Welcome

Welcome to SaaS Primer.   I am a serial entrepreneur and SaaS investor.  I love to learn and the purpose of this blog is to learn by writing, sharing, and tracking the science of building great SaaS companies.   I have learned via hard work, great colleagues, amazing entrepreneurs, veteran co-investors, and other SaaS practitioners who share their insights generously on the internet.

Popular posts from this blog

Conducting Layoffs

Having been a leader through many layoffs in my career (not surprising since I spent the first part of my career at GE with "Neutron Jack" Welsh ) and they always suck.   At times I have felt like Ryan Bingham in the movie Up in the Air . (except unlike him layoffs had a high personal toll on me). The folks at Andreesen Horowitz put out a timely post on Planning and Managing Layoffs . It is an excellent resource and a great checklist for planning and conducting reductions.   However, the post doesn't fully communicate the amount that layoffs suck and the level of emotional impact both on the affected person and the manager forced to conduct the layoff.  During the dot.com crash of 2000 and 2001, I was a leader in a firm that went through more than five rounds of layoffs.   Yes, we could have cut deeper earlier but the downturn had repeated waves of economic impact with some geographies continuing to produce and while other geographies were negative...
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Great list of B2B GTM metrics

Recently, Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz summarized his 11 key GTM metrics for B2B businesses . He starts with CARR (contracted annual recurring revenue) which is the single best metric for the health of the business.  This forward-looking metric leads to recognized recurring revenue and assuming a high retention rate can look like an annuity.  Frequently, the question is "if you sold nothing else this year what would your revenue be?"  One key assumption behind CARR is that the contract lengths should be one year or more in duration.   Many times folks will multiple CMRR (contract monthly recurring revenue) by 12 to obtain a CARR but this can be misleading.   In the B2B enterprise world CARR is predominately used. Martin's 4th and 5th metrics are Net Dollar Retention and Gross Dollar Retention.  Both are important and just getting one or the other of the metrics can obfuscate what is really happening with the business.  The mea...
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Analogies between Tuck-in M&A and portfolio investing returns

In portfolio investing like venture capital or private equity, you are balancing risk versus reward to obtain a portfolio or fund return.   Some deals may be a home run and some may be a single or worse a zero.   Similarly in M&A you are balancing risk versus reward.  Customer or book acquisition where you acquire only the customers that transition to your platform is low risk and accretive but not huge rewards from one transaction.  A tuck-in acquisition that dramatically improves your product or provides a best of breed adjacent solution to cross-sell maybe be higher risk but offers much higher reward. Auren Hoffman wrote a thought-provoking post called M&A is a Power Law .  He provides great commentary of grand slam home run acquisitions like Google buying YouTube, Facebook buying Instagram and Priceline buying Booking.com.   These are legendary acquisitions and the best of serial acquirers like Google, Facebook, and Priceline....
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