Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 1, 2016
Rolf Winkler wrote a piece in the WSJ about A16Z’s returns in which he says they “lag behind Sequoia, Benchmark and Founders Fund.” Scott Kupor of A16Z responded with a comprehensive overview of valuation methodology in a post that while accurate feels more targeted at sophisticated Limited Partners (LPs) who invest in funds. Let me offer you an insider’s take.
This is going to be BIG.
AUGUST 29, 2016
Investors turn down deals for some pretty dumb reasons. They lack logic, consistency, and sometimes even a grasp of what their own job is. You know. taking actual risk. "We're not interested for this round, but come back to us when Sequoia is leading at a $1.5 pre-money, you have seven enterprise customers and you're cashflow positive. Oh, and make someone from your 25 person Moldova tech team your co-founder.
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Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 28, 2016
Jeff Wiss has managed demand generation and corporate marketing for some iconic software companies. MySQL, the most valuable open-source acquisition; Zendesk*, the $3B leader in customer support software; DataStax, The business commercializing Cassandra; and most recently Duo Security*, an Ann Arbor-based trusted access company that has some of the most sensational SaaS metrics I’ve ever seen.
Entrepreneurs' Organization
SEPTEMBER 2, 2016
In my career as an entrepreneur, I’ve often fooled myself about what’s important and how to build my business. I’d go to work each day focused on results that are easy to see: making a sale, collecting “follows” on social media, tracking the website hits from my online advertising. And sure, all those things are cool — but measuring them rarely leads me to the behavior or the decisions that would make my business more sustainable and more profitable.
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Lack of digitalization decreases business competitiveness. To thrive, embracing modern solutions becomes essential. The approach to digitalization often aligns with a company's business model. This shift not only boosts productivity but also automates processes and improves security. The tech market offers a wealth of technologies tailored for management, planning, and forecasting, replacing outdated pen-and-paper methods.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 29, 2016
GOAT just announced it raised $5 million in venture capital led by our friends at Matrix Partners. On the surface that sounds unremarkable — fundings happen daily. But this isn’t just any funding. GOAT (“Greatest of All Time) is a sneakerhead marketplace that is en fuego, but we led the company’s last financing round in 2012 (yes, four years ago) when they were an application for letting people join group dinners.
Startup Catalyst Brief brings together the best content for the entrepreneurial ecosystem from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Berkonomics
SEPTEMBER 1, 2016
This is not necessarily the way we intend to behave as managers, but our headline reflects the reality of most experiences when viewed in retrospect. We carefully vet the potential hire for experience required. Ninety days or longer later, if that person is terminated by management, it often is for actions resulting from the person’s relationship with others in the organization more often than failure to perform the specific task for which the person was hired.
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 1, 2016
Creating and optimizing a sales plan for an early stage SaaS company is a challenging task. There are lots of different variables to manage and the truth is it’s always a work in progress even for massively successful businesses. But at the very earliest days, where do you start? Quota is a function of number of deals closed, sales cycle, price point and conversion rate.
Entrepreneurs' Organization
AUGUST 29, 2016
By Shawn Busse , an EO Portland member and CEO of Kinesis. Dear fellow business owners, I know that you work insanely hard. Your company consumes your thoughts during most of your waking hours. I also know that you have a fierce desire to “win,” climbing ever higher to reach the next peak or goal. That’s because I’m just like you. This intensity is what makes us successful entrepreneurs.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 28, 2016
I just finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I can’t recommend this book strongly enough. I loved it in so many ways. J.D. grew in a single-parent (often zero parent) lower-income home in Middletown, Ohio and spent much of his youth also in his family’s cultural home of Jackson, Kentucky. His youth was surrounded by family members who struggled with substance abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy and lack of social mobility.
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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.
Entrepreneurs' Organization
AUGUST 31, 2016
By Sanjay Agarwal, an EO Winnipeg member, and the founder and president of Orientworks, Inc. My first visit to Bangladesh was in 2002, and I had no illusions about this country. I expected poverty and there was plenty of it. However, only a few people truly know about Bangladesh’s developmental surprise in the last decade. For example, Bangladesh is one of the few developing countries that is on target for achieving most of the Millennium Development Goals.
Entrepreneurs' Organization
SEPTEMBER 2, 2016
By Michael Klazema, special to Octane Blog. Most recruiters and hiring managers know that background checks are a vital part of any employee screening and onboarding process. However, while pre-employment background checks are commonplace in most jobs today, there are still numerous aspects of these checks that remain woefully misunderstood by most employers.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 30, 2016
If your SaaS startup were to trade in the public markets today, what would it be worth? The true answer is we don’t know, but we can approximate it by comparing it to the other publicly traded SaaS companies and benchmarking the business by its growth rate. The chart above shows the median multiple of public SaaS companies by growth rate bucket, 25%-49%, 50%-74%, and 75%+ trailing twelve month revenue growth rate.
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