SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2023

G2 had us back for another great deep dive on just where SaaS investing is there days, and it was a great panel: Accel Partner Arun Mathew Inspired Capital Founder & Managing Partner Alexa von Tobel Salesforce Ventures Managing Partner Paul Drews and Jason Lemkin! Low investment multiples pose a key challenge.

B2B 285

B2B Investment Venture Capital Scale 285

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Jason now has 5 investments at $200m+ ARR that are all cash-flow positive (which is necessary today), and there’s one clear trend he’s seen in today’s new efficient world: The New Normal is 700 Employees at $200,000,000 in ARR (or $300,000 per employee) at the average public SaaS company. This starts to get tough.

Sales Recruiting 315

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 315

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 20, 2023

Since then, investing activity dropped precipitously. By looking at the cumulative rounds since 2010, we can see that Seed, A, & B volumes all trended meaningfully above their predicted counts. At current trends, actual round counts should revert to the mean sometime in the second half of 2023. But the gap is narrowing.

Investment 236

Investment Venture Capital Startup Finance 236

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

This means for every sales and marketing dollar invested the company purchases an additional 60 cents of gross profit in the next period. The Cisco acquisition continues the trend of take-privates that includes New Relic for $6.5b , Qualtrics for $12.5b , Software AG for $2.4b. The estimated sales efficiency at 0.6 is top quartile.

Trends 204

Trends Software Review Acquisition Pricing 204

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

Their platform helps restaurant owners, who typically earn less than $50,000 annually in profit, create professional online presences without significant investment in time or resources. Restaurant Industry Solutions Owner.com has developed an AI website generator that implements industry best practices automatically.

AI 225

AI Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Systems Review 225

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

The result was a 5x increase over initial projections – growing from an $8M revenue target to $40M actual results – driven by a belief that market demand justified the investment. This approach required immense trust from the CEO to invest millions ahead of proven results.

Scale 188

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 188

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 10, 2020

Each quarter, a group of analysts, including me, publish analysis on the trends in the venture capital market. This retrospective analysis compares Crunchbase data from April 1, 2020 to data from October 10, 2020 across three dimensions: round counts, investment total, and median round size. Last is median investment size.

Venture Capital 355

Venture Capital Trends Investment Data 355

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 7, 2025

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. We’ll see how these consensus estimates trend over the year, but the initial guides out of the gate do not inspire confidence that 2025 will be a year of out performance. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 157

Cloud Forecasting Subscription Payment Features 157

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 21, 2025

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now M&A is Back!

Cloud 188

Cloud Pricing Subscription Payment Features 188

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2025

Their conversation offers a rare, insider view of the strategies, challenges, and opportunities driving the next wave of technological innovation.

AI Search 244

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 244

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2023

They invest in the right tools, and in the right team, to understand the impact. Then they really invest in recovering the CAC as soon as possible. They raise money when they have cash in the bank, which means that they have much more leverage negotiating terms and getting additional funds for the company. So how do they get there?

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Technical Review Software Review Venture Capital 246

Clouded Judgement

JANUARY 24, 2025

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. It might also boost sales forecasting accuracy by using your enterprise’s historical transaction data to predict future trends more reliably. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation.

Enterprise 157

Enterprise AI Cloud Artificial Intelligence 157

ChurnZero

JANUARY 10, 2025

With that in mind, here are my top four predictions on the digital customer success trends well see from forward-thinking teams this year. Digital customer success trend #1: Efficacy, along with efficiency Making customer success teams more efficient has long been a stated goal of many digital programs.

Trends 52

Trends Customer Success Technical Review Artificial Intelligence 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2024

Four portfolio companies join Sameer to talk about three trends of the Cloud AI Era. Trend #1: Foundation Models Many models exist: open source, closed source, frontier models. Trend #3: Change Management Matters In the last paradigm shift, the end user experienced little change when moving from on-premise software to SaaS.

Cloud 170

Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence Healthcare 170

Tom Tunguz

JULY 4, 2020

As a reminder, 2008 saw a 40% reduction in venture dollars invested in startups. We’ve met companies that have grown at steady and even accelerating rates through the crisis, especially those that capitalize on the dominant trends, including cloud computing, remote work, and collaboration. There is a flight to the known.

Marketing 364

Marketing Investment Cloud Startup 364

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 11, 2020

In 2006, VCs invested about $3.5B Then the investing velocity fell by half to $2.9B, $2.7B, and $2.3B Let’s break down the trends by series. Seed investments suffered a 50% fall in Q3 2008, but the market came right back in Q4 and continued to increase in volume. So this was a bit of a trip down memory lane.

Marketing 359

Marketing Startup Investment Trends 359

ChurnZero

JANUARY 6, 2025

” So what 2025 customer success trends can we anticipate? Trend 1: Customer teams strengthen their revenue focus. Closely held businesses and organizations with long-term time horizons have always invested in healthy growth, but public and venture-backed companies often suffer whiplash due to changing KPIs.

Trends 52

Trends Customer Success Scale SaaS 52

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 303

Cloud AWS Azure AI 303

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 362

Startup Investment Trends Metrics 362

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Follow along to stay up to date! Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

Cloud 144

Cloud Banking Subscription Payment Features 144

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2021

But there’s more to this trend than just nomenclature change. Investment processes last a few days. Pricing rounds on multiples like public market investing. Index investing and the entrance of hedge funds. The market feels different. Preemptive rounds have become a norm. Vibrant secondary markets.

Software Review 364

Software Review Venture Capital Cloud Pricing 364

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2023

Now that I have 5 investments at $200m+ ARR, and they are all basically cash-flow positive (which is necessary today), I’ve seen one clear trend in today’s new efficient world: Just about everyone at $200m ARR now has about 700 employees or so. But what does it mean in practice, when you are well before the IPO stage? ?

Venture Capital 341

Venture Capital Scaling AI Investment 341

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2023

There’s concern that valuation trends seemed to mimic previous market bubbles. Despite what we’ve seen post-2020/2021, there has been a surge in AI investments, with AI companies at the infrastructure layer hitting a hundred times valuations at early funding stages. There are worries over the persistence of low public multiples.

Investment 159

Investment Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 159

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS, Venture Capital, Bootstrapping, and Valuations – understanding market trends and investment patterns is critical. We’ll explain Jason’s take on the recent market fluctuations, highlighting major deals that shaped investment patterns and their effects on valuation trends.

Venture Capital 275

Venture Capital Scale Technical Review Software Review 275

Buffer Resources

JULY 24, 2024

What if you could automate the mundane, repetitive tasks and focus on your core jobs that actually move the needle toward your return-on-investment (ROI) ? 2: Use social media listening tools to stay on top of niche trends Social listening observing what your audience is saying online and creating content around it.

Social Media 115

Social Media Outsourcing Services Strategy ChatGPT 115

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2022

And at the earliest part of investing, seed is still active. At least for now, investing early has only been partially impacted by stock prices that have fallen 50%-75% since their peaks for even the best in SaaS. Even Series D rounds, the handful that are still happening, aren’t even unicorns. It is what it is for now.

Education 330

Education Startup Pricing Investment 330

User Pilot

JANUARY 19, 2025

At first, this seemed like a smart investment for my company, so I invested. Reasons why you shouldn’t invest in standalone session recording tools You might think standalone session replay tools have one flaw, but theres more to the story. Reasons for not investing in standalone session recording tools.

Investment 52

Investment Scale Software Review Technical Review 52

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 26, 2024

Consider discussing industry trends, offering career advice, or sharing lessons learned from your own journey. Whatever your platform preference, short-form video — usually clips that are 90 seconds or under — is one of the most powerful types of social media content you can invest in. Short-form video ideas 7.

Social Media 115

Social Media Trends Branding Engagement 115

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 5, 2022

My top 5 unicorn and decacorn investments all had a rough year. Are the macro trends still positive? They want to believe their investment will rebound and do well. Or a Red Light company that’s really a write-off already, and sort of the walking dead? The truth is, the numbers alone don’t have the answer.

Startup 354

Startup Sales Hiring Venture Capital Cloud 354

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 17, 2021

From time to time, I chart the fastest growing categories of startup investment in the US for seed through Series C. The automation of QA is a secular trend that perhaps accelerated with more software engineers working from home. Here are 2015 , 2017 , This year, I was certain the categories would have been influenced by COVID19.

Startup 362

Startup Software Engineering Finance Engineering 362