The Latest from SaaStr: There’s A Lot of Angst in VC Today

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin · Monday, November 21 2022 | Company Culture, Leadership

So there’s a lot of angst in VC today. 

And a lot of it is around bridge rounds. 

What’s a bridge round?  It’s extra money solely from the existing investors.  And bridge rounds are … stressful.

Almost always.  No one really wants to do them.  They want a top VC to come in and do the next round at 2x, 3x, 10x the last round price.  Not the existing investors having to reach deep into their own pockets.

GROWTH

By Amelia Ibarra · Monday, November 21, 2022 | Marketing, Sales

Wherever you are in your revenue journey, adopting certain growth strategies can help you keep growing fast.

Robert Butler, Chief Commercial Officer at Payrix, has spent over 25 years in fintech and has most recently grown Payrix from $4 million to $100 million in ARR over the last four years, leading to a successful buyout and the launch of Worldpay for Platforms.

Joined by Katie Wickham, Payrix’s Director of Marketing, Butler shares essential tips on accelerating your business to $100 million ARR and beyond.   

Q&A

By Jason Lemkin  · Saturday, November 20, 2022 | Blog Posts, Q&A

Absolutely.

It took me about 18 months to close Google, for example:

• Need identification and discussions with project manager over several months
• About 6 on-site meetings to review need identification and discussion with broader group
• RFP
• Prototype of workflow
• +More

SAASTR EVENTS

Better than a toaster or new headphones ---

we know Black Friday is typically reserved for retail, but we wanted to give our SaaStr insiders the chance to save big on tickets to our upcoming events this week. 

SaaStr Europa will be taking over London for 2+ days in 2023, and we're already seeing record-setting demand for tickets this early on.

There will be 3,500+ SaaS CEOs, Revenue Leaders, Founders and Investors joining us at the historic Tobacco Docks on 6-7 June. It'll be great weather, great content, in-depth networking, and for next year, we'll be hosting so many workshops across 2 days, that you won't want to miss a second of it.

Reserve your tickets this week for SaaStr Europa 2023. This is your chance to save big on attending a SaaStr event in-person!

LEADERSHIP

By Jason Lemkin · Saturday, November 19, 2022 | Company Culture, Leadership

In the Boom Times of late 2020-early 2022, many startups … really never had board meetings.  Or barely had them.  Or had 1 or 2, but would sort of never schedule the next one.

They didn’t take them seriously.  The money kept coming, and in many cases, the VCs didn’t care.  They were on enough boards anyway.

See, e.g., FTX.  No board meetings, and no one cared.  The money and times were just too good, and founders had all the power in hot deals anyway.

But now a lot has changed.  And folks are paying a bit of the price for not having board meetings.  And never got the benefits from having them.

Your sales and customer success teams are losing deals and customers due to backlogged integration requests.

But can you really justify spending months of development on each integration, when an embedded iPaaS can help offload 70% of the work?

There are a lot of factors to consider in this build vs. buy decision, and it's all outlined in this guide.

Tip the payment scales in your favor by being one of the first to unlock exclusive early access to BlueSnap's 2023 Payment Predictions eBook.

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