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Pricing is one of the hardest things for startups to get right because there is no universal and constant price optimum. As a SaaS startup’s product evolves and offers more features, the product’s price points should increase. As a sales team or marketing team engages different customer segments, price points may vary wildly. The contract for a F500 should have very different pricing than a startup, because of the stark contrast in the different companies’ willingness to pay and value associated with buying the product. When competitors influence the market place, price points may change. Conferences, seasonality, news events, business development relationships, sales promotions all may impact pricing.

Tien Tzuo, the founder and CEO of Zuora* and former CSO/CMO at Salesforce, knows SaaS businesses better than most. So when he pens an opinion about the subscription economy, a term which I believe he coined, I read it with great interest. Yesterday, Tien wrote “These Numbers Show That Box CEO Aaron Levie Is A Genius”, explaining Box’s business and growth in great detail.

When the meeting first appeared on my calendar, I incredulous at the idea of a management coach. “A business shrink who would sap another hour from my frenetic day,” I thought.

I was a few months into being a product manager at Google and stressed because I was in over my head. Most difficult of all, I lacked any type of formal authority. Google structured its product teams to have authority through influence, not direct management of engineering teams or marketing teams or sales teams. The brilliance of the engineers, marketers and salespeople I worked with amplified this challenge. We were all holding each other to very high standards.

Last week, we proved SaaS startups are raising more than they have in the past and newer SaaS companies seem to be generating more revenue per dollar invested. But do newer SaaS companies actually spend less on sales and engineering than their older counterparts?

In fact, the 2014 cohort of public SaaS companies spend more on sales & marketing and engineering than previous IPO cohorts. But this increased spend results in faster revenue growth and consequent higher revenue.

If you visit Yahoo Finance today, type in the ticker of every SaaS stock, copy and paste the image into a document, you might create a chart that looks like the one above. A cursory glance at the plunging lines in most of these names might send you into a panic, only to tweet in alarm that the bottom is falling out of the SaaS market. Chicken little. Chicken little.

I’ve been following Casey Johnston’s journey on Ars Technica to switch keyboard layouts from the ubiquitous Qwerty layout to the Dvorak layout with great interest and empathy. (part 1 and part2). About six years ago, I went through the same process to learn Dvorak. It took me five tries to succeed.

Judging by the volume and passion of the comments in that series, keyboard layouts are a topic many people are pretty passionate about. I suspect it’s because we’re all trying to eke out a little more each day from ourselves.

Last week, we analyzed the fund raising history of billion dollar SaaS companies and determined SaaS startups are raising nearly twice as much capital as 16 years ago before going public. Given that trend, I wondered if there is there any truth to the idea that startups today require less capital than before to succeed.

To answer that question, I’ve taken the same basket of public SaaS companies and computed a revenue-on-invested-capital (ROIC) across the four 4-year IPO cohorts from 1998-2014. The revenue-on-invested-capital is the revenue at IPO divided by the venture dollars raised pre-IPO, inflation adjusted and measured in 2014 dollars. In other words, the efficiency score marks the number of venture dollars invested to generate one revenue dollar at IPO-time.*

One of the cloud’s great promise has been cost-reduction and for a while, we’ve chanted a mantra that startups require less capital than before to get started and ultimately succeed. As the number of publicly traded SaaS companies has grown with time, it’s possible today to examine whether those statements are proven in the data, at least for those 41 publicly traded companies.

As I’ve described in a previous post, this blog’s goal is to create and sustain relationships with readers across the startup landscape. Tuning the engine is proving much harder than I expected and I suspect that content marketers are facing similar issues.

For example, over the past 18 months I’ve witnessed a halving of RSS subscribers to this blog. They have fallen from about 4,000 to about 2,000. I wasn’t sure what the cause could be, until I compared the RSS data with email subscriber data. The chart above contrasts the two data sets. Clearly, email subscriptions are cannibalizing RSS subscriptions.

Last week, I had a surreal experience with Uber. It was mid-morning on Friday and I pushed a button to request an UberX as I walked out of Sightglass, the coffee shop deep in the South of Market district.

When the car arrived a few minutes later, I got in. Without saying a word, the driver passed me his iPhone. Confused, I looked up from my emails and he mouthed to me, “I am deaf.” I understood and typed in my destination in South Beach into his Google Maps and returned his phone to him. Away we went. A few clicks on my phone later, I found the gesture in sign language for thank you, touching my chin and moving my hand forward. I signed “thank you” as I stepped out of the taxi cab.