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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.

How do you tell if your sales team and marketing team are working well together? There’s a simple diagnostic that I’ve come to use. Compare the slopes of marketing’s lead generation efforts to sales’ bookings trajectory.

The marketing pipeline trend should be the pipeline for this quarter, pipeline that’s available to close (ATC). ATC is a concept I learned from Lambert Billet, the CRO at Looker. It means the prospect will buy this quarter. Sometimes, teams report aggregate pipeline generated, but prospects ready to buy 12 months from now aren’t relevant.

Asana filed their S-1 this week. Asana builds productivity and task management solutions. When they launched, their vision of eliminating email through task management made big waves in the market. Today, the company is a massively successful SaaS business and another example of the flywheel business model that creates demand at the individual user and leverages that interest to sell department and company-wide contracts.

Asana competes with SmartSheet, another publicly traded productivity company. In this analysis, I’ve compared the metrics of the two companies at the time of IPO. Also, I’m trying a new format for these analyses that you might call a baseball card analysis, rather than a series of charts. Let me know which you prefer.

Demand generation limits growth. To scale, a company must find customers in ever larger numbers.

The ideal scenario is one where purely external signals confer a prospect’s propensity to buy. A prospect experiences hypergrowth is perfect example. Massive headcount growth presages large software purchases and expansion. A company anoints a new department head catalyzing change.

The more external the signal of lead quality, the easier the demand generation task will be. External signals are powerful proxy metrics.

Rippling published their fundraising deck. Within it, Adil Syed, (a former Redpoint VC!), introduced a gem of a new metric: month zero cash-on-cash payback. It’s not a metric one sees very often in pitch decks. But it’s another metric to add to the toolkit.

Month Zero Cash-on-Cash Payback is a mouthful. Let’s dub it ZCP for Zero Cash Payback to save us from the more evident but unwieldy MZCoCP.