Times Are Tough but 25 of The Leading SaaS and Cloud Companies Are Up

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So no question many folks, especially selling sales and marketing tools, are having a pretty tough time of it.  Leaders we admire and look up to from ZoomInfo to Zoom to Box have had tough years on the stock market, no doubt.

But not everyone. 

Not by far.  Overall, the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index is up 22.97% this year.

I went further and put together a quick list of 25+ SaaS and Cloud leaders to see how their share prices are doing. On average, their share prices are up a stunning 68.50% and they are worth on average $26 Billion!

So Fastly is a public Cloud company you may not have heard much about in a while.  It started off with a ton of PR and attention as a next-generation, super fast CDN, and had an early IPO, but for the most part, has quietly been heads down since then.  Customer count isn’t really growing anymore, as we’ll see below.

For a while, its market cap dipped to a tough low — but 2023 was good for Fastly. Its stock is up a stunning 122%!  That’s second only to Palantir. A good part of the gains are from finally getting EBITDA positive.

Still, it’s not all such great news.

As we approached $10m ARR, we were doing very well: growing 100%, cash-flow positive, with 100%+ NRR.

But I did see that certain of my weaknesses still were impacting how well we could do:

• I didn’t get on enough jets. I didn’t visit enough of our biggest customers in person. The ones I did visit, we never lose.
• I remained a serial recruiter. You have to move to parallel recruiting. I was too slow in recruiting VPs, and only did it one VP at a time. You have to become a parallel recruiter by $2m-$3m ARR or so.
• I needed to do better at Biz Dev follow-up. I was very good at initial partnerships and biz dev, but less good at all the details in following up in the months and years to come. I should have built out a true Biz Dev function as soon as we had a handful of partners to manage.
• I thought an IPO would take like forever. I was right in that it would be many years off, but I was wrong in that that was OK. It is supposed to take a while in SaaS.
• I worried too much about dilution. I had scar tissue from too much dilution in my first startup, so I swung the pendulum too far the other way. We only spend about $6m net to get to $10m in ARR and became cash flow positive at $4m ARR. That was great, but having too tight of a balance sheet inhibits some investments. I should have just raised another $20m and not worried about the dilution. 

My list:

1. 1. “You need to start managing people.” My second boss was generous enough to give me a small team to manage a few months into my job. I didn’t ask for it, and it wasn’t a group I wanted to manage. So at first I turned it down. He said, “that’s fine, but it’s time you learn to start managing people.” I woke up the next morning and realized he was right, and asked if I could still have the opportunity. By the end of the week, I had a team of 3 to manage.
   2. “You need to get out of the office and go visit more customers.” This is a constant SaaStr theme, and I needed to hear it, too. When I was struggling, I went to meet with another of my old bosses, who was one of the salespeople I knew. He said he didn’t know how to fix all our problems, but he knew getting on jets and going to visit prospects and customers in person would help us close. He was right.
   3. “You have something good. Stop listening to the noise and the naysayers, and push on and do even better. Just double down on what is working, and go hire one great person to help you do even better.” Actually, I never got this advice. But I needed to hear it. So now, when appropriate, it’s the #1 piece I try to give.

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