2015, the company will generate $320M in revenue.