Posts

In a book called The Outsiders - Eight Unconventional CEOs and their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, the author William Thorndike asks the question, who have been the best CEOs ever? And what metric should be used to gauge them?

Thorndike doesn’t choose Jobs or Welch or Gates. Instead, he selects the 8 CEOs whose company’s share price appreciated the most compared to the S&P 500. While Welch grew GE share price at 20% compounded, he did so when the S&P 500 grew at 14% annually. Great CEOs, he argues, grow their business value in headwinds and tailwinds.

No matter the stage of the business, startups need to manage the size of their Employee Stock Option Pool or ESOP. The ESOP contains the shares set aside by the company for hiring and retaining employees. Like a financial budget, ESOP budgets help a startup plan how to finance its growth.

Most Series A companies create pools of 15-25% of outstanding stock. When a startup is young, the equity has the potential to be quite valuable, but isn’t worth very much at the time. To attract great employees, the startup has to provide large grants.

In a recent First Round Review article, former Google President of Enterprise Apps Dave Girouard voiced the importance of speed in making decisions. “Deciding on when a decision will be made from the start is a profound, powerful change that will speed everything up.” I believe this statement is broadly true, and no where else is it more tangible for me than in managing daily email. After all, what is responding to email other than a thousand decisions?

When we say a startup has raised a big round, we often mean the round is big in two dimensions - total amount invested and valuation. And when we say a big valuation, more precisely we imply the round was priced at a high revenue multiple. A SaaS company that will generate $400M in revenue next year that raises $200M at $1B valuation has raised a big round, but at low valuation-to-revenue multiple of 2.5x. In contrast, most high growth SaaS startups are raising at very high multiples, somewhere between 10-20x forward revenues. What are the implications of raising at a large multiple?

Startups today are growing faster than they have in the past. US VC backed startups in 1998 grew revenue 63% per year on average. In 2014, the median startup grew at 85% CAGR before going public.

More impressively, newer startups must be 5x larger than 15 years ago before going public. In 1998, the median IPO-bound startup reported $11.8M in revenue in their S-1 (inflation adjusted dollars). In 2014, a startup needed $54M. Withthe two venture backed IPOs though August 1, 2015, the trend shows no signs of abatement.

We all build products based on assumptions - assumptions about our users, who they are, how they think, what they expect. When the underlying assumptions underpinning product design no longer holds, new opportunities are created.

Jakob Nielsen, a famed user experience researcher, writes about one such secular dislocation of UX assumptions in the Anti-Mac interface. It’s a post written in 1995 that remains remarkably relevant today. It contemplates all the assumptions underpinning the original Apple software design, and how the old fundamentals no longer apply for users who have grown up with technology. Below, I’ve reproduced all the core Mac UI assumptions from 1995. How many of them changed with the smartphone just ten years later?

The prevailing wisdom for hiring the first VP of Sales is roughly $1M in ARR, or whenever the company has figured out some repeatable sales process. The rationale behind this advice is, at this point, the company needs someone to build recruit, incentivize, coach and manage the team that will grow to acquire more and more business. While that all makes sense, I was curious to see if startups do this in practice, and whether the timing of the VPS differs by ACV.

Founded in 1998, Netsuite is worth about $7.7B, making it the sixth largest SaaS compay behind Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday, ServiceNow and Splunk. Netsuite began developing ERP (enterprise resource planning) tools to help companies manage their finances, expenses and supply chain. Over time, Netsuite has added a few more product lines including ECommerce platform, CRM, business intelligence and a professional services management product. In the last ten years, Netsuite has grown revenue from $18M to $556M. As the company disclosed in their last annual report, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, owns 47.4% of Netsuite common stock, implying the company is strategically important to Oracle.

In response last week’s post on The Fastest Growing Areas of Startup Investment in 2015, in which Bitcoin topped the list, I received many questions about the underlying dynamics of this startup segment. Which regions? Which stages? How much is going into Bitcoin companies. Using Crunchbase data, I analyzed BTC investment patterns over the past 4 years.

The chart above shows that Bitcoin investment started in earnest in 2013. In 2014, total investment spiked to more than $3.5B, and through June 2015 Bitcoin startup have raised more than $4B. This data implies 2015 should be the best year ever for Bitcoin investment.

Founders often ask, when is the right time to expand geographically, add a second product or pursue another customer segment? Most of the time, the answer is not yet, not until the company is quite large, perhaps in the hundreds of employees and the main challenges and questions for the business have been answered well.

When a startup pursues a new major initiative, the company divides all its key teams by two. If speed and focus are the advantages of startups, then this startup has halved its focus and doubled execution time. There are now two marketing messages, two sales pitches, two press strategies, two product and engineering teams. Rationalizing two messages can be a challenge for companies to communicate and customers to internalize. For most small companies’ management teams and employees, this doubling of complexity is overwhelming.