A dollar is a dollar is a dollar, right? Not quite. Not all revenue dollars are created equal, but all gross profit dollars are. Gross profit, not revenue, is the metric companies should be using to compare themselves. Ultimately, gross profits account for more than 55% of the forward multiple of publicly traded SaaS companies after normalizing for revenue growth.
At SaaStr 2016 and SaaS Office Hours in New York, I shared an analysis of the fastest growing SaaS companies over the last 3 years. In particular, I benchmarked the revenue, growth rates and round size characteristics of these businesses at their Series A. I’ve embedded the slides here.
These are the key bullet points from the deck about exceptional SaaS companies. Note: there are two key statistical biases in this analysis: survivorship bias and sample size bias. This analysis considers only a small fraction of the total number of SaaS companies.
Each new year, I try to implement a new productivity hack. Getting Things Done. Bullet Notebook. This year, I’m trying to manage my to do list with my calendar.
I realized a few years ago no arsenal of productivity hacks will prolong the working week, this February’s 29th day notwithstanding. That’s the challenge with to do lists - they lack commitment devices. A commitment device is a “way to change one’s own incentives to make an otherwise empty promise credible.” And what is a task on a list but an empty promise?
Attorneys witness the changes in the fundraising market from a unique vantage point. Consiglieri to startup founders and investors alike, attorneys assist in the negotiation and are privy to the terms of investment. Fenwick & West, one of those law firms, released data this morning detailing the evolution of financing terms for Q4.
I’ve reproduced the most salient difference in Q4 compared to previous periods above. The median growth in startup valuation has fallen from a high of 74% in Q2 2016 to 39% in Q4.
Join me for SaaS Office Hours on February 22 in New York at the Axial headquarters. This is the first time we’ll be hosting SaaS Office Hours on the East Coast, and there will be more to follow.
Given the volatility in the market and the number of inbound questions about the implications, this SaaS Office Hours will be focused on fundraising and the venture capital outlook for 2016.
Most modern data architectures employ many different data stores and processing engines. Hadoop, Cassandra, HBase, Spark, Storm, Phoenix. Data analysts looking to unearth insights within these data stores must move data back and forth between different systems and different data formats. As the number of new open source projects continues to grow geometrically, this data fragmentation is likely to splinter further.
There are several forms of venture debt. Convertible notes are the most common, today. Most startups raise seed rounds using convertible notes. Startups that have substantial working capital requirements often employ lines of credit/revolvers. Last, many startups take out term loans. They borrow money for several years and repay it over time. Venture debt can supply additional capital for a startup to grow at a lower cost of capital than equity. And the difference can be material.
When we discuss payback periods in SaaS, we implicitly mean customer payback periods. How much time does it take for us to recoup the capital outlay we invest in acquiring a new customer? But, there’s a second and equally important payback period – the payback period on hiring a new account executive.
Let’s take a hypothetical SaaS startup that sells a $20k product at a 75% gross margin. Clients pay monthly and commissions are paid monthly. The company hires a new account executive in month 1. The AE has an on-target-earnings (OTE) of $60k base/$60k commission and a quota of $600k. The AE is given 5 months to ramp to full quota: 0% in the first month, 25% the second, 50% in the third, etc.
As the fundraising environment changes, some SaaS companies will look to reach cash flow break even on their existing reserves. Founders may reduce staff, particularly in recruiting or new projects that the company prefers not to finance. But there are three other ways to become profitable that limit reductions in force, enable the company to continue to grow with greater efficiency and increase the value of the company in the process.
Mr. Market is a fictitious character imagined by legendary investor Benjamin Graham in The Intelligent Investor. Graham describes Mr. Market as emotional, irrational, moody - and is in the short run a voting machine, in the long run a weighing machine. It might sound like a children’s story, but Warren Buffett lauded the book as the greatest book ever written on investing. So, has is halving of SaaS multiples the work of irrational Mr. Market or a change from the voting machine to a weighing machine?