SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

What is the secret to aligning go-to-market teams and finance teams? Prakash Raina, Co-Founder of Subskribe, and Leslie Hui, VP of Accounting Operations and Finance Transformation at Okta, break down the secrets to unifying SaaS teams, processes, and systems. The secret to aligning GTM & finance teams. Prakash Raina.

Scale 246

Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

But to recruit a truly world-class VP of Eng, Product, Sales, Marketing, CS, Finance … you probably can do just one of those per quarter and do the job for real. Force yourself to. You can’t truly hire sequentially for all roles, especially after the earliest dats. Which one are you focusing on this quarter? And you are doing it for real?

Sales Hiring 276

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Finance 276

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Happens When You Can’t Meet The Expectations From the Valuation of Your VC Financing? A related post here: The $100,000,000 Valuation: The Last Stop Before “IPO or Bust” (overpriced image from here ) The post Dear SaaStr: What Happens When You Can’t Meet The Expectations From the Valuation of Your VC Financing?

Finance 275

Finance Pricing Acquisition Startup 275

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The role of finance in SaaS is changing. No longer are finance teams the traditional “bean counters” of ages past. IVP Partner Michael Miao explains, “The role and the scope of the modern finance team has changed dramatically in the last decade. SaaStr Workshop Wednesdays are LIVE every Wednesday. Sign up for free.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2025

Orbee’s technology aims to transform repetitive tasks across finance and accounting, enabling businesses to dramatically improve efficiency and reduce critical errors. Bella Liu of Orbee leads a company focused on generative process automation, creating AI solutions that understand and automate complex enterprise workflows.

AI Search 244

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 244

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2024

A truly great VP of Finance / Controller solves all these tactical financial mistakes. You can be too lean, but also, in some ways too flush with cash. Everyone stops caring about being efficient, or the incremental dollar, when there is more cash in the bank than anyone expects or needs. A mediocre one … solves none of them.

CTO Hire 276

CTO Hire CTO Banking Finance 276

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2025

In my experience the one most founders get wrong is how much more employees cost post-initial traction and after your first round of VC financing. Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Startup Costs That You Didn’t Anticipate? And how much that dramatically drives up the burn rate and cost of doing business. Dramatically.

Startup 276

Startup Finance Engineering Investment 276

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2024

But an IPO back then was in any ways like a late stage financing today. And it seemed to really minimize dilution (see founder stakes below). Now, times were different. Lotus quickly become a unicorn even by the standards of the day. It was the only efficient way to raise a larger slug of capital. billion in ’95.

Startup 263

Startup Finance Software Metrics 263

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2024

Many Vertical SaaS leaders do payroll, finance, accounting, and much more — not just the core software. Toast and Shopify and Bill are really more payments companies today than SaaS companies. You probably have to go multi-product much earlier. Churn is all over the place with SMBs. So be honest.

Payment Solutions 263

Payment Solutions Inbound Sales Team Marketing Scale 263

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 3, 2025

But watch out – this is a major undertaking that touches product, engineering, sales, and finance. The Metrics That Matter Have Changed Dramatically The “growth at all costs” era is dead. In 2019, top SaaS companies spent 50-55% of revenue on sales and marketing.

Scale 275

Scale SMB Enterprise Enterprise readiness 275

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2024

So when you’re thinking about this audience, you always have to think about being multi-threaded now as finance has come back into the deal cycle much more than it used to. Define Your ICP When you’re thinking about your audience and selling into this sector don’t boil the ocean.

Engineering 287

Engineering Development CTO Leadership 287

TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

In corporate finance , generative AI is a transformative force, enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency. Moreover, it automates routine tasks such as transaction processing and report generation, freeing finance professionals to focus on higher-level strategy and analysis.

Generative AI 443

Generative AI CTO Hire AI Sales Recruiting 443

SaaStr

AUGUST 14, 2024

Sage Finance Happy Hour! CFOs and VIP Finance, sign up here. SaaStr Finance Leaders Happy Hour with Carta and Friends. SaaS Founder Happy Hour with SVB and Deel at Pinstripes. This is a great upscale bowling alley with drinks near the venue. Sign up here. Sign up here. SaaStr CFO Summit, 12- 3:30 pm. At Annual itself.

Finance 330

Finance AI Cloud SaaS 330

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

Before BILL, around 2004, he started thinking more about this problem of doing finances with filing cabinets and a lot of pain, the same way it was done 60 years prior. Creating a Moat ”I definitely believe it’s a moat, and it’s the thing that got me most excited about the business,” René shares.

SMB 310

SMB Payment Services Payments Payment Methods 310

Clouded Judgement

JULY 16, 2024

We can expect the company to start trading on the public markets next Wednesday Subscribe now OneStream Overview From the S1 - “OneStream delivers a unified, AI-enabled and extensible software platform—the Digital Finance Cloud—that modernizes and increases the strategic impact of the Office of the CFO.

Benchmarks 295

Benchmarks Data Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 295

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2021

In the later stages, debt is often used to finance acquisitions, and perhaps this is occurring more for venture backed companies. Last, there are new financing options for factoring receivables for startups. Meanwhile, venture debt dollars have migrated to later stages. Why has venture debt shifted later?

Finance 338

Finance Startup Acquisition SaaS 338

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 18, 2022

The company moved to customer_revenue last quarter when we hired a new VP of Finance and they updated the definition. With MetricFlow, a user can search for metrics, find the one approved by the outgoing VP Finance, receive a notification when the new VPF updates it, see the calculation, and identify the metric’s owner.

Revenue 325

Revenue Sales Hiring Finance Metrics 325

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2023

SaaS products and services like Pilot track the finances of 1,000s of SaaS and other startup so they’re an interesting source of hard data. VC finance is designed to fund 18-24 months of runway. What does Pilot’s latest data say? Many have already raised a bridge round. This sounds a bit dire, but really it isn’t.

Startup 357

Startup Venture Capital Azure AWS 357

Payrix

FEBRUARY 4, 2025

With the rise of Embedded Payments, payment processors have a new role as a powerful sales tool for software companies that strive to become the everything platform empowering them with essential digital finance tools to manage and grow their business as well as generate new revenue streams. Learn more about Embedded Finance.

Payment Services 130

Payment Services Payments Merchant Services Payment Methods 130

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

The activity rates of those users mirror web2 finance apps. MixPanel recorded the activity rate of web2 finance apps at 10.7% By my rough estimation, there are approximately 30m monthly active web3 users (getting closer to that 100m user mark! ) In other words, 11% of users who use the app every month, also use it daily.

Finance 323

Finance Technology Software Marketing 323

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2024

At the end of the day if your product is SUPER sticky and doesn’t need a big procurement battle to renew, then just have finance or ops handle it. Finance / ops isn’t the right choice. Basically, automate it as much as possible. Don’t make the renewal an unnecessary source of friction. A renewal now is real work.

Sales 278

Sales Finance Churn Customer Success 278

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

They usually come in and handle compliance and oversight for an existing finance team that perhaps lacks the seasoned experience to handle models, venture capital and debt, prepare for an audit, etc. We have a Fractional CFO for our tiny team at SaaStr, he reviews the finances and corporate actions of the team that does … the actual work.

Sales Hiring 327

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale Finance 327

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2020

One thing I see most SaaS companies do a pretty poor job of until they have a great finance team is a go-forward model. Even once start-ups have a strong finance team, the models they do make are often still … too rosy. Build One Now. SaaStr [link]. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) October 27, 2020. An L4M Model?

Finance 353

Finance Scaling SaaS Data 353

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

Land Secure Accelerate The revenue plays become the basis for enablement and PMM playbooks and the core of your product roadmap, how finance reports on the business, running MBRs and QBRs, and measuring pipeline. GitHub took all the GTM motions and conversations across the company and organized them through the lens of three revenue plays.

Scale 263

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 263

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2021

The next dilution you hopefully won’t lament, but may, is Equity Financing (i.e., On VC financing, here are my 3 suggestions (and 1 framework) on how to think about Dilution: First, raise 125% of what you need in VC capital. It won’t eliminate these issues, but it will at least align you on them. Angel and VC Dilution).

Sales Hiring 333

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Finance 333

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2022

I think at a minimum you should have a real experienced finance lead at $2m ARR, a real VP Finance once you raise $20m, and a CFO once you are at $20m+ ARR. Most startups just wait way too long to get finance right: They wait too long to get collections right, and have to write off a lot of bookings. jasonlk) April 12, 2022.

Scale 273

Scale Finance Churn Startup 273

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2022

As the pendulum swings to a higher-cost-of-capital-environment, milestone-based financing may return. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if milestone-based financings re-emerge to justify round sizes again. [1] So, did headcount at the Series A. In 11 years, the median headcount at Series A swelled from 15 to 28. [1]. Median Salary.

Headcount 325

Headcount Venture Capital Finance Startup 325

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

But even here, I think I could do better: Our metadata platform helps you build a superior data infrastructure to drive your organization’s data culture, help analysts build better models, make better decisions, and deliver superior business outcomes across areas like finance, marketing, and operations. It’s not great.

Marketing 140

Marketing Business Finance Sales Hiring 140

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2022

So I’ve seen a trend among many startups these days which is to sort of have a VP or Director of Business Ops instead of a VP / Director of Finance. They handle the cash too, but also go deep on the business in a way a “finance person” usually simply can’t. True finance folks (e.g., In fact, they usually don’t know how.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Finance Consulting Banking 287

The Daily Egg

AUGUST 14, 2022

You need to have a firm grasp of your finances and. Running an ecommerce business is more than just selling products online. The post The Complete Guide to Ecommerce Accounting appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Finance 317

Finance Business 317