SaaStr

MAY 18, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Have You Ever Made a Very Risky Investment That Paid Off Big Time? More of the story here: The post Dear SaaStr: Have You Ever Made a Very Risky Investment That Paid Off Big Time? In my first start-up, the VCs pulled our term sheet between signing and closing. But sometimes … you just do it. appeared first on SaaStr.

Investment 274

Investment Leadership 274

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Do angel investors or seed venture capitalists normally ask for detailed budgets including cash flow analysis before investing, even though most of the numbers will be pure speculation? The post Do Angel Investors and Seed VCs Ask for Detailed Budgets Before Investing? When it is, you can learn a lot.

Investment 249

Investment Sales Hiring Business Model Sales 249

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Is The Average Time it Takes a VC to Make an Investment Decision? For hot seed and even Series A investments? The average VC basically makes the initial decision to tentatively invest very quickly — pending due diligence, confirming her theories are correct, and making sure what they think is the case actually is.

Investment 259

Investment Leadership 259

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Can I Convince My Investor We’ll Double Their Investment By The Next Round? If you are a VC / private investor, there’s a key meta question: why invest now ? There are really two, related answers to “let’s wait” One is because if you don’t invest now, it will be too late.

Investment 245

Investment Pricing 245

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2025

Billion To Invest in More B2B Companies appeared first on SaaStr. But there have only been 4 B2B / SaaS IPOs since 2021, and M&A is way down. That leads to stress. The post SaaS Is Back, But Different: Insight Partners Raises $12.5

B2B 212

B2B Investment SaaS AI 212

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2024

Those rare investments that return enough money to the VC fund to pay off at least 1x the total fund size. And you can see VCs are often pretty careful to make sure structurally, any given investment can do it. Investing in the #3 or #4 in a space? It’s not what anyone hoped when they invested. A 1% stake?

Investment 246

Investment Venture Capital Social Media Startup 246

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Would You Invest in a Start-Up With 6 Co-Founders? UPDATED The post Dear SaaStr: Would You Invest in a Start-Up With 6 Co-Founders? I’ve done it — once. At least with 5 true co-founders. And that startup did end up selling for over $1 Billion (!) — so it’s not a firm “No.” But it did have the exact issues you’d expect.

Investment 220

Investment Compensation Startup Scaling 220

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 8, 2024

In a recent Office Hours, Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake & a friend from Google, shared his insights into Snowflake’s approach to AI. It was a great conversation to understand how one of the leading data companies is pushing AI forward. The video for the session is here & the audio is here.

Artificial Intelligence 224

Artificial Intelligence AI Search AI Investment 224

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2025

Have we lost interest in investing in the human side of sales? For the most part, folks seem done investing in more productivity for their sales humans. In 2021, everyone bought 100 new sales and revenue apps to keep the sales engine humming, along with large investments on the human side of RevOps, Customer Success, and more.

Sales Hiring 321

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount AI 321

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2024

I’ve invested almost $200m as part of SaaStr Fund / 2024. Make the cold email so great, you’d want to invest based on just it alone. Make the cold email so great, you’d want to invest based on just it alone. Is this the type of investments they do? VCs don’t expect investments to be perfect. They right stage?

CTO 269

CTO Investment Revenue Marketing 269

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? I invested in a company named CAT Labs in Q1 of this year. What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? My main focus is to invest in Series A with an initial check of $5-15M, although I do reserve an interest in smaller checks for late Seed rounds.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Management Investment AI 269

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? We invest in early-stage startups, so we’ll participate in Seed through Series C rounds, with an emphasis on Series A and B. What’s different about your fund / how you invest and support founders?

SaaS Payments 263

SaaS Payments Management Scale Venture Capital 263

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2024

We’re obviously written up a lot about Fundraising and Investing here on SaaStr.com, but time and time again, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin has seen so many Founders sign a bad term sheet based on gut instinct, VC celebrity or vibes, and while that may be fine, it’s not enough.

Venture Capital 271

Venture Capital Software Review Investment Startup 271

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

I’ve had the privilege to invest one way or another in about 35 SaaS companies, both as a VC and as angel. They understand why they got “No”s in the early, pre-traction days, and even, in the early-ish days when they had a handful of customers but wasn’t really taking off yet (my favorite time to invest).

Scale 344

Scale Sales Recruiting Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 344

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2023

Conversely, Don’t Feel Pressure to Invest and Deploy Capital. One of the all-time best SaaS VCs just invested in one of my companies. He said it was his first investment of the year (in December), and the only thing he’d seen he got really excited about in the last 12 months. You will feel this pressure.

Investment 305

Investment Cloud SaaS Management 305

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 30, 2024

Aside from the overall growth of these clouds increasing, the massive investment in CapEx data centers, power plants, and GPUs is stunning. Google and Microsoft would wait another two years to replicate a similar level of investment. Google and Microsoft would wait another two years to replicate a similar level of investment.

Cloud 288

Cloud AWS Azure AI 288

SaaStr

MAY 9, 2023

Most dramatic is later-stage investing, with the latest Crunchbase data showing Series D rounds are now own 92% (!) Well, it doesn’t mean VCs have no money to invest … today. When VCs aren’t sure they’re going to have nearly as much money to invest themselves going forward. Now what does that mean?

Startup 345

Startup Investment Trends Metrics 345

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2024

Share everything anyone would want to know to invest in you. But unless you are raising from folks that truly invest pre-revenue, investors are going to want to see 3 strong months of growth in a row. If nothing else, point out an existing investment or two theyve made that is somewhat similar to yours. # Share it all.

Venture Capital 257

Venture Capital Investment AI Metrics 257

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? We recently led a [ $50M series B ] investment in Todyl, which is a modular cybersecurity platform for small and medium businesses. What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? What’s different about your fund / how you invest and support founders?

Venture Capital 266

Venture Capital Cybersecurity Artificial Intelligence Scale 266

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2024

A Burn Rate That is Too High Venture capital is meant for investing, for sure. But there’s a fine line between investing and keeping a leaky boat and set of metrics afloat. Investing in Segments That Can Never Be Profitable This is a subtle but important one. ” Let’s make a list: #1.

Trends 303

Trends Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 303

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2024

Most Smaller VC Funds ($100m or smaller fund) would like to own 10% or more after a Seed or Pre-Seed Investment , but typically model around 7% average ownership. If it’s not a core investment, VC funds may be more flexible. But these exceptions to ownership targets make these investments non-core.

Investment 220

Investment Pricing Engagement Leadership 220

Clouded Judgement

JULY 12, 2024

Because your competitors are investing in AI efforts, you also have to invest in AI efforts. At the end of the day these investments might not immediately result in better business outcomes (ie more revenue), but they certainly lead to better end user experiences. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 285

Cloud AI Investment User Experience 285

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 6, 2024

Traditional VCs usually reserve another 1x-2x of their first check for later investments. If the synergies are real, they’ll happen irrespective of some token investment. An investment won’t create a partnership. An investment may anoint one vendor in the space as the preferred vendor over competitors. Be realistic.

Outsourcing Services 270

Outsourcing Services Investment Pricing Enterprise 270

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? Stage 2 Capital invests $4M to $6M in first checks into B2B software companies that are around $1M ARR. These investments typically occur between the seed and the A round. Check that out here.

Technical Review 291

Technical Review Scale Management Sales Hiring 291

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 1, 2024

” I heard that a lot in 2021, and unfortunately not many call options hit… It’s hard to invest at 100x ARR and exit at 10x and make a return VCs aim for. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 314

Cloud AI Investment Metrics 314

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

More entrepreneurs are doing direct investing themselves than ever. So net net we still see very high levels of seed investment. … And a great recent deep dive on VC SaaS investing here: The post Raising Venture Capital in 2024? It’s still a weird world in venture: Firms are both shutting down and raising new funds.

Venture Capital 313

Venture Capital AI Investment SaaS 313

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2024

A VC fund will typically do 30-ish investments per fund. of the fund, on average, per investment. If they invest say $2m into your start-up and it fails, that’s a bummer. Or if it’s one of an individual VC partner’s biggest investments. Typically, though, that’s over 3–4 rounds of investment.

Startup 250

Startup Investment Leadership 250

SaaStr

AUGUST 11, 2024

As a reminder, the SaaStr Fund is investing $170,000,000 in seed and late-seed investments. Algolia and Legacy Investment Talkdesk in BVP Cloud 100! A big week at SaaStr Fund! 750k-$4m checks for SaaS, Cloud and B2B startups at from $10k-$200k MRR. Some great news this week: #1. Great to see for these pre-IPO leaders!

Cloud 265

Cloud AI Generative AI CTO 265

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2024

If you had just one investor, then in a perfect world, this investor would get to dole out chunks of the initial investment and see how it goes. They can choose to invest if milestones are met, but don’t have to. The problem is twofold: First. there’s a tragedy of the commons. It doesn’t work with a syndicate.

Investment 281

Investment Leadership 281

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

Most VC investments do need to make money. There, even if most “logos” don’t make money, most of the dollars invested do need to make money. The 50% line is a big deal at every stage of investing, at least from seed to IPO. Most of your investing dollars do need to make money. Not every one, but on balance, most do.

Pricing 277

Pricing Startup Investment Data 277