Entrepreneurs are always looking for “Strategic Investors” — corporate VC such as Intel, Verizon, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Cisco, InQTel, etc. The view is that these investors provide not only capital, but also guidance on the product roadmap, engineering/dev resources, critical introductions, and they’re often customers themselves. Demand for strategic investors…

Nicholas Carlson wrote a fantastic book about Yahoo entitled “Marissa Mayer and The Fight to Save Yahoo.” Below I have paraphrased what I found to be valuable sections, verbatim; the full book is definitely worth the read. Allow employs to give feedback, anonymously. The questions were submitted during the week…

Average Contract Value is an important metric in SaaS. If it’s trending up and to the right, it’s a sign that customers are upgrading more than they’re downgrading, the base is getting more “enterprisey”, and you’re really focusing on the ideal customer. However, the last 73 SaaS companies to IPO…

We’ve had the good fortune of learning from and investing in SaaS businesses with excellent customer retention and upsells. Below are some of the key learnings we’ve gathered over time. The Customer Success Team is not the only group in charge of customer success. Preventing churn is everybody’s job, so…

Recently, we got a hold of an investor letter from one of New York’s finest late stage venture funds. The letter shared insights into what the fund looks for in a management team, which resonated with us. Below we share these points, verbatim. We like CEOs that are patient with…

At some point you may have to lay off a chunk of your team to reduce burn, especially now. Large layoffs at a startup are particularly challenging because the team is small, everyone works in the same office or at least closely, and the impact to the culture can be…

We just watched a company go through a very intense, distressed M&A process that fell apart in the final hour. It was an acqui-hire which has its own nuances relative to traditional M&A. Below are some tips to pulling off your own acqui-hire should it come to that. Protect your…

Below are revenue multiples for publicly traded consumer tech companies (B2C). Industries and therefore multiples vary widely. If you’re looking for data on SaaS multiples, that blog came out a week ago.

From time to time, we’ll share our views of what we’re seeing in the market for software venture capital. Below is the latest. The bid-ask spread is very wide. The “bid-ask” is as wide as we’ve ever seen it. The bid is what venture funds are willing to pay for…