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The fundraising markets have infused more cash into startups in 2015 than in any year since 2001. But, the venture backed IPO markets touched five year lows and whispers of a bubble have become a meme in the past six months. What’s really going on? And should that impact when founders start companies?

No one can time the financial markets. If you can, you should be trading stocks, bonds and options and retiring very soon. The financial markets will rise and fall, and shouldn’t factor heavily into when a founder decides to start a business.

Last week, I was chatting with an old friend who after I told her how busy and ragged I sometimes felt, she asked me, “Are you present?”

To which I immediately replied, “At work?”

And she laughed, and said, “I meant at home, but I have my answer!”

The conversation reminded me of a man at Google named Chade-Meng Tan. In Building 42 of the Mountain View Campus, which is the main building in the center of the headquarters, there used to be a poster on the wall of Chade-Meng with many world leaders including several presidents and the Dalai Lama among others.

As a startup scales and surpasses its first organizational breaking point of 8 employees, it’s time to start thinking about organizational design. The strategy a startup chooses in their market should determine their organizational design.

In the First Round Review profile of Paul Arnold , the Head of Operations at AppDirect, Paul shares the challenges the initial organizational structure created as the company grew 5x in less than a year.

We started building our teams with a simple functional structure: product managers working as a product team, account managers working as an account team, and so forth for engineering, sales, marketing, customer support, QA, and partnerships. But we hit a wall quickly…

The Ultimate Software Company is a $5.5B market cap provider of SaaS Human Capital Management software. Founded in 1996, the company initially sold licensed software and migrated to multi-tenant SaaS in 2002 with a product called UltiPro. Today, more than 82% of revenues are subscription dollars.

The company serves the mid-market and enterprise customers with a broad software suite that includes Payroll, Human Resources Management Software (HRIS), Benefits Management, Time Clock and a Self Service Portal for employees. In addition, Ultimate Software sells a business intelligence product licensed from IBM Cognos. At roughly 2800 customers as of November 2015 and $583M in trailing twelve months’ revenue, Ultimate Software generates about $210k in average revenue per customer, which implies reveune skews toward the enterprise part of the market.

SaaS Enabled Marketplaces employ elegant business models. They are verticalized SaaS companies that manage a marketplace to create winner-take-all market dynamics. SEMs can generate revenue in four ways: charge the buyer and/or supplier a software fee & charge the buyer and/or supplier a marketplace fee. In addition, a startup must determine what rake to charge.

At Redpoint, we’ve invested in more than 15 marketplaces and have evaluated dozens more, including more than 20 SEMs in the past year. Some of these are Free SEMs. So which type of pricing should SEMs pursue? These are the questions we use internally to hypothesize the best pricing models for SEMs.

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.

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: