Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially founders.

Many entrepreneurs we speak to obsess over what their competitors are doing. While it’s good to know where you are in the market relative to peers, overly concerning yourself with your competition is counter-productive. Below are a few things you should stop doing in regards to competitors:

Stop worrying every time a competitor raises money. Especially if you’re in a new market. A lot of that money your competitor just raised will inevitably go to building the market, which is a positive…

Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially founders.

If you’re not communicating with your investors regularly (at least monthly), you should be. Here’s why:

The more info you share, the fewer questions you’ll answer. I can attest to this personally. At BSV we have a lot of investors and one thing I feared was getting weekly sets of random questions from all of them, crippling my productivity. To prevent this from happening, I share a weekly update with my investors talking about our portfolio, opportunities we’re looking at, the Fund’s…

Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially founders.

eBoys by Randall Stross is a classic. It chronicles the early days of one of the finest venture funds ever: Benchmark. Below are some of the excerpts I found most valuable.

“When Benchmark invested $6.7mm in eBay in 1997, the auction company’s valuation was put at $20 million. By the next spring, the company was valued at more than $21 billion; the value of Benchmark’s stake had grown 100,000 percent in less than two years’ time, making it the Valley’s best performing…

Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially seed to Series C founders.

Sumo Logic recently went public and in case you forgot to read their S1, we summarize it for you below. There are some nice learnings from how Sumo runs their SaaS business.

What Sumo does. “Our Continuous Intelligence Platform enables organizations to automate the collection, ingestion, and analysis of application, infrastructure, security, and IoT data to derive actionable insights within seconds.”

Data is eating the world. “The volume of data is growing at an extraordinary pace, which is…

Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially seed to Series C founders.

JFrog recently went public, so we did a deep dive on their prospectus. In conclusion, they’re a fantastically run company and there are a number of tidbits in their prospectus about how to run your own SaaS company. For instance, having engineers on the CS team, using CS to drive revenue, focusing on product so well that it sells itself with no outbounding, etc. A Our notes are below.

Incredible Stats. 5800 customers, 139% NDR, 98% GDR, 50%…

Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially seed to Series C founders.

Everyone loves recurring revenue and rightly so: it’s far more valuable than one-time revenue to VC and acquirers. But, don’t forsake one-time revenue. Whether it’s for services, onboarding, licensing, or some other one-time event, revenue of this type is still valuable especially at early stages. There are three big reasons:

It’s a Source of Cash. The most obvious reason one-time revenue is valuable is that it’s a source of cash to fund overhead. While a VC or acquirer…

Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially seed to Series C founders.

The economics of a SaaS sales rep can make or break a business. Below are some thoughts to keep in mind regarding your SaaS sales team:

The best SaaS reps sell 4x their pay. The very best reps tend to make 4x their all-in compensation including benefits, but don’t scoff at a rep earning 2x or 3x their pay. So long as the reps are using the leads you give them efficiently and they’re comfortably profitable, keep them.

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Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com, especially seed to Series C founders.

One question I get from entrepreneurs frequently is “so what value are you going to add?” It’s a fair question that should be asked of every VC, and my answer every time is “none”. Don’t get me wrong, I sit on multiple boards and I think every one of the CEO’s of those companies would tell you they appreciate us and we’re accretive. But we’re good at the things every VC should be good at such as M&A…