Where Venture is Right Now; Plus Weekly SaaS News and Updates

Hey SaaStr Community,

So the world is back.  Offices are reopened — they’re just different from before.  In many cases, very different.  Events are back, dinners, lunches.  2nd and Howard in downtown SF is even packed again with Internet startups and execs.  And it’s good.  It’s really good.

For many of us, Covid memories are fresh, but muchly in the past.  Heck, Team SaaStr just attended Coachella.

But we’re not all past it.  I’m still watching many folks struggle.

It’s Still Time to Take Care Of Your Team. Covid Isn’t Over For Everyone.

So the public markets are in tumult.  Many SaaS and Cloud leaders are down more than 50% from their all-time highs. But Covid did create a lot of artificial demand for Cloud products, especially the lockdown phase. The boosts Zoom (can’t go to the office anymore), Shopify (can’t go to a store anymore) were real, but could never be sustained. 

It makes sense the “Covid Boost” is over, and that there would be a hangover.  And indeed there is today!

This edition of the SaaStr weekly is sponsored in part by DuploCloud

Braindates are designed for you to share knowledge and network with fellow leaders during SaaStr Europa. The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships and exchange strategies.

Braindate groups always fill up quickly, so if you've been putting off buying your ticket, this is the nudge you've been waiting for. Get your ticket and reserve your seats!

So a top theme across SaaStr CEO interviews since 2017 or so, and across our 5 Interesting Learnings series with public SaaS companies, is … when should you go multi-product?

I’m going to summarize a bunch of my learnings into 2 rough metrics, and then let’s do a deep dive across a bunch of SaaS leaders to see what we can learn. 

This edition of the SaaStr weekly is sponsored in part by Reachdesk

It’s not that complicated. You generally have one option.

Iconiq General Partner Doug Pepper and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin do a deep dive on where the venture markets really are today, and what it means for founders. 

Doug's been an investor is so many of top SaaS companies, from Marketo to Calendly to Loom to Braze to Lattice. Today he's a general partner at one of the top growth stage firms, Iconiq.

• SaaStr is seeking new team members! We're hiring in Sales, Marketing, Content, and Customer Success. If you're ready to help us grow the SaaStr community, see all the opportunities!

• CloudBlue is looking for a Director, Partners & Alliances to hold end to end responsibility for the Partner organization’s pipeline, all opportunities going through the sales funnel and generating revenue (with specific sales targets) via indirect sales channel of CloudBlue technology.

551

Top 5 Mistakes While Building & Scaling Global Product Teams from Microsoft to Salesforce to Hubspot with Hubspot GM & VP, Products, Poorvi Shrivastav

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5 Lessons on Building Your Sales Organization for Scale with Than Hancock, EVP of Sales @ Podium and Carlie Adams, Head of West Coast Sales @ Podium

553

10 Things You Can Do Today To Grow 10x Faster With SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Boast.ai Co-Founder Lloyed Lobo

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

Anyone remember another time when SaaS stocks plummeted 50% from January?

I do

It was called 2016:

* Everyone panicked

* Seemed like multiples would never recover

* LinkedIn sold to Microsoft for 7x ARR And then …

Later that year, SaaS went on a tear like we’ve never seen

And Just Like That,

Slack selling for 28x ARR seems well played

Really rough venture math:

Each core VC investment is maybe 2% of the fund

So to return just 1x of the fund, you need to return 50x what your investors give you

Thinking of a joining a startup for the first time?

A quick guide on training and onboarding:

1-10 Employees: Nonexistent

11-20 Employees: Terrible

20-40 Employees: Some

If worried, Then join something larger

© SaaStr 2022

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