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How do you validate an idea for a software startup before the product is built? Last week, a founder of a SaaS business and I were wrestling with this problem. It’s a question without a universal answer. After a while, we came up with quick and dirty rule of thumb for his business. Can he hit his quota?

Suppose this founder wasn’t the founder, but the first inside sales hire for the startup. His annual quota would be around $300k or about $25k per month. He would likely commit to a four month quota ramp, needing to reach of 25% of quota ($6k) in the first month, 50% in the second ($12k) and so on.

There’s a perptual and roaring debate in Startupland about the ideal founding team. Should the ideal team be entirely computer scientists? How important to success is having an MBA/business person? What about the stories of billionaire dropouts?

To answer that question, I’ve aggregated the academic backgrounds of 30 of the top startups of the past few years and analyzed the make up of each of those founding teams.

Above is a chart comparing the number of “billion” dollar startups by the total number of founders and the share of technical founders.

There’s an interesting phenomemon occurring in founder compensation for post-Series A companies: founding CEOs are swapping cash for larger equity stakes in their companies. Founding CEO salaries, post Series A, have fallen by about 24% while founder equity has increased by 32%.

This trend is broad. Each year, Redpoint portfolio companies participate in a compensation survey along with the portfolio companies of about 50 other firms, totaling about 800 startups. A third party pools the data to benchmark compensation trends across the executive functions in startups (CEO, VP of Product, VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, and so on) across the different financing series, locations, development stages and founders vs non-founders.

This week, Netflix announced its US userbase grew to 31M subscribers surpassing HBO for the first time. The magnitude of Netflix’s milestone is hard to overstate. In a bid to compete with Netflix, HBO has partnered with Comcast, which serves 21M subscribers, to trial an Internet-only subscription plus HBO, the first time HBO is available to US consumers without a full cable subscription. It’s a clash of behemoths.

Separately, the NY Times revealed they have amassed more than 700,000 digital subscribers who provide upwards of 20% of circulation revenues and grow about 40% year over year. The data flatly countermands arguments against the paywall when it launched two years ago.

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.