This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 8, 2015

'To date, I''ve backed three fashion related companies--Refinery29, chloe + isabel, and Ringly--and now I have the pleasure of joining the syndicate of investors in Bradford Shellhammer ''s new company, Bezar. Could I a less likely candidate for such a portfolio? :). Bezar is where you find people who design the kinds of things that I see in other people''s apartments and stop to pick up, inspect, wonder at and think, "That''s awesome.

venture capital 387

venture capital creativity VC financing 387

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 19, 2015

'Any reader of this blog for a period of time will know that I’ve been long YouTube for years. Along with Greycroft, I was the first institutional investor in Maker Studios (sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion) and am still the largest investor in Mitu Network , the largest online video producer of Latino content. We have made 5 online video investments in total – some we will talk about later this year.

media 357

media networking advice development 357

Berkonomics

JANUARY 29, 2015

'Investors as a group have a common gripe – almost universal. Information flows from the company irregularly, in fact most often when the company is urgently in need of more money. Investment documents usually call for quarterly reporting by the company to the investors. Less than a quarter of companies receiving early stage investment voluntarily fulfill this promise.

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board investing investment entrepreneurs 75

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 29, 2015

Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools startups can employ. Blogs are powerful drivers of awareness and creators of purchasing intent which ultimately lead to new customers, new employees or other new opportunities. This is doubly true as buyers are educating themselves before contacting sales teams to a far greater extent than ever.

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strategy education SaaS opportunity 40

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technology

Derek Sivers

JANUARY 31, 2015

The last time I was in really bad state of mind, I used these five steps to get out of it. I’ve shared this with a few friends in a similar situation, and they said it helped. I hope it works for you too. 1. Ask myself what’s wrong in this very second. Am I in physical pain or danger? No. I’ve got mental pain, but that’s just me imagining things or remembering things.

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energy 40

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 5, 2015

'I love thinking about career paths and how people get from A to B. It''s my favorite thing to teach as well--and I''ll be giving a class at Startup Institute this Tuesday night about it. They''re a career accelerator, which is a pretty neat concept--doing what YC and Techstars do for startups, but for your career. Anyway, 2015 marks a couple of big career anniversaries for me.

startup ecosystem 297

startup ecosystem VC networking venture capital 297

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 24, 2015

'I was waiting for my son’s basketball game to start this morning and with the morning’s emails all drained I turned to Twitter and saw this Tweet from Marshall Kirkpatick. Test: open your twitter stream, look at the 1st item in it, think of something to say in response, say it. Theory: it’s really that simple. — Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 24, 2015.

networking 332

networking media pitching communities 332

Berkonomics

JANUARY 22, 2015

'This is a trick headline. There can be three “whys” or twenty, depending upon the issue and the responses. To make the point, the word “why” has to be one of the more powerful words in a manager’s vocabulary. Asking the question forces the other person to think beyond the usual “what” that generated a response to “why.”. It sure is a way to get to the bottom of an issue.

consulting 97

consulting 97

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 22, 2015

In 2015, SaaS companies trade at a 30% lower multiple of revenue than last year. In early 2014, the typical SaaS company traded at about 9.2x their next-twelve-months of revenue. Since August 2014, that figure has dropped by about 30% to about 6.0x. Almost every public SaaS company has seen multiple compression. Only RealPage, Qualys, NewRelic, ConstantContact and Hortonworks are at highs in 2015 compared to 2014.

SaaS 40

SaaS accelerator investing investment 40

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development

abovethecrowd.com

JANUARY 30, 2015

'“Can you take me Higher? To a place where blind men see . Can you take me Higher? . To a place with golden streets”. — Creed, Higher. In their seminal 1994 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies , Jim Collins and Jerry Poras coined the term BHAG (pronounced BEE-hag) — an acronym that stands for “ B ig H airy A udacious G oal.

transportation 105

transportation leadership energy venture capital 105

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 25, 2015

'Startups in a world of massive markets can be confusing. The law of large numbers, platforms that can make your company blow up unexpectedly and the trendy nature of tech markets can be deceiving. Success for many is ephemeral. I have written about the deceiving nature of early successes before – in particular in the SaaS or B2B world leading to a phenomenon called “shelfware.” If you didn’t read it I recommend it.

sustainability 309

sustainability SaaS disruption venture capital 309

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 22, 2015

'I''m incredibly excited to announce Brooklyn Bridge Ventures'' investment in Plum Print. Plum Print turns your kid''s artwork into buyable merchandise like coffee table books, and soon note cards, framed prints, and calendars. While other apps store art for future printing, Plum Print is different because it doesn''t require large amounts of time for you to do it yourself.

venture capital 289

venture capital disruption pitching ventures 289

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 15, 2015

'Why do startups fail? They run out of money, of course. That''s an oversimplification and actually it''s more the result than the root cause. A lot of times, it comes down to failing to produce results, and enough of them. What I''ve realized recently, though, is that smaller, faster results are key--and it doesn''t always matter whether those results are good or bad.

board 393

board venture capital culture technology 393

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opportunity

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 21, 2015

Figuring out how much capital your startup may need to raise will inform lots of different strategic decisions. A startup’s growth rate is often highly correlated with the amount of capital it can invest in sales and marketing. More customers means more bookings, which means more capital and so on. The chart above shows the cumulative dollars raised across a basket of more than 50 enterprise software companies.

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SaaS enablement sustainability capital 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. There’s a SaaS company on the other side of the world founded nine years ago that is worth $2B, generates $100M in annual revenue and growing 80% year over year.

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SaaS strategy development investing 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 13, 2015

Christoph Janz , one of the best seed stage SaaS investors, published a great tweetstorm on the state of the SaaS ecosystem yesterday. I’ve copied it below. There’s no excuse for not understanding your metrics, for not providing great customer service, for not understanding the role of customer success, for not doing intelligent lifecycle marketing, for not doing great content marketing…What was hard and innovative 5 years ago is #tablestakes now.

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SaaS communities enablement innovation 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 6, 2015

This week, an entrepreneur told me his startup is a B2C2B business. It was the first time I’d heard this acronym, and I thought it was a genius moniker. B2C2B (business-to-consumer-to-business) succinctly captures the critical part of the new customer acquisition model powering many enterprise startups: winning hearts and minds of the intermediate consumer, the employees of a company.

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B2B marketing

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2015

One of the most important forces in SaaS today is the Consumerization of IT. Instead of a centralized IT organization deciding which products to buy, product managers and marketers and engineers and data scientists determine which products they think would serve them best and buy them directly, often using a credit card. This movement is transformative and its impact is immediate.

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SaaS education support enablement 40

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 18, 2015

'I used to love blogging. For me it was always a creative outlet. I love sitting down – often in “one take” like a classic film – and capturing what was on my mind at the moment. What I loved about it was that my thoughts were instantly in the ether, I would get quick feedback from readers and I would know where my ideas stood in the world of ideas.

creativity 305

creativity advice strategy support 305

Berkonomics

JANUARY 15, 2015

'New hires can shore up the weak areas of a business in ways existing employees cannot, if hiring is done to fill true needs. Some employees lose their drive, or remain behind as the company grows, failing to gain the experience or knowledge needed to manage expanded processes or numbers of subordinates. Sometimes, there is just too much work for one person, and a second is needed to continue growth.

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opportunity 75

Berkonomics

JANUARY 8, 2015

'It seems to be a rule, not an exception. The first professional senior manager that an entrepreneur hires to share the growing workload does not last more than a year. Why? Entrepreneurs start businesses with a strong vision of what and how , involved in every process from buying supplies to hiring and directly supervising early employees. The culture of the company is built day by day by those actions, often centering on the founder’s vision and management style with little room for deviati

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leadership culture entrepreneurs founder 70

Speaker: Wayne Spivak - President and Chief Financial Officer of SBA * Consulting LTD, Industry Writer, and Public Speaker

The old adages that "cash is king" and "you can’t spend profits" still hold true today. But however well-known these sayings might be, it requires a change in mindset to properly implement a cash flow management system that predicts your business's runaway as accurately as possible. Key to this new mindset is understanding the difference between the Statement of Cash Flows, a historical look at the source and uses of cash, and the Cash Flow Statement, which uses transaction history and forward-l

financing

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 18, 2015

SaaS startups are growing faster than ever before. Publicly-traded SaaS companies founded from 2008 through 2014 needed 50% less time to reach $50M than their counterparts founded between 1998 and 2005. I stumbled across this trend when looking at a different chart used in my S-1 analyses that compares the time to $50M for each of the 51 or so publicly traded SaaS companies.

SaaS 43

SaaS enablement ventures startup 43

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 15, 2015

We’ve seen a sudden decline in SaaS pricing. In the past 3 years, the median Average Revenue by Customer of SaaS companies going public has dropped by about 70%. But has the shift towards smaller customers, shorter and faster sales cycles created less profitable businesses? Not at all. The chart above shows the gross margin trends of public SaaS companies broken down by their ACV (average customer value).

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SaaS startup development 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 12, 2015

These are my two favorite devices from 2014. I use each one on a daily basis and both have changed my life in a meaningful way. Amazon Kindle. In 2014, I slept really poorly. I had trouble falling asleep and when I did, I had chaotic dreams and I was tired when I woke. I thought it was stress. But it turned out to be my Nexus 7 tablet. Before going to sleep, I read for 45 minutes or so each night.

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pitching board startup 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 11, 2015

After writing about B2C2B companies last week , I received a lot of great comments about the differences between the B2C2B models, particularly the sales models after a company has acquired the initial Consumers. These are three sales models I’ve observed B2C2B companies use to convert the initial momentum with consumers into dollars. The first sales model is the 2 Phase Sell.

frameworks 40

frameworks development startup 40

Speaker: P. Andrew Sjogren, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Very Good Security, Matt Doka, Co-Founder and CTO of Fivestars, and Steve Andrews, President & CEO of the Western Bankers Association 

PCI compliance can feel challenging and sometimes the result feels like you are optimizing more for security and compliance than you are for business outcomes. The key is to take the right strategy to PCI compliance that gets you both. In this webinar, we have a great set of panelists who will take you through how Zero Data strategies can be used as part of a well-rounded compliance and security approach, and get you to market much sooner by also allowing for payment optimization.

strategy