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 i … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
How large of a seed round should founders raise to maximize their chances of raising a Series A? Smaller seed rounds are simpler and faster to raise because they typically require fewer investors. They may also require less dilution because of the smaller investment size. On the … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, I wrote Californian Dreaming - Is Silicon Valley Still the Best Place to Start a Company, where I analyzed the IPO and M&A trends of venture-backed companies by state. Those metrics are lagging indicators of startup distribution. How will the distribution chang … | Continue reading
So much has happened in the last decade. We’ve seen the rise of massive startups in Europe, South America, China, Israel. Technology entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon. Within the US, there’s much talk of a diaspora out of California and Silicon Valley, particularly with the … | Continue reading
Rewind a decade. Angel investing was an important part of the Startupland ecosystem. Today, you can’t make the same argument. 2018 observed the fewest number of angel-led financing rounds since before 2010. Angels led 156 rounds last year, a figure that collapsed from 714 in 2015 … | Continue reading
Top 10 Learning about Free Trials from Tomasz Tunguz At Saastr yesterday, I presented thetop 10 learnings from the Redpoint Free Trial Survey that we distributed in October. The data confirmed many rules of thumb but also raised some interesting new questions about the best way … | Continue reading
As you start to go to market, there are two things to prioritize from early customers that matter more than cash. Feedback and marketing rights.The feedback matters for obvious reasons. The product is early; customer feedback will help you hew the raw granite of your initial prod … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, the NY Times interviewed a classmate of mine from Dartmouth and fellow oarsman on the freshman crew team, Cal Newport, about his book and his idea, Deep Work. Here’s the crux of the idea: Deep work is my term for the activity of focusing without distraction on a … | Continue reading
Your startup is growing quickly. To hit next year’s target, you may need to hire many people. Where do you start? Bottoms up or top down? Both are viable strategies, but hiring a strong management team at every level provides some key benefits. First, they help you hire more effe … | Continue reading
In their book,It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of 37Signals share how they’ve built and run their very successful company Basecamp. There’s a novel idea in the book: your company is a product used by its employees. [W]hen … | Continue reading
These are my ten favorite books from 2018.The (Mis)Behavior of Markets - Written by Benoit Mandelbrot, the Belgian mathematician who pioneered fractals, this book and theory inspired Naseem Taleb. It’s a powerful book on the uncertain nature of financial turbulence.Creative Selec … | Continue reading
One of the major trends facing SaaS companies today is the rising cost of customer acquisition. Data on this trend has been difficult to find. Fortunately, Patrick at ProfitWell sent me his survey results across about 800 companies. The chart above shows the increasing cost of cu … | Continue reading
Of late, I’ve been having lots of conversations with founders about setting goals. It’s a really important topic for many founders, because it’s the way that management teams align incentives and focus an organization on a few important areas. It’s their focus that enables startu … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, IBM announced the largest software acquisition of Red Hat, an open-source software company, for $35B. It is the largest software acquisition in history, and the third largest technology acquisition (Dell/EMC at $67B and JDS/SDL for $41B were both larger hardware … | Continue reading
Dr. Richard Cook, formerly an associate professor at the University of Chicago, published a paper in 1998 entitled How Complex Systems Fail. In his paper, Dr. Cook lists 18 observations from his research in medicine about failure of complex systems. His insights are directly appl … | Continue reading
The SEC announced last week that it wants to find ways to let Main Street investors access stage private venture companies. This news item underscores an important trend that is reshaping the industry. Today in Startupland, startup access is the scarcest commodity. Everybody want … | Continue reading
Salesforce is worth $113 billion. 1% of $113 billion is $1.13 billion. ServiceNow is worth $34B and Workday is worth $33B. 3% of $33-34B is $1B. Atlassian is worth $20.5B. 5% of $20.5B is $1B. Why am I doing all this simple math you might ask?We have reached a point in SaaS where … | Continue reading
How long should you let a customer use your software before they sign a contract? You could offer them a 7 day free trial. Or 14 or 21 or 30 or 90.Longer trials might be better. The customer could delve deeper into the product, become more committed and sign a larger contract. Sh … | Continue reading
There are three types of product features, a seasoned head of product told me recently. MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. MMRs are minimum market requirements; basic features that every customer expects and demands. Neutralizers mitigate competitive threat. Differentiators … | Continue reading