Inc - Pre-Seed to Series A Funding is Down

So it’s interesting how folks craft headlines from data.

Carta released its latest funding data the other data for 2024 Year-To-Date here.

What you can see is that yes, large, hot AI later stage deals overall are indeed driving venture capital deployments up an impressive +17% the year.

But that’s for late-stage capital. Most of it AI driven. That’s the story those headlines tell.

For early stage VC, it’s actually down -9% in 2024 over 2023.

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So there’s a quiet trend I’ve observed for a while but didn’t want to call a trend.  Didn’t want to see it as a new thing.  But I think it is.

It’s the founder CEO quitting.

Even after raising $20m, $50, $200m+ in venture capital.  Even with 100 of employees and 1000s of customers counting on them.

I guess it’s not totally new. This stuff is hard. And it’s even harder for folks running unicorns and close-to-unicorns that have seen growth slow radically.

But founder-CEOs are supposed to get going when it gets tough. To somehow, find a way to turn it around.

Absolutely.

It took us 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
• Ensure integrations could be connected to custom apps
• Wait for new feature to ship
• Do 90-day unpaid pilot
• Get through security audit
• Procurement cut deal size by 90%
• Throw up hands
• Sales saves the day, closes deal

That’s 18 months to first revenue. Then, another 18–24 months to scale up the number of seats, grow core deal size, etc.

Software buying behavior has changed, and today we’ll share how you can leverage these changes to win in the age of AI. Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2 and SaaStr fan favorite, shares insights from G2’s annual buyer behavior report to help prep you for the 2025 buying cycles.

1. The three key areas to pay attention to:
2. The promise of AI is dictating purchasing behavior.
3. The ability to win these limited software budgets and access decision-makers is harder than ever.

The expectation of ROI is mismatched. Buyers want to see ROI immediately but aren’t seeing it fast enough.

Understanding buyer behavior isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. The good news is that G2’s data shows that more people are going to be buying software in 2025 than in 2024, with only 6% saying they are going to buy less.

So a lot of SaaStr’s team is getting back from AWS Reinvent.

We did a dinner with some of our top partners and some of the conversation went to the ROI on big events:

• Some folks just advocated for just buying tickets to the event and networking. This is cheapest, of course. If you can work a room, the ROI here is real.
• Some folks advocated their own side events and dinners.  This is cheaper, and you can easily decide who to invite.
• Others spent big, big, big on the event. This can cost 20x-200x more than just a nice customer dinner, let alone a couple of tickets.

So what’s the right approach? Well, we’ve done a lot of events at SaaStr and we just want everyone to be happy. But we’ve learned a few things.

First, buyers go to the top events. And they go to the expo when they are there to meet and do diligence on vendors.

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