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In this era, virtual events have replaced IRL events. Virtual events have many obvious benefits. No hotels, no event venues, no catering, no ensuring guests are in the right city at the right time. But there are unanticipated benefits that are only now coming to light.

Many of our portfolio companies have experimented with virtual events quite successfully. We have done the same with our Office Hours program. These are some of the things that we have observed running vevents (may I coin a new word for them?).

I’ve been searching for a book that combined the history, the people, and the emotional roller coaster of US economics. Given all that’s happening, I wondered how events today compare to other times in US history. I’ve spoken to people who lived through stagflation when interest rates were 15%. In history classes at school, I read about the Great Depression and the Roaring 20s. But I still sought the feeling of living it day-to-day.

There’s a relatively new theory of how the government should manage the economy called Modern Monetary Theory. Over the weekend, I read a bit about it. With the impact of the COVID crisis, there are open questions about the best way forward. Should we continue managing the economy as we have since 1940 or change it?

The US government has two primary economic goals: maximize employment and minimize inflation. The more employed Americans, the greater the GDP, the wealthier the country. Too much inflation means your money’s purchasing power decreases with time, which means you need more dollars to buy the same thing.

Cloud Data Lakes are a trend we’ve been excited about for a long time at Redpoint. This modern architecture for data analysis, operational metrics, and machine learning enables companies to process data in new ways.

A cloud data lake is a repository of data in native cloud storage, with the tools and infrastructure to analyze it securely, and with as little data movement as possible. We’re all storing data at increasing rates because every team inside a company needs data to succeed.

It’s been two quarters since the coronavirus has hit Startupland. And you can see the impact of the shutdown in the numbers. We reviewed the data in May and compared it to the effects of the financial crisis in 2008 on startup fundraising.

As a reminder, 2008 saw a 40% reduction in venture dollars invested in startups. It took about six to eight quarters to return to normalcy.

On Wednesday, July 15th at 10 AM PT, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Adam FitzGerald, the VP of Developer Relations at HashiCorp. Prior to HashiCorp Adam was the Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS and held senior positions at Pivotal, VMware, and SpringSource. With two decades of experience, Adam is well-versed in developer evangelism. My partner Astasia Myers will be leading the discussion. She writes often on topics like these on our blog Memory Leak.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the stock market, the economy, and geopolitics, always a dangerous combination. I’ve come across two charts that I have been wondering about.

The first comes from Bloomberg via the BEA. It shows consumer savings rates have catapulted to the highest level ever measured. Meanwhile, consumer spending has fallen in parallel.

Consumer spending in the US accounts for 68% of GDP The question is then: how do consumers change their spending habits over the next quarter?

Yesterday, we shared the Top 10 Learnings from the 2020 Redpoint GTM Survey at SaaS Office Hours. The presentation is embedded below. It contains data on go to market team structure, performance by sales function, marketing spend benchmarks, and customer success priorities.

I want to thank Nick Giometti who parsed and processed the data and taught me (an R user) a lot about python and pandas along the way. Thanks to his work, we have some terrific insights to share. I also want to thank everyone contributed data. The full transcript is here.

This post is part of a series leading up to SaaS Office GTM Edition on June 24 in which we’re reviewing the results of the 2020 Redpoint GTM survey. Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales?

We can derive the table above if we look over the entire respondent base and bucket headcount by ARR. The median startup with between 1-5M in ARR will have 12 engineers, 6 in sales and 3 in marketing.

This post is part of a series leading up to SaaS Office GTM Edition on June 24 in which we’re reviewing the results of the 2020 Redpoint GTM survey. Today, we’re answering the question: how should you structure your sales teams for maximum performance?

First, let’s introduce a concept called span of control. A span of control of 7 means, on average, each manager has seven people reporting to her. I’ve seen teams with spans of control ranging from 1 to more than 40.