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.
One smart SaaS entrepreneur told me last week he prefers bottoms up businesses to top-down companies because bottoms up sales and marketing efforts enable startups to pursue hundreds of paths into a company. Unlike top down sales processes which offer a startup one shot at closing an account (a meeting with a CEO or VP), for bottoms up products, each employee is a credit-card-carrying-decision-maker.
As the number of total potential buyers expands, so does the universe of sales processes. And because each sales process is targeted to an individual, the sales cycles are much shorter. Combined, these two attributes of bottoms-up sales models permit startups to AB test and iterate their marketing and sales tactics much more quickly. Each experiment in marketing collateral or sales pitch reaches statistical significance in weeks, not months or years.
As Fred Wilson wrote over the weekend, Janet Yellen, the Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), indicated last week that the Fed would likely increase the federal funds rate, which has hovered around zero for the last seven years - since the collapse of Lehman.
In the last 35 years, the federal funds rate has varied from as high as 16% in 1981 to as low as 0.09%. throughout those cycles, venture capital has flourished from a cottage industry into $100B per year asset class. VCs are on track to invest as much capital this year as during the height of the dot com era. But, is there any observable relationship between the federal funds rate and the startup ecosystem?
When deciding to open source software, one of the key questions teams must answer is the license under which they will distribute their software. There are a wide variety of different alternatives. But, the three most common are GPL, Apache and MIT. I was curious if there was any relationship between type of license used by startup commercializing open source software, and their ability to raise capital, and exit.
There’s a “new” $4B startup today. A consumer hardware company called FitBit started trading on the Nasdaq this morning and it’s an impressive success story. We’ve examined the tremendous revenue growth GoPro experienced in a previous post. Impressively, FitBit is growing faster.
As the chart above shows, FitBit grew from $14M to $76M to $271M to $745M in revenue in four years, generating astounding growth rate of 170% per year. Of late, FitBit ’s growth rate has begun to outpace GoPro’s growth rate.
Open Source Software started the movement in the late 1990s. Since then, open source software has transformed the software industry. Today, many infrastructure software startups employ open source strategies to market their software and win dominant market share.
Open source is a disruptive distribution strategy. It allows potential users and buyers of a software to try it, evaluate it, and understand exactly how it works because the source code is freely available. Open source companies market to developers exactly how developers would like to be marketed to - with code.
Financial discipline is a hallmark of great companies. It’s what enables businesses to build exceptional go to market models, weather difficult times, and ultimately succeed. Sometimes, financial discipline in startups is imposed by financial markets, like in 2008 when the total amount of venture capital investment plummeted after Lehman imploded. Other times, financial discipline is imposed by founders and management teams. The tweet above is from Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic, a $1.5B market cap company serving developers, who deliberately raised small arounds at the outset of the company to impose financial discipline on his business. In other words, Lew valued patience with unit economics.