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 […]
US SaaS companies need to take note of the growing number of world class SaaS companies based outside the US because the international landscape is shifting rapidly. Increased funding activity in Canada, Europe and Asia/Pac is introducing more non-US competition in the SaaS marketplace. More and better funded SaaS companies worldwide can be a challenge […]
SaaS multiples look great and made a nice comeback from Q4 2018: of the 72 SaaS companies we follow, the average public SaaS business is trading at 10.51x revenue while the median is 8.94x. Interestingly, the gap between the average and median has never been larger for the time period shown, meaning more attractive SaaS companies are being rewarded with big premiums.
In the first half of 2019, total VC deal values hit $66B and is nearly on pace to match 2018’s record of $134.7B, according to the latest report released by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. The size of VC funding deals continues to trend upward, while angel and early stage investing is holding its own in terms […]
What does it take to achieve extraordinary SaaS B2B valuation multiples? A big market and performance indicators showing that the company can acquire customers at a fast pace. In addition, it is valuable to show that your company can support/maintain customers with a low cost of revenue. Even better when your metrics show gains in […]
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 […]
Back in 2014, I wrote a post titled “Five ways to build a $100 million business”. If you haven’t seen it yet, the central idea of the article was to look at how many customers you need, for a given ARPA, to get to $100 million in annual revenue and what this might mean for […]
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 […]
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 […]
This week I listened to Jeff Epstein, Bessemer partner and former CFO of Oracle, present to CFOs and finance execs at Intacct’s Finance Summit. The Summit content was well done and kudos to Sage Intacct for organizing it. Jeff described the stages, pre-money valuation and milestones at each stage, from pre-seed to Series G and beyond. […]
About two years ago, Marketo was publicly traded and valued at roughly $1.1B. Vista Equity paid $1.8B to take the company private, a 64% premium. At the time it was taken private by Vista, Marketo generated $241M in trailing revenue, growing at 35% annually. Its net income margin was -31%. Last week, Adobe announced they […]
For SaaS companies targeting fast growth to $100M and beyond, the company’s data management of its own business information can enable the growth path or bog it down. Manual and “heroic” efforts to get the data out of business systems for reporting and analysis will get harder and harder to do as systems, records and […]
Over the past 12 months, a number of our benchmarking customers have either filed or completed SaaS IPOs. And Adaptive, a customer and partner, filed for an IPO in May and then announced in a surprise move on Monday its acquisition for $1.55B by enterprise SaaS company Workday for more than double (2.2X) the expected post […]
Intelex, a Canadian-based global leader in Environment, Health, Safety and Quality (EHSQ) SaaS, with offices in Toronto, Denver, and the UK, uses OPEXEngine’s SaaS Benchmarking platform, BenchmarkEngine™, together with Adaptive Insights budgeting and planning solution to drive operational analysis enabling fast growth. Intelex has grown to 500 employees with global offices and over 30 percent […]
Last week, Hubspot announced strong Q1’18 results of 39% revenue growth and 44% customer growth. These are great growth numbers, but more importantly, Hubspot announced a major evolution in its growth strategy. Here is how one successful SaaS vendor is evolving its model. Hubspot invented and evangelized the term “Inbound Marketing,” dramatically influencing the SaaS playbook […]
Subscription revenue management SaaS vendor Zuora’s IPO on Thursday, priced at $14, closed at $20 and valued the company at $2B. 2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for B-2-B SaaS IPOs: Dropbox and Zuora already have listed, Docusign, Pluralsight, Smartsheet have filed and Qualtrics, Apttus, Github, SurveyMonkey and Slack are expected to […]
Last week, Salesforce.com (CRM) announced their FY 2018 results. The data indicates strength of their expansion model. Here’s why. SaaS companies, as well as investors in SaaS, watch Salesforce the original pioneer of the SaaS model. The “No Software” company is the largest fast growth SaaS company in the world, keeping the momentum going even […]
Last week we looked whether all SaaS companies benefited from the incredibly hot stock market in 2017. We found big variations in Market Cap to Revenue multiple trends. Some companies doubled their market valuation multiple during 2017, and some at the bottom of the spectrum reduced their multiple by almost half. This week we’ll look […]
Bomgar is a venture-backed, mid-sized software vendor which has ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for the past 4 years.
The tagline for General Catalyst Partners is “entrepreneurs investing in entrepreneurs,” and partners of the active venture firm are well known for lending deep operating experience to their portfolio executives’ growing businesses. I’ve known Larry for years since we were both operating executives at various software companies. Here’s his take on the key operating metrics that […]
Rally Software, based in Boulder, CO, is the leader in Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and IPO’ed April 2013.
Financial results for the Class of 9 B2B SaaS companies that IPO’ed in 2014
In the following Q&A, Lauren and David share lessons from each of their 25 years of technology management, tailored for SaaS companies on how fast growth SaaS companies are using key metrics to grow their businesses. Q: What are the do’s and don’ts in building a successful SaaS company? Lauren: SaaS is more complex and […]
The private U.S. software industry is experiencing its biggest revenue gains since the recession, and both private and public companies are renewing their focus on investment in order to gear up for further growth, according to a study announced today by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software […]
I thought it would be worthwhile to publish an interview I did earlier this year with Mike Morgan, CFO of Bomgar Corporation talking about benchmarking value and how it has worked for them. Bomgar is a venture-backed, mid-sized software vendor which has ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for the past 4 years. With […]
