The Latest from SaaStr: 82% of Top YC Companies Are Partially or Fully Remote

So if you were on social media this week, you probably saw a ton of YC companies talking about how they were in the 2023 Top Companies.

SaaStr Fund has invested in several of them, from Algolia to Treasury Prime to RevenueCat and more and it’s always fun to see awards and similar content from leaders like YCombinator.

But beyond the great stories of who is breaking out, I found a quiet set of statistics even more interesting:  where they are breaking out.

It turns out that 58% of top YC companies are headquartered in the SF Bay Area … but at the same time, 82% are partially or fully remote.

So the SaaStr YouTube is pretty awesome, really.  Where else can you get the CEOs, CROs, CMOs of all the best in SaaS to train you — for free? 

From Slack to Zoom, from Asana to Atlassian, from Monday to Notion, the best of the best share how to do it here.

It took a little longer to cross 30,000 than perhaps it should, but a good mini-milestone to celebrate.

And with that, here are The Top 10 of The Past 12 Months to catch up on.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by MERGE

Merge’s Unified API allows you to access 150+ integrations across HR, payroll, ATS, accounting, CRM, and ticketing systems.

This is indeed a big bummer.  But it truly does make you stronger — if you commit to winning the next one.

Six thoughts on how to do better next time:

First, move them into your Lost Now (But Not Forever) Marketing Program . I know you don’t have one yet, but maybe it’s time to add this new marketing program as part of your demand gen efforts. You likely will get another shot, albeit in 1–3 years.

If you got into an RFP as a tiny start-up, that probably means it is a new initiative. That also probably means they’ll take a fresh look at the landscape again a few years down the road. Market to them like a medium warm, but long-sales-cycle prospect. That already knows you and the space cold. 

The odds you can truly steal the deal later are often relatively low, but they’re often not zero, and unpredictable.  Keep the relationships warm.  Invite them to your customer conferences and webinars — this helps keep the relationship warm as well. 

Go long here. 

You’ll likely talk to them again.

There are two types of SaaS companies in the world: those that are category creators and the challengers of incumbent technology. 

At SaaStr APAC 2023, Scott Pugh, VP of Sales at Figma, shared how to scale these two sales teams while building culture. 

Pugh’s strategy is simple, albeit not always easy: 

1. Recruitment — how to hire the best talent to scale your sales organization. 
2. Enablement — setting your team up for success and investing in their professional growth. 
3. Culture — developing sub-cultures within sales that enable the team to scale successfully. 

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by LARK

Lark is a collaboration tool designed to improve team productivity. Get chat, email, video conferencing, calendar, and docs together in one place.

Next Thursday, we’ll be hosting 5 Ways to Measure the ROI of Events with SaaStr and Bee Content Design’s CEO, Massimo Arrigoni!

Each Thursday, the SaaStr Insider Live Webinar series covers how to get the most out of events, the latest saastr events news & much more. 

Sign up here as we share the traditional and non-traditional ways to measure the ROI of live events. 

I’m fortunate to have invested in some of the best SaaS companies over the years, usually from first-time founders.  My first 5 investments were:

• Pipedrive, co-led seed, acquired for $1.5 Billion
• Algolia, led Seed-2, worth $2.2B at $200m+ ARR today
• Talkdesk, first VC, worth $10B today
• Parklet/Greenhouse, acquired for $800M
• Salesloft, acquired by Vista for $2.5B

Since then, there have been some ups and downs as there always are, but I’m proud of the next wave. YCombinator recently named its Top Companies for 2023 and it included 3 SaaStr Fund investments:

• Algolia
• RevenueCat (where we were the very first investor)
• TreasuryPrime (which got started in our offices)

In my experience, probably about $2m worth of happy customers. At that point, you don’t have a world-famous brand or anything. But you do start to have a “mini-brand”, where folks in your top niche or segment start to have heard of you.

• If your product costs $2,000 a year, that might be around 1,000 customers.
• If your product costs $20,000 a year, your mini-brand might kick in around 100 customers.
• Etc.

At this point, customers start referring other customers to you. Folks talk about you in the industry. And prospects looking at the competition will begin to in-bound because they at least want to look at you, too.

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