We’re gearing up for 2024 SaaStrEuropa.com in London on June 4-5, which will be awesome. 3,500+ of the best in SaaS and Cloud together in London!  See You There! But then comes The Biggest Non-Vendor SaaS Event of the Year! SaaStrAnnual.com 2024 on Sep 10-12 in SF Bay!! 12,000+ of the best founders, CEOs, CTOs, CROs, CMOs and more! 1,000+ Braindates, workshops, and mentorship sessions 800+ of the top VCs in SaaS and Cloud 250+ speakers and sessions Founder-VC matchmaking Awesome networking, parties and more! Don’t just come … bring your whole team! For 20% off HERE until May 1!! Alr ..read more

So there’s one topic you have to be ruthlessly honest about as a founder: are you falling out of product-market fit? The reason you have to be ruthless is while sometimes falling into product-market fit can happen relatively fast, e.g. with a magic feature … falling out takes time. It takes time for customers to churn, especially bigger customers, and especially customers that sign annual deals. It takes time for your brand or even just your mini-brand to stop carrying you into deals. It can take years to truly fall out of product-market fit. Or at least — to truly see it clearly. But ov ..read more

So the #1 OG vertical SaaS leader is Veeva.  A core CRM, data and Cloud platform for the life sciences industry, it started off as a “Salesforce for Pharma” and expanded from there. It raised less than $10m before it IPO’d, and fast forward to day, it’s at $2.5 Billion in ARR, and is very profitable (almost $1B in non-GAAP net income), but growth has slowed to a mature 12%.  Still, Wall Street is good with the combo.  It trades at a stunning $32 Billion market cap. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.  1,432 Customers, But New Logo Count Has Slowed to Just +44 In Past Year Veeva h ..read more

A little while back on LinkedIn and Twitter we put together a list of things that later, once you are successful, even very successful, you’ll regret.  It got a lot of engagement from the SaaS veterans out there, so I thought it would be worth digging in more on each point: Regrets are different than mistakes.  You will make so many mistakes.  We all do.  You learn, you move on. No, regrets are things that especially in recurring revenue companies, you’ll look back and say … well, I knew I should have done that at the time, and it wasn’t crazy hard, and it would have helpe ..read more

Databricks had an incredible scale-up from $400M to $1.5B+ during former VP of Product Nadim Hossain’s time there. The company has gone from 1600 employees to over 5500 and most recently crossed the $2B ARR mark. Now, he shares his top five learnings during his time at Databricks. His role covered about 40% of the engineering roadmap, which was all things Enterprise-focused. Lesson 1: Innovating with First Principles First principles is when you make an assumption about something and then break down that idea into its fundamental parts to find solutions. These are Databrick’s cultural values ..read more

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Craft a Winning Investor Deck for an Early-Stage Startup? Here’s my #1 piece of advice: Get it all down to One Slide.   "How to Create a Compelling Investor Deck: The Power of the First Slide" pic.twitter.com/AyyS7lHATz — SaaStr (@saastr) March 22, 2024 With 6-7 points on that slide.  Not more.  Not using 6 point font. One slide that summarizes the team, the opportunity, the traction, the logos, the vision, the capital requirements, the unit economics. When that one slide is great.  When you’d invest just based on that one slide. Whatever s ..read more

So a little ways back a bit of a Board of Directors soap opera broke out.  The Information broke the story, with Sequoua asking its ex-active partner and leader Mike Moritz to step off the board of key portfolio company Klarna in favor of an active partner, Matthew Miller. What exactly happened we may never know, but clearly it didn’t sit well with the CEO of Klarna or Moritz.  WIthin a few days, Miller was off the board himself, and Moritz stayed put. Now I haven’t been through this exact scenario myself, but I’ve been through and observed board-level investor changes multiple time ..read more

How do you reverse-engineer your first million as a SaaS startup founder? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin chats with Sam Parr on the popular YouTube channel and podcast My First Million about what’s required to make it on the map for a $100M exit and then reverse engineers the steps to get there. To the OG software people who read SaaStr, Jason is “the guy,” Sam says. He’s the person that the founders of Hubspot and companies that make tens of millions of dollars want to learn about software from. For those who aren’t as familiar with our CEO and founder, here’s a highlight reel (as per Sa ..read more

So it’s been a long IPO drought since HashiCorp was the last IPO of the Boom Times in December 2021.  Since then, we’ve had just one — Klaviyo. But now a second SaaS security leader has filed to IPO, Rubrik.   They’re still transitioning from onprem / appliciance model to cloud, which makes some of the metrics a touch confusing. But they are ar $780,000,000+ in ARR, with an 86 NPS and strong revenue growth at 29% overall and 49% in subscriptions (yes, it’s confusing). Is this the new bar to IPO in SaaS?  $500m+ ARR, with ~50% growth? If so, it’s a mighty high bar. 5 Inter ..read more

A few years ago, Harry Glaser sold his company, Periscope Data, for $130M. It was a difficult, punishing, and rewarding experience. At a recent SaaStr Workshop Wednesday, he shared a behind-the-scenes look into what this process looks like and five key takeaways for other founders who are want an inside look the process.  The Journey of Selling Your Startup Harry was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which raised a seed round before finding customers, yet didn’t run out of money before becoming an overnight success 3-4 years later. They grew like crazy when they found product-ma ..read more