When will a start up’s management team feel comfortable telling employees they’re safe to return to work? Is it when the government declares it safe? Or schools re-open? Or customer prospects agree to meet in person? Or when we each record a positive antibody test? How will we conduct meetings? With masks and gloves? What […]
In November 2019, two spectacles occurred. The first is Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual event and the largest software conference in the world. The second is Elon Musk announcing the Tesla Cybertruck. Benioff and Musk use these events strategically. They engender an operational cadence to Salesforce and Tesla. There’s no feeling like launch day. It’s the day […]
You’ve found product market fit. You’ve hired a team, including some managers. Your initial, small customer base is very happy. You’ve discovered an initial channel of customer acquisition that’s working. You’ve raised a meaningful round of capital. And then, right then, product innovation decelerates to zero. The fast pace that characterized the past 12-18 months, […]
In a recent meeting, a founder asked me what I thought of the fundraising environment. My answer was: it’s become incredibly sophisticated along three dimensions: diversity of product offering, pricing sophistication, and efficiency of investment processes. If you read eBoys or Done Deals or Creative Capital, you’ll get a sense of the early days of […]
Slack has transformed the way we work. By replacing email with beautiful and simple internal chat, Slack has productized productivity. Founded as a gaming company called Tiny Speck in 2009, the company’s initial product, Glitch, didn’t catch on as expected. So the business pivoted to commercialize an internal tool – a Searchable Log of All […]
PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by 3 former Amazon engineers who were often on-call. To engineers, being on call means carrying a pager to respond to crises when software breaks or services go down. In the 10 years since that day, PagerDuty has built an exceptional business. Their product has evolved from on-call management, which […]
A founder posed me a question earlier this week: Do you have any data/perspective on whether it’s worth keeping the unassisted free trial flow vs. providing only one path which leads to a demo and an assisted free trial? This is a complex question. Let’s break it down.The unassisted free trial has benefits. There’s a […]
Here are some predictions for 2019 and a review of my thoughts for 2018, many of which were wrong. The M&A market slows meaningfully, especially at the multi-billion dollar level. The recent seasickness in the public markets forces most CEOs adopt a more conservative approach to acquisitions. Facing large swings in valuation, these leaders may […]
Customers will pay you to build your SaaS product. It’s one of the great advantages of a SaaS model. Annual prepay contracts – wherein customers pay for a year’s cost on day – is a free loan from customers. And every startup can benefit from this advance. There’s only one requirement: you must be able […]
Your startup is just getting off the ground. You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? I’ve […]
“The Benchmark Engine™ is a powerful ally for us to help analyze and shape the organization as we scale.”
David Dean
VP Financial Planning & Analysis
“OPEXEngine delivers key SaaS and other operating benchmarks that aren’t easily available anywhere else.”
Marc Linden
CFO
“OPEXEngine provides us with the data and benchmarks to fine tune and improve our operations.”
Jeremy King
CFO
“OPEXEngine’s benchmarking report is a key element of our planning process and helps us set the right targets for 2-3 years out.”
Stephane Panier
CFO
“The great thing about OPEXEngine data is there are several peer groups to look at … private vs public, companies with similar revenue and headcount.”
Mike Morgan
CFO
“OPEXEngine’s benchmarking is the only tool that enables us to perform quality comparisons with similar types of companies.”
Jim Lejeal
CFO
“OPEXEngine benchmarks the key business metrics we need...you can’t find this kind of information for private companies anywhere else.”
Dan Kossmann
Former CFO
“OPEXEngine, one of our strategic planning tools, provides us with key benchmark data that we struggled to find elsewhere.”
Jim Zaloudek
CFO
“OPEXEngine’s comprehensive benchmarks enable us to evolve our strategy and make operational changes that drive growth in profitability.”
Regis Kaufman
Senior VP
“OPEXEngine helped us align our internal data to produce consistent metrics and benchmark comparisons. This is a real benefit of using OPEXEngine's benchmarking platform.”
Jeffrey Wilkins
CEO
“As a fast growth, mid-sized, public software company, OPEXEngine’s benchmarking is a critical information source for operational metrics you can’t get anywhere else.”
Ralph Bryant
VP Finance
“OPEXEngine’s EdgarEngine with EDGAR Online’s robust XBRL financial data ratchets up the quality of tools companies can use to maintain a competitive edge.”
Sue Childs
Executive Vice President
“OPEXEngine's On-Demand Dashboards service takes all the headache away. In 5 minutes I can put together a great financial data report to present to our Board.”
Todd Palmieri
Chief Financial Officer
Dell/Boomi
“We use the benchmarks to get the whole executive team on the same page in terms of the budget and targets.”
Jim Johnson
CFO
Two pioneers and leaders in performance benchmarking and financial planning for SaaS companies join forces to share guidance, best practices, and concrete steps for growth.
Sherri Wolf
CFO
Sherri is a seasoned finance and operations professional with deep experience in the operations and financial structures of emerging growth companies. Sherri began her career on Wall Street with Salomon Brothers and then became an equity research analyst with Adams, Harkness & Hill, a Boston-based investment bank where she covered information technology services companies. After leaving the capital markets, Sherri became a Managing Director at Internet Capital Group (ICG), an Internet venture capital organization with 80 business-to-business e-commerce companies in its portfolio.
Sherri has spent the last 15 years working with start-ups in the information services and consumer goods markets in a variety of financial and operational roles. Most recently, she was the CFO of JOOS, LLC where she helped to build JOOS into the largest fresh-pressed, organic fruit and vegetable juice provider in New England. She joined OPEXEngine to be a part of a rapidly growing high-tech Company that has an impact on how financial professionals make day-to-day operating decisions.
Sherri is President, of Columbia College Women and a Board Member of the Columbia College Alumni Association. Sherri has a BA in Economics from Columbia University and an MS in Finance from MIT Sloan School of Management.
Donna Rice
CCO
Donna is a respected senior executive with a demonstrated and successful history in leading a diverse portfolio of companies. She is well known for her innovative, collaborative, and hands-on leadership style. Donna is skilled in setting digital strategy, establishing strategic direction, building teams, and delivering continuous improvement. In addition, she has extensive experience launching new products and successful events.
Prior to joining OPEXEngine, Donna was the Chief Operating Officer at Innovation Leader; Managing Director of Compliance Week; VP of Global Sales at Artifact (Auction Holdings) Invaluable; and held multiple management positions with Boston Globe Media and New York Times Digital.
Richard Scott
COO & General Counsel
Rich is a successful SaaS technology executive with a unique background including roles as COO, CFO and General Counsel in a variety of B2B and B2C organizations. He leverages his operational, finance, legal and business expertise to transform business outcomes and build shareholder value for start-up and growth companies, including as CFO at OLB Inc., FISC Solutions (acquired by WAUSAU Financial Systems), and Relevant Equity Systems (a Thomson Financial portfolio company). He joined OPEXEngine for the opportunity to work with leading SaaS companies and to leverage his skills in helping to build out the OPEXEngine benchmarking product offering.
In his various leadership roles, he has driven financial operational and business strategy, scaled organizational infrastructure, raised outside capital and arranged financing, implemented financial reporting, customer care and KPI driven process improvement, accelerated product innovation, and expanded operations into global markets. His industry expertise includes technology, media, financial services, and consulting.
Rich resides in Boston and holds Master’s Degree in Finance from McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University and a J.D. from New England Law Boston.
Lauren Kelley
CEO & Founder
Lauren Kelley is the founder of OPEXEngine. After 25 years in fast-growth high-tech companies, she founded OPEXEngine to solve the problem that high-tech companies lack good quality benchmarks from a neutral provider — especially operational benchmarks — to reduce risk and improve efficiency and growth.