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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:

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.

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.