Posts

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.

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.

Much has changed in the world since we announced our last early stage fund in 2018, especially in the last several months, as so much of our day-to-day lives have been reshaped by the coronavirus pandemic. We believe it’s more important than ever to back visionary founders, like the many we’ve had the privilege of working with as a firm so far.

We’re both excited and grateful to have the opportunity to continue to partner with early stage entrepreneurs. To that end, we wanted to share that we’ve raised a new $500M early stage fund.

How do you benchmark a sales organization in a time like this? This is one of the questions that Jim Benton, CEO of Chorus.ai, answers every day in his Daily Briefings. Using data across 10m telephone calls, Jim highlights how the coronavirus is changing sales team performance. Here are some of the highlights from my reading.

Cold calls are down 67%, while connect rates have fallen by about 10% since January. Discovery calls are down 24%. It’s curious that volumes have fallen, given the connect rates have seen such a modest decline.

A few weeks ago, I wrote What I Expect in the Next Few Months in Startupland, in which I mentioned two fundamental forces: Bullwhip Effect and Startup Growth Rates. We are seeing the impact on both in full force today.

A quick refresher on the Bullwhip Effect: “The idea is that small changes in retail demand amplify into big swings up the supply chain.” A few readers asked for examples. Today, it’s hard to dodge them. A barrel of oil cost -$7 last week. Electricity in France was better than free, hitting -€20 per megawatt hour. And coincidentally, beer brewers are suffering the effects of overproduction. These are examples of adverse demand shocks: demand disappearing for energy and liquid courage overnight.

If I start a salacious tweetstorm that our local bank is running out of money, that rumor will circulate quickly. Eventually, the rumor will trigger a bank run. By tomorrow, the bank will face insolvency, even though it was business as usual at the bank this morning.

This is the idea behind Narrative Economics. Robert Shiller wrote Narrative Economics, in which he explores how stories impact the economy. In particular, narratives stoked three depressions and recessions in the US in 1920, 1929, and 2008. Shiller, a respected and lauded professor at Yale, models the spread of narratives in these periods using epidemiology.

Among the most useful frameworks I’ve found to manage a company in this era is the 2×2 matrix above. This matrix answers the question: what should the company’s stance be. It also raises the question: when should it change?

One could argue times like these all good opportunities to adopt a defensive posture: focus on product, limit GTM hiring, and modulate burn. A million saved is a million raised.

On the other hand, one could argue, now is a great time to press competitive advantage, win share, and emerge from this epoch stronger for it. Fortune favors the bold.