The cash conversion cycle is a key metric for startups, but one that often isn’t talked about until a business hires a CFO. Once a business established product market fit, the cash conversion cycle is a key metric of a company’s cash efficiency - how quickly a company can convert a dollar of investment into a dollar of cash flow.
To calculate the cash conversion cycle for a software company, the formula is
“Would you compare a bootstrapped SaaS company to a seeded company? At what point does the bootstrapped company have to raise if it’s profitable, if ever?” One founder asked me this question recently.
I hesitate to compare and contrast bootstrapped and venture backed businesses, because I’m a venture capitalist and it’s very easy to dismiss any analysis as biased in favor of venture investment. As I’ve said countless times, there are many ways of building a very successful business.
Invest Like the Best is one of my favorite podcasts. Hosted by Patrick O’Shaugnessy, Invest Like the Best profiles investors from many different disciplines. Recently, New York seed investor Jerry Neumann spoke on the show and talked about three key ideas on the technology innovation cycle.
First, he discussed reading Carlota Perez Technological Surge Cycle. I first read Perez’ book after Fred Wilson wrote about it. Jerry describes the theory very well in about 10 minutes. The key idea is each technology cycle lasts 70 years, and is broken into two phases installation and deployment.
At some point in the life of most SaaS companies, the business will be faced with the question, when should we move up market? The strategic question might be catalyzed by increasing cost of customer acquisition in the core SMB segment. Alternatively, a surge of large customers paying for the product might trigger the question. Or account executives might raise it. Whatever the reason, this is a key strategic question.
Moving upmarket is an experiment. It’s a new sales motion. Very few businesses have clear demonstration of success in enterprise sales cycles without effort. The first step in deciding when to move up market is an asset allocation question.
Last week, I wrote about the decline of investments in San Francisco startups. On Hacker News, this post engendered a lengthy conversation on the challenges facing founders and start-up employees in San Francisco. In short, the cost of living in San Francisco and the Bay Area has reached untenable and unacceptable heights for many.
The average one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco costs $3500 per month. That is simply astronomical. It’s 30% more expensive than Manhattan.
Just where is the US venture market relative to the rest of the world? After most US analyses I publish, a few founders in other geographies ask questions about their own. These inquiries made me wonder, how has the global market evolved?
The chart above shows the compound annual growth rate of venture investment rounds A through D in ten fastest growing venture markets plus the US from 2010-2016. The USA is slowest growing market across that six year span at 12% CAGR. Meanwhile, Korea, China and Japan take the top three spots. Brazil, United Arab Emirates, and Ireland follow at four, fix and six.
Tell me three numbers and I can estimate the amount of capital your startup will need to raise. Which figures are those? The startups’ revenue target, the average revenue per customer and the average cost of customer acquisition.
For example, I’d like to estimate the cost for my SaaS startup to reach $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR). My typical customer pays $25k average contract value (ACV) and my cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is $29k. I estimate a 14 month payback, which is the average according to the 2016 PacCrest survey. To calculate CAC, we take the 14 months of payback divide by 12 months and multiply by the ACV. To reach $100M requires 4,000 customers. Each of the 4,000 customers cost on average $29k. This math implies spending $116M to acquire those customers.
During every person’s working life, there comes a time when you have a question that could be answered by having access to the right data. Unfortunately, the time and effort required to find that data, package it the right way, and send it to an analytics or business intelligence tool present a formidable obstacle to answering the question. Two years ago, Redpoint partnered with Dremio to solve this problem. This morning, after an enormous amount of hard work from the team, the company has made its product publicly available.
Bloomberg published a post this weekend called San Francisco’s VC Boom is Over. The article pointed to the seeming collapse in the amount of venture capital raised by San Francisco startups relative to other regions. The slowing of venture investment more broadly across the US serves as a backdrop to San Francisco’s particularly strong correction. I was curious about the drivers of these trends, so I ran my own analysis.
I’ve asked many VPs of Sales the same question. Which is the best book on the fundamentals of selling? Almost unequivocally, they respond, “Miller-Heiman.” The New Strategic Selling is an updated version of the original Strategic Selling, which was published in 1988, and describes the key activities of successful sales people. I resonated with two concepts in the book: the 4 Seller Response Modes and the authors’ recommendations on how to prioritize a salesperson’s time.