Posts

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.

On Wednesday, August 26th at 9 AM Pacific, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Tyler McNally, the VP of Customer Experience at Gainsight. My partner, Jamin Ball, will be leading the discussion. He provides weekly data driven analysis of SaaS companies on his blog Clouded Judgement.

During the presentation, we will cover customer success trends and how they impact early stage B2B SaaS companies, share our point of view on how early-stage customer success drives growth, and provide a “game plan” that focuses on the key things to get right from the get-go.

After I wrote a post on the health of the seed market during COVID, AngelList Venture emailed me saying they observed different patterns in their early-stage data and offered to collaborate. This data set is unique because it records transacted deals on the AngelList platform.

The first post highlighted a 40% reduction in seed investment in Q2 2020 and 42% increase in Series A investment, quarter over quarter. AngelList data shows different patterns.

In 2017, I wrote the post Managers Must be Insane to Brainstorm in Groups. If you’ve been a group meeting for brainstorming, you’ll identify with the three problems reasearchers identified with in-person brainstorms:

1. Only one person can speak at a time.
2. Many people don’t participate and free ride hiding in the back of the room, unengaged.
3. Some attendees are glossophobes: they fear speaking in public. And you’ll resonate with the frustration of this meeting format.

Remote work changes this for brainstorming meetings and collaboration broadly defined. The secret is Google Docs.

In my recent post about the fundraising market during COVID, I wondered aloud about inside rounds. Inside rounds, new financing rounds led by existing investors, have historically been primarily the territory of companies who cannot raise from outside investors at attractive terms. But recently, insiders have been leading the most competitive rounds in their portfolio companies. Or at least, that was my perception.

What does the data say?

Yesterday, Dremio hosted the Subsurface Conference, the first conference on cloud data lakes. More than 5000 people registered, and more than 2500 attended. If one had doubts that cloud data lakes are a strategic area for many in the data ecosystem, those figures should quash them.

I delivered a presentation at the end of the day that I’ll share here. Entitled 5 Data Trends You Should Know, the presentation covers the major trends we observe in the data world. Here’s a quick narrative of the talk.

Marketing has many disciplines. Bill Macaitis counts nine. Gabe Larsen enumerates more. Howeve you may count and divide marketing skills, marketing is the team with the broadest mandate of different techniques to master. To handle this complexity, some startups have split the role under two leaders: a head of product marketing and a head of demand generation.

This organizational pattern isn’t an anomaly. I searched on LinkedIn for VP Demand Generation. 464k results. An identical query for VP Product Marketing yields 1.6m profiles. LinkedIn cannot find companies with both titles, but let’s suppose the overlap is between 10-15%.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my post about US Economic History. I received a torrent of suggestions for books and decided to share them with everyone, in case you’re interested in the subject. I’m going to be working my way through them and just started the book on Keynes. As I learn interesting things, I’ll share them here.

Manias, Panics, and Crashes: history of financial explosions and the importance of credit in crashes.