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Office Hours with Lee Kirkpatrick, former Twilio CFO on Managing through Turbulence

Tom Tunguz

During the dotcom crash in 2001, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and the SaaS corrections in 2014, 2016, and 2018, Lee was either COO/CFO or CFO at Twilio, SAY Media, and Ofoto. Lee Kirkpatrick is no stranger to downturns.

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Bezos' Shareholder Letter in 2000

Tom Tunguz

Amazon stood fast to their principles throughout. Just as important, though, Amazon managed their finances well. Net Income, $m. Cash & ST Equivalents, $m. Before the dotcom crash, Amazon grew at 68% and lost -$1.4b in net income.

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Venture Capital, Withering & Dying

Tom Tunguz

Amy Cortese published “Venture Capital, Withering & Dying” in the New York Times on Oct 21, 2001. I came across it during a Google search & reading through the article. It’s a powerful reminder of history’s rhymes. 11, investors have become much more discriminating.

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Even With Just “Pretty Good Growth”, You Can Build a Unicorn After $10m ARR

SaaStr

Mailchimp in 2001. Here are a few scenarios with initial growth rates at $10m ARR, with a growth decay factor baked in: The hyper-growth company really can get to $100m ARR fast. UiPath did it. But you know what? They didn’t start there. UiPath actually was founded in 2005!!

Scaling 351
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5 Interesting Learnings From Five9 at $550,000,000 in ARR

SaaStr

It’s old, founded in 2001. And in many cases, pre-Covid, they’d been working on decades-old server-based phone systems. Pre-Cloud systems, really. So Five9, Talkdesk, RingCentral, Dialpad and more boomed during Covid. Five9 is particularly interesting. It wasn’t a rocketship.

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The Power of Going Long in SaaS

SaaStr

Blackline : Founded 2001, boostrapped. Today, just 2 years after that, Hubspot in a very similar space (just more SMB) and with very similar revenue, is worth $18B. That’s 18x. Shopify: Founded 2006. Original CEO steps down, Tobi has to take over. 2015 IPO at $1.27B. Today, $128B market cap. 100x from IPO. Unable to raise any money.

SaaS 201
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Inside Apple Software Design

Andreessen Horowitz

In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z’s Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection.