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Public software companies trade on forward revenue multiples. Investors contrast the relative value of one business by comparing the enterprise value divided by forward revenue (sum of the next 12 months’ revenue) of one business to another. Ten years ago, forward multiples remained in a tight band between 5-10x. Today, they span 2-60x+.

This novel dispersion provides us an opportunity to ask some interesting questions.

Let’s cover one today: does the market price efficiently? We know revenue growth rate correlates most with forward multiples. If we divide the forward multiple by the growth rate, we normalize it, which means we can compare them on a pineapples-to-pineapples basis

I’ve been steadily progressing through the excellent books in the Stripe Press catalog. First, I read High Growth Handbook. Most recently, I read An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson. It’s the best book I’ve read on engineering management.

Will has worked at Digg, Uber, Stripe, and is now at Calm and has seen many engineering teams endure and thrive through hypergrowth. The book abstracts out the wisdom of those times into theory abstracted from experience, not just hypothetical ideas. Will extends the concepts of systems thinking into engineering management.

Recently, we welcomed Kimber Lancaster to Office Hours at Redpoint to discuss running successful virtual events. It was a fantastic session in which Kimbre surfaced counterintuitive insights about one of the most critical marketing channels of 2020. Below, I’ve summarized some of my notes from the session.

First, there’s much more crossover between physical and virtual events than most people think.

Join us on Wednesday, October 7th, at 9:30 AM PT, for our next Redpoint Office Hours. [Medha Agarwal(https://www.linkedin.com/in/medhakagarwal/) will host the conversation “Every Company is a Fintech Company” along with special guest Kaz Nejatian, VP & GM of Shopify Financial Solutions (including Shopify Capital). Prior to Shopify, Kaz was the Product Lead for Payments and Billing at Facebook and was the former founder and CEO of Kash, a payment technology company that was acquired in 2017.

High growth software companies are valued based on forward revenue multiples. In other words, to calculate the enterprise value of a business, you multiply the revenue by the forward multiple. But, how does the market set the multiple? What predicts the forward multiple, or correlates with it?

I pulled together the data for the basket of the roughly 60 publicly traded SaaS companies and ran a linear regression to understand the predictive power of the many key metrics reported by public companies.

The Economist ran a story about the future of work this week. Working remotely, we have reduced meeting length by about 15% and increased our total time at work by 2 hours per day. We might declare we have found an extra 10 hours in the workweek from nothing.

This productivity boost might seem universally positive, but there’s a catch. One of the critical topics in many boardrooms today is managing employee burnout. Sheltering-in-place, managing schooling, healthcare for elderly family members are just a few things that have become more difficult. Working longer hours while managing these stressors may compound the exhaustion.

Many companies today pursue a pincer GTM. First, target the individual user and then convince the economic buyer, typically a manager, director, or VP depending on the scale. Two constituents in the sales motion, but only one website raises a conundrum. Who do you serve on the home page?

Technical products often face this two persona quandary. And it surfaces on the website because of the constraint of a single home page.

Where is the SaaS world relative to how far it can go? With valuations of as-a-service companies and all-time highs or close to it, and more and more startups leveraging this model to serve an ever-larger number of consumers, I wondered how much more business is there to capture?

Let’s try to estimate. We do have enough data to get a sense of total as a service penetration. Last year, Zylo published a study suggesting that the average business spends about 10,000 dollars per year on as-a-service (aaS) software.

When a new leader joins a startup, their impact hinges on their ability to build their teams. Whether you manage a team of engineers, a team of regional sales managers, or the company, your first responsibility is to hire and successfully manage the seven people who will form your leadership team.

Managers who hire those seven people - either from talent inside the company or outside the company - will be more effective. Why?

On Tuesday, September 15th at 10 AM PT, Redpoint will welcome Kimbre Lancaster as the next co-host of Office Hours. Kimbre is the former Director of Global Events and Field Marketing at Gremlin where she managed the industry sponsorships program, Gremlin’s produced conferences (Chaos Conf, Failover Conf) and the new remote field program. Prior, she built and scaled the programs at both Split and Scalyr.