SaaStr

MARCH 11, 2022

And so, Cloud multiples have rationally fallen back to where they were in 2018 and 2019. The argument here is multiples have fallen too far, since the best SaaS and Cloud companies are growing so, so much faster than in 2018 and 2019. Multiples exploded when we all lived in the Cloud, quarantined in whole or in part in the Cloud.

Scale 325

Scale SaaS Cloud Pricing 325

Incredo

JULY 22, 2019

In digital marketing, content dominates and acts as the main selling point. Content is king in the digital world as we can't do without it. But content marketing requires proper planning, after which it will be able to provide the desired results.

Content Marketing 250

Content Marketing Trends Marketing 250

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2021

In comparison, approximately 3,000,000 sqft leased in all of 2020 and over 6,000,000 sqft leased in all of 2019.” ” So that’s not back to the 6m sq ft of 2019, it’s a lot more back than you might think. #3. . “In 2021, leasing activity totals 2,800,00 sqft so far this year. This is interesting to see. .

Scale 321

Scale Cloud Startup Trends 321

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2021

And that number has gone up from 78% in 2019 to 84% today. 62% annual is up from 54% in 2019, so a big push there. A steady march above $5k in ACV. While only 25% of Freshworks’ customers pay more than $5k a year, they represent 84% of total ARR. Freshworks hasn’t gone super-enterprise. And a few bonus learnings: #6.

Scale 361

Scale SMB Scaling Payment Features 361

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2024

Yet, its $36k+ ARR customers are now 28% of its base, up from 15% in 2019. $36K+ Deals Also Increased to 28% of the Base Shopify has seen something somewhat similar, as both have gone upmarket, growth in SMB and smaller customers have still kept up. At HubSpot, it has more and more smaller customers as part of its Starter plan.

SMB 315

SMB CTO Onboarding Scale 315

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2021

Sprout Social IPO’d somewhat quietly at the end of 2019 at about an $815m market cap — small for a SaaS IPO. If that growth from a $815m market cap in 2019 to $4.7B So one of the quieter SaaS success stories in Sprout Social, a leader in social media management. But they kept at it. Billion (!)

Social Media 327

Social Media SMB Cloud Scale 327

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2022

Back to where we were in the markets at the end of 2019. We’re back to 2019. But it’s crazy times with interest rates in one year going from zero to closer to historical norms, and inflation like we haven’t seen in a very long time. Where does that leave us, going into the end of 2022? At least, sort of.

Cloud 300

Cloud Pricing Metrics SaaS 300

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 18, 2022

For the next 3 years, Series Ds increased in size until the late 2019/early 2020 correction of 41%. The Series D mean round size is plotted in red. 2014’s correction stalled and then reversed Series D round sizes for 2 years through the second correction in 2016.

Marketing 362

Marketing Startup Finance Technology 362

Tom Tunguz

MAY 10, 2020

We can plug in last year’s numbers in the table linked here to get an approximation for the value of the S&P 500 on Dec 31, 2019, of 3224, and this implies an S&P dividend growth rate of 5.8%. The S&P500 levels in April suggest that the market believes dividends will grow at 4.0%, down 30%. But a lot has happened since then.

Marketing 319

Marketing Investment Pricing Revenue 319

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2022

My quick review of Miami for SaaS: – Met ton great CEOs, including 2 unicorns – 5x the size for SaaS vs. 2019 – Meet some good VPs, etc. 2019: 184 attendees at SaaStr Miami Meet-Up. There just weren’t that many in Miami even in 2019. – Still small – Crypto et. Dominates, not B2B.

Technical Review 296

Technical Review B2B SaaS Engagement 296

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2022

Sprout Social IPO’d in Dec 2019 at an $800m market cap. A few case studies: * Sprout Social IPO’d in December 2019 at an $800m market-cap. It IPO’d early, in a crowded space. But they kept on going, and gong, and growing. years later, in a market down 50% …. They’re worth $2.7 Billion #golong pic.twitter.com/nA8jSXgehx. It’s tripled.

AWS 286

AWS SaaS Cloud Scale 286

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2022

The #1 trend is that apart from the huge run-up in SaaS multiples starting in 2019, and a nice bump in 2021 … public SaaS companies have been trading at about 10x forward revenue. But the markets right now seem to be saying we’re heading back to pre-2019 mutliples. Do they deserve more today? I would argue yes.

Cloud 289

Cloud Trends Revenue SaaS 289

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2021

2019: $336m rev. 89 $1m+ ACV customers — up from 21 in 2019. Revenue grew nicely at first from $1m to $3.5m from 2015 to 2016 … and then exploded: UIPath History. 2005: Started as a tech outsourcing company. 2014: $500k rev. seed round. 2015: $1m rev. 2016: $3.5m 2017: $30m rev. 2018: $155m rev. 2020: $607m rev.

Outsourcing Services 362

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Payment Features Cloud 362

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 18, 2020

Starting in 2019 and continuing in 2020, the public markets value these companies with better multiples. Let’s excise this group of 50% growers from the rest and add Redpoint internal data for forward ARR multiples for later-stage companies, which are all growing above 50%. This is a critical shift.

Software Review 363

Software Review Finance Enterprise Acquisition 363

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2021

Early stage debt origination and round counts peaked in 2019, while later stage debt has increased quite nearly every year. However, equity dollars are replacing those debt dollars in the last 18 months in the early stage. Meanwhile, venture debt dollars have migrated to later stages.

Finance 338

Finance Startup Acquisition SaaS 338

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 12, 2021

This chart shows the median and the 75th percentile of enterprise value/forward revenue multiple for the basket of public stocks which were public at that moment in time. Correction Year. These corrections reduced valuations by between 30% and 60%. These undulations are short-lived.

SaaS 352

SaaS Cloud Enterprise Software 352

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2023

While Doximity was EBITDA positive back in 2019, it really exploded as the business scaled. 290 $100,000+ Customers. That’s how they’ve built up to something big. #3. Insanely Profitable — At Scale. Today, it’s on track to generate $181,000,000 in EBITDA in 2023.

Scale 333

Scale Scaling Revenue SaaS 333

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2021

Twilio’s NRR since 2019. Pretty consistent. A question so many of us had in the earlier days of SaaS was … will we max out all our bigger customers? We all saw especially larger customers buying more and more each year, but most of us founders a generation or so ago in SaaS worried we’d max out our larger accounts.

Scaling 340

Scaling Investment Cloud Customer Success 340

SaaStr

DECEMBER 6, 2021

Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, discusses the process leading up to IPO in 2019, her main focus for the company in the years since, and the lessons she’s learned along the way. Before PagerDuty went public in 2019, we had our clear “why” for doing so. Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates.

DevOps as a Service 278

DevOps as a Service Scale Cloud Interviewing 278

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2020

Better to put that energy into products that would move the needle in Cloud in 2019–2025 and beyond. Once Office 365, Azure, etc. took off, and Microsoft’s Cloud strategy became clear … a new task manager wasn’t important enough. It seemed possible at the time it might help their productivity application strategy.

Azure 321

Azure Cloud Acquisition Strategy 321

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

Draw a straight line and assume multiples gradually expand at the same rate as they were growing from 2017-2019. That revenue multiples should rise from where they were in 2019. SaaS companies are better and growing faster than ever before. So just ignore the Covid Boost and Hangover. This does make a lot of sense.

SaaS 348

SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 348

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 6, 2019

We’re proud to have > 60% women and multicultural speakers at the 2019 and 2018 SaaStr Annuals, and we are on track to meet or exceed that again in 2020. Our 2019 and 2018 attendee Diversity and Inclusion programs were fully subscribed and worked well, so we want to go even bigger this year on a number of levels.

Leadership 51

Leadership 51

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

Blame “the economy” too much, and you’re doing yourself a disservice. It’s not slowing down Salesforce, Snowflake, or almost any other SaaS or Cloud leader. Salesforce Growth: 2023 $31.8B (guidance) 2022 $26.5B 2021 $21.25B 2020 $17.1B 2014 $4.1B. Thank you Ohana! pic.twitter.com/CMhrBXgHSF. — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) May 31, 2022.

Sales Hiring 347

Sales Hiring Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 347

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Through Q3 2020, late stage investors have invested as much as the entirety of 2019, and should things continue linearly we should expect the final tally to exceed $100B. And it would be 4x the size of 2010. The late stage venture market is on pace to set a record in 2020.

Venture Capital 352

Venture Capital Government Pricing Investment 352

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2023

Those multiples went up in 2018 and 2019, and things were Better. But I think a lot of us are betting on a return at least to 2018-2019 multiples. The reality is, as you can see in the above BVP chart, the Median public SaaS company — a pretty high bar right there — has traded around 6x ARR. To a 8x-10x world.

Cloud 285

Cloud Trends Scale SaaS 285

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2021

The number of deals is also way up, from 126 in all of 2019 to 105 just in 1H’21. Protocol and Pitchbook partnered to do a comparison to see what’s happening in Private Equity and enterprise deals so far in 2021, and the data is a bit jaw-dropping: Just in 1H’21, PE invested $20.4B in SaaS and enterprise deals.

Investment 290

Investment SaaS Acquisition Enterprise 290

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 7, 2021

The majority of that fall occured before Covid in 2019. How did sales efficiency evolve? Across public software companies, the average sales efficiency fell from 0.6 over the last 3 years. In contrast, sales efficiency improved throughout 2020. Examining the data by quartiles, the sales efficiency has remained largely unchanged.

Software 305

Software Travel Sales Metrics 305

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2021

So I also know we’ll have about 2,500 next year at the 2019 Europa. I know what SaaStr will look like in 2019, 2021 and 2022 at least, and maybe even 2024. Even with very limited marketing and a tiny list, for example, we’ll have 10,000+ come to the 2019 SaaStr Annual. Different, but the same.

Sales Recruiting 360

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 360

The Daily Egg

MARCH 22, 2019

In 2019, wherever you look, you will find its traces. The time when project management was considered a discipline that applies to just a few industries is gone.

Management 269

Management Trends User Experience Marketing 269

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 29, 2019

Slack generated $105m in revenue in 2017, $221m in 2018 and $401m in 2019. Slack grew 110% and 82% in 2018 and 2019, compared to Zoom’s 149% and 118%. Slack’s combination of greater revenue and a smaller ACV translates into a much larger customer base: 88k customers in 2019 vs 51k for Zoom.

Benchmarks 264

Benchmarks Metrics Scale Revenue 264