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When asked why he took Zendesk public this week, CEO Mikkel Svane replied, “At some point you have to move out of your parent’s basement.” It’s a witty quip with some truth to it. Evolving into a public company is a step for about 25-30 venture backed IT companies per year, and it can be a worthwhile, if strenuous, journey. Zendesk went public in the midst of a 30% reduction in SaaS multiples in the public markets, and the company has continued to perform well.

Earlier this week, we examined the trends in the major categories of startup investment including eCommerce, Software, Social Networking and Education. But which lesser known startup sectors are starting to raise venture dollars? Where are founders finding unique opportunities to innovate?

Bitcoin is the fastest growing sector followed by photo sharing and physical storage (which includes moving and self storage companies). Each year, starting in mid-2012 through mid-2015, these sectors have grown their investment dollars by more than 145%, according to Mattermark data.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” This line from Simon Sinek’s TED talk captures the power of a values based marketing campaign. Simon contrasts feature-based marketing - start with what the company is selling continue to how they do it and finishes with why - to value based campaigns which reverse the story-telling order. Values campaigns start with the why.

Starting with why is a simple but powerful framework for startups to develop a unique marketing message, particularly in a competitive marketplace. Starting with why focuses on values which are difficult to emulate, not features which can be copied. Without question product differentiation matters, but it may not suffice in a world where “Customers, generally speaking, see significantly less difference between us and the competition than we do ourselves. It’s not that they think most suppliers are particularly bad on brand, product, or service. It’s just that [customers] don’t think [suppliers are] particularly different.” Source: CEB

In the last six months, VCs have invested more than $57B according to Mattermark data, which puts 2015 on pace to exceed 2000 as the year the most venture capital will be deployed, ever. Which sectors are benefitting from all these venture dollars?

The chart above contrasts the top 12 sectors receiving venture funding in the US, and plots the relative share of dollars invested by month. The red line indicates the monthly data point, the thin blue line shows a linear regression trend line, and the shadow around the blue line is the area of standard error.

In every sales process for every SaaS startup, there is one ultimate internal champion advocating the purchasing decision. And it’s their budget that will be used to pay for it. So, which departments within customers spend most on SaaS?

One way of looking at this question is to compare the successes of software companies targeting different departments. I have categorized the 50 or so publicly traded SaaS companies by their principal buyer, and tallied the aggregate market caps of those companies above.

According to ChiefMarTec, in 2015 there are 1875 marketing technology companies, up from 947 last year. If the number of marketing software companies is any indication, there is a huge expansion in the number of SaaS companies in almost every segment including sales tools, engineering productivity, finance, and human resources.

This fragmentation trend has been happening for quite some time. In the old model of software procurement, companies would call one of the large software monoliths (Oracle, SAP, IBM, etc) and negotiate an enterprisewide license for a software suite to serve the majority of their departments. These suite offerings promised simplified negotiation and procurement, a single integrated platform with free data interchange across departments, and one point of support. But, this promise was never fulfilled. For example, according to a recent study by Panorama Consulting Solutions, the average ERP implementation requires 16 months to deploy and 20% of them are considered failures.

About two years ago, we examined the new Second Seed, a tactic employed by startups who raise an initial seed round, achieve a set of milestones and raise a second seed round, before raising a series A. During the two years since that analysis, this trend has continued.

In the last 24 months, Second Seeds have grown From 7.5% to 18% of US technology seed rounds, both in number and in dollars invested according to Crunchbase data.

This time last year, I analyzed the state of the startup acquisition market. Two key trends surfaced. First, the larger acquisitions were becoming larger. Second, that the total number of acquisitions in 2014 would achieve a 5 year high. As of mid-2015, the first trend continues while the second seems to have faltered.

The median acquisition price for technology companies in Crunchbase’s data set is plotted above, bucketed by size. For example, the $500M bucket marked in yellow includes all acquisitions between $100M and $500M. Startups haven’t seen any increase in the median value an acquirer pays over the five year period. However, at the top end of the spectrum, companies sold for $500M or more, has increased 40% over the last five years from $1.25B to $1.75B. Premium startups are fetching higher premiums than in recent history.

Ultimately, the goal of most content marketing campaigns is email address capture. When a reader decides to receive content consistently via email, a content marketer knows they’re developing a deeper relationship with that person. Whether the marketers selling software or venture capital, retaining an email address is a victory.

In the last 18 months, this blog has grown its email subscriber list from zero to roughly 8000 subscribers, and lost about 1000, meaning the current distribution list is about 7k. Over the weekend, I tried to understand the general behavior of unsubscribes.

When startups achieve hyper-growth, many of the key internal processes begin to fail under the strain of a newer, larger organization. So they must be reinvented. One of the most important internal processes, but least considered, is scheduling meetings.

As Anne Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Most of us spend our days in meetings. Meetings, like a snowball rolling down a mountain, develop ever greater inertia, roll down a path of their own - different from their initial purpose - and ensnare increasing numbers people as a business grows.