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On June 24 at 10am Pacific, SaaS Office Hours will hosting be a virtual session. This time, we will be reviewing some of the insights from Redpoint’s 2020 Go To Market Survey.

Nick Giometti and I have been working to prepare the survey results over many weeks. Last week, we published highlights at Saastock. If you’d like to register to attend and submit questions, please fill out the registration here by June 19.

Written materials transform board meetings. With most of us working remotely, many startups have thrown out Google slides and replaced them with Google docs. It’s a fundamental change, and one I hope persists after work returns to the new normal.

Amazon is famous for its narrative process and contempt of slides. The email in which Bezos banishes decks reads:

“The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”

Recently, we welcomed Hollie Wegman to SaaS Office Hours to talk about marketing to developers. It was our first virtual event, and we had hundreds of people attend. Given the success of the format, we are going to continue it.

During our chat, Hollie shared some valuable wisdom from her experience as a marketing leader at Segment, Envoy, Mulesoft, and Salesforce. Here are some of the highlights from the session. The full transcript is here

Earlier this week, I wrote Californian Dreaming - Is Silicon Valley Still the Best Place to Start a Company, where I analyzed the IPO and M&A trends of venture-backed companies by state. Those metrics are lagging indicators of startup distribution. How will the distribution change with time?

While we can’t know the future M&A and IPO of any company in particular, we can try to divine the future by looking at current unicorn distributions.

So much has happened in the last decade. We’ve seen the rise of massive startups in Europe, South America, China, Israel. Technology entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon. Within the US, there’s much talk of a diaspora out of California and Silicon Valley, particularly with the sudden move to remote work catalyzed by the coronavirus. Has the shine rubbed off the Golden State to reveal pyrite?

Over the last ten years, California based startups consistently raise about 35% of the venture capital in the US by round count. In dollar terms, California’s share is a bit higher at 40%. That figure hasn’t changed despite the massive increases in total venture funding from about $10B to $100B in that time frame.

On June 3rd at 10 am, SaaS Office Hours will welcome Hollie Wegman, former CMO at Segment. Hollie has a wealth of experience as a marketer. She’s marketed many iconic companies including Salesforce, Mulesoft, and Envoy.

During our conversation, we’ll talk about how to market technical products to developers, how to scale marketing teams, and how to develop the right portfolio of marketing approaches at every stage of the business. We’ll also answer questions from the audience.

Here are three little puzzles about infinity.

Here’s a short blue line and a red line that is 3x longer than the blue line. Let me show you how there are just as many points in the blue line as there are in the red line.

Let’s make a right triangle with the blue and red lines, and then draw a green line to connect them. I’ll draw a line connecting a point on the blue line to a point on the red line. I can draw an infinite number of lines from the blue line to the red line. Though the red line is three times longer than the blue line, they have an equal number of points.

If the shelter-in-place order were to remain in place for another 12 months, how would you change the way you run your business? Over the past two months, CEOs and founders have managed the turbulence imposed by the coronavirus onto their companies. Most of the time, we’ve implemented short-term plans.

This week, the first companies announced longer-term plans. Twitter empowered employees to work from home forever. Google and Facebook announced work-from-home plans through the end of 2020. I’m sure there will be more announcements of this ilk.

Why is the S&P index “only” down about 15%? Given all the economic turmoil, shouldn’t the index collapse? I was wondering this so I went to the source of all truth on the internet, Reddit. As I read the investing subreddit, I stumbled onto an explanation written by VPride1995 using a simple mental model that illuminated one potential answer.

The discount dividend model states that the value of a stock is the discounted cash flow of all future dividends. Companies pay a dividend to shareholders from profits. Public companies dividend out 30-40% of earnings on average.

In March, I published analysis of the fundraising market in 2008. It showed that the later rounds, the series B and series C were the most impacted. The early data from March 2020 shows a different pattern. Seed and Series A rounds are first to bear the compression in the market. Later rounds are unblemished.

Round volumes in seed have been declining since summer 2018. The same is true for Series A and Series B. Meanwhile, Series Cs are flat to up.