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Intent to purchase is the engine of the consumer web. Creating and capturing intent motivates almost every dollar invested into ecommerce and advertising. Intent is also the fuel for the Internet’s most successful business model, Google’s AdWords + Search.

As the internet has evolved, so have the ways of creating and capturing intent. From display to search to retargeting to collections, each new technique has leveraged data in a novel form to discover consumers’ wishes. I believe we’re at the beginning of the next wave of mining that intent using anticipatory computing.

Financial statements are the Rosetta Stone for a business. They are the most succinct way of communicating how a business operates to management teams and boards, who weigh the trade-offs of different investments.

In the early stages of the startup, financial statements aren’t used much as a management tool. They are most often used to keep an eye on monthly burn rate. But as companies grow, startups hire leaders to manage marketing and sales and product and engineering. These functional teams require money to achieve their goals. Investments include recruiting, structuring sales quotas, developing software, buying ads, hosting events, or expense accounts to close customers.

In the past 24 months, something extraordinary has happened. The value of publicly traded SaaS companies has grown by 200 to 400% while the underlying customer unit economics of those businesses hasn’t changed.

Below is a chart of the ratio between enterprise value to revenue for two segments of SaaS companies. The All Segment contains 36 publicly traded SaaS companies. The High Fliers comprises the upper half.

At all hands meetings on Tuesday afternoons, our 75 person AdSense Ops team reviewed the most important metrics for the business: top-two box customer satisfaction scores, revenue growth and customer churn.

But unlike every other all hands meeting I attended, these meetings ended with a monkey and a dog. Our director, Kim Malone, would stand up and call for two stuffed animals, first, Whoops the Monkey and Second, Duke the Dog, both of whom employees had carried to the meeting.

When I was a teenager I read a book called Barbarians at the Gate about KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. Two journalists detail the dramatic struggle for power and control of the company between Henry Kravis of KKR and Nabisco’s CEO Ross Johnson. From that point, I was hooked on business history.

In the valley, there’s a massive collection of verbal history that is passed around. There are anecdotes of Google’s early days with a high burn rate, personal chefs, unbending founders and without a business model in sight; the handful of times Netflix had just enough cash to make payroll that week; the tactics and psychology behind LinkedIn Series B pitch deck; the genesis stories of YC starlets

Freemium SaaS and free-to-play games have a lot in common. If you’ve ever harvested crops on Farmville or raised an army in Dragons of Atlantis, you’ve experienced an aspirational product. The same is true if you’ve signed up to use a freemium CRM, expense reporting tool or note taking app.

Freemium SaaS businesses, like free-to-play gaming companies, seek to build a large funnel, extract data from the free users, and leverage that data to increase the conversion and retention of users into long-term paying customers.

It’s an important question and one that arises most often as a SaaS startup scales. Churn, masked by growth, becomes a limiting factor of growth. How much should the business invest in managing churn?

Our SaaS benchmarks from earlier this week tell us the average public SaaS company has a 3% monthly revenue churn or a 2 year lifetime and a sales efficiency of 0.8, which implies a 5 quarter pay back period on cost-of-sales and cost-to-serve.

Paying for an Uber is a breeze. I step out of the car and go on my way. Behind the scenes, Uber has identified me, recorded my fare, added a gratuity, and sent me a digital receipt that I can easily forward to Expensify.

That’s the way I want all my payments to be.

Paying for Uber with a mobile phone is less work than using a credit card, which is the biggest competitor for share of wallet of in-person payments. As one of my partners likes to say, credit cards are fast, convenient and easy. We’re all pretty quick on the draw for our wallets.

Anyone who has ever penned a blog post has asked, how long should this post be to maximize viewership? I’ve often wondered the same thing, particularly in the moment before I click the publish button and broadcast a perhaps-too-short-perhaps-too-long post into the Interwebs.

I’ve written 256 posts in the past 18 months and I sought to understand the impact of word count on every metric I could measure: page views, time on site, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, retweets and favorite activity.

If a typical SaaS business loses about 2 to 3% of their customers each month to churn, the business must grow by at least 27% to 43% annually to maintain the same revenue.

The idea written as an equation:

Revenue Growth = Customers x Avg. Contract Value x (Growth Rate - Churn Rate)

At the beginning of a SaaS startups' life, when the company generates $1M in annual revenue, churn in absolute dollar terms is small, about $300k for the year. This number is particularly easy to write off if the company is growing quickly, perhaps tripling to $3M in revenue next year. Fast forward two or three years to a SaaS company generating $15M per year and churn is now $5M per year. Then two or three years later that number could be $10M or $20M.