When a startup founder shepherds his company to a successful exit (IPO), what are the paydays like? We dove into major tech IPO’s since 2018 to find out. Note that paydays aren’t necessarily what the founders took home at the IPO (shares are usually subject to a 6 month lockup)…

When you finally exit or IPO, will you be the CEO or will someone else be running the company? It’s a great question so we dug into 191 tech IPO’s to figure it out. Specifically, we looked at the CEO at the time of IPO/exit and compared it to the…

We looked at the R&D spend of SaaS companies at IPO and in years prior to answer the question ‘what is the right level of spend on R&D’. The data is below.

Below are some of the things investors say to early stage companies that are just wrong. “Don’t take the first offer you get.” While true, this is a very misleading statement to make to a crowd of early stage founders. It’s wrong to make early stage founders believe they will…

Often we hear founders get excited about strategic investors — corporations making venture investments. Founders think the strategic investor will assist with the product roadmap, become a customer, intro the company to new customers, add credibility, and potentially acquire the company at some point. However, strategic investors have not been…

What is a good rate of new revenue for every dollar of sales and marketing spend in SaaS? We looked at new revenue divided by sales and marketing spend of SaaS companies at the time they went public (“S&M efficiency”). We then compared that figure to the same calculation the…

SaaS Capital, a lender to software businesses, published an excellent research piece which examined the performance of publicly traded SaaS businesses during the 2008/2009 recession. If we’re heading into a recession, the data and observations below provide excellent context as to what could happen. The companies grew. Even during the…

We’ve invested in 23 companies since our founding and we’ve seen some CEO’s use their time much better than others. In our view, below are the tasks a CEO should prioritize. Partnering. One of your priorities should be to build partnerships with bigger companies. The reasons: i) larger partners ultimately…

Below is a continuation of a recent blog post about a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Chris was one of the premiere FBI Hostage Negotiators in the world, and his tactics could be useful for negotiating with customers, vendors, and of course your VC. The original…