Alex Ferrara

Tomorrow is the summer edition of SaaStock Local London and we've a great entrepreneur sharing his story of how he orchestrated an exit (to Zuora). If your building a SaaS with a view to a future exit (most folks except Basecamp), Or your currently thinking about M&A Then this is the inside story from a great founder, James Henderson, who got a fantastic outcome. The content will not be recorded, so you have to be there to get the insights such as: Why selling was right for James and Zephr - How do you plan an exit - What forces did James consider before he sold - How he managed his team and board through the process - What happens when you make a deal and sell All these questions and you get to ask your own. So make sure you're there if you're serious about building a SaaS company to sale. Around 17 tickets remaining. Link in the comments. #exits #M&A #founders #saas #london #CEO #saastocklocallondon

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Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

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Rob's goals and progress on contactout and athena.vc 22nd July 2024 Last week: Monday - meetings Tuesday: QA pricing plans, admin,sign and mail company docs, pay capital call community moderation. Wednesday - Talk with deeptech founders, connect with influencers from alex brogan interviewRead about fusion, longevity and sam altman, peter theil investments Thursday - Read about helion, world coin, other sam altman investments. read btc and eth whitepapers, rain ai , lob, cocorobotics, running tide, hermes, boom Friday - Read fcp docs, eth whitepapers, sam altman peter thiel investments. What did I learn: https://lnkd.in/g3D8__Q2 what are the highest impact industries and technologies? study what top investors like sam altman and peter thiel have invested in: https://lnkd.in/gFeutEcM https://lnkd.in/g_ErBh7k lots of stuff from nuclear fusion, to longevity, to a better GPU than nvidia, universal basic income, growing seaweed to capture carbon, building the next google. https://lnkd.in/gYGjbEF2 should we start on researching how to build a better google especially google scholar for scientists: study futurehouse.org and similar and lots of scientists and deeptech founders about problems they face Jessicia Livingston's started a new podcast "Social Radar" interviewing YC founders. Her old book founders at work is really good too. The old YC content from PG, Sam, Jessica is way better than the current YC content. Going through all the startup school interviews from 2012, 2014, 2016 way better speakers. Next week: continue reading YC content write up founders curriculum

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With 1H entering final few weeks, highly recommend this operating model. ( Finance and Sales ) + ( Product and Marketing ) The Cadence will help bring order to the chaos of QBRs, Product Release, Campaigns, Field Events, and getting as many people to "The Beach" as possible. Two Quotes: 💰 "There is a time for everything" ~ King Solomon 🎶 "And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me" ~ Rolling Stones When coaching front line leaders or running project management for some back-office initiative, calendar and time management is critical for operating efficiencies. https://lnkd.in/g9HAtsT

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As a B2B SaaS VC 👩‍💻 and a huge data nerd 🤓, fewer things bring me more joy than a truly statistically significant analysis (600+ companies surveyed) of B2B SaaS metrics across early stage companies. Great work by our team at Emergence Capital! See comments for full report, and please let us know how we can make this better in the future!

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Nice overview of how we're using data to inform how we invest in early-stage founders. We'll be announcing more this summer but we're seeing some really interesting early data. https://lnkd.in/exU_Juf5

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In case you missed it last week, one of my favorite SaaS benchmark reports was released. Thanks to High Alpha and OpenView for the work and having us as a partner! This thing is stuffed full of insights on everything from growth rates, net revenue retention, ARR per FTE, and more. You can't build a great SaaS business without it! https://lnkd.in/ghKT_tBY

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“Harness is like having extra team members. Without Harness, there’s no way my team could support the company’s updated core platform and the many products we offer.” — Jonathan Call, Engineer Manager for SRE at Vivun. Feedback like this is such a testament to the Harness team's hard work over the years. Our customer Vivun has undergone a DevOps transformation with the help of our platform. The challenge:   Vivun's DevOps landscape was fragmented. Their monthly releases were risky, stressful, and a lot of work for everyone. During releases, developers and top executives would join calls to approve proposed changes verbally and manually test them in production. After implementing Harness: ⚡ Today, they ship on demand, not on monthly calls. ⚡ Previously, one DevOps engineer was needed for every 20-30 developers. Now a single person can support 50-75 engineers. ⚡  Developers are more effective with self-service. For example, using templates, they can now set up a robust deployment in mere minutes. Very proud to see the impact Harness is having! #GetShipDone More here: https://bit.ly/4hsT8Y5

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On this Tech Tuesday we're talking testing SDKs. Whether you're building SDKs or consuming SDKs someone else built, here are the topics to consider and ask your SDK vendor about.

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Converting PoCs to Contracts - A Lesson in Difficult Conversations Like going from dating to co-habitating, moving your first customer from pilot to contract is a Big Leap moment for early stage startups. Waiting too long to have the conversation is the most common mistake. You are afraid of rejection, so you never learn if your product is making life easier for your customer, let alone how much they will pay. The truth is, once your pilot is launched, you can't be too early in discussing what it will take to move to a contract. I just got off the phone with a startup CEO who told of countless meetings, waiving integration fees, hiring a dedicated employee and more all to get their first customer live. After several revised timelines and a reorg, the engagement was going sideways until he said "We can't do this for free anymore. We need to move to contract or we are done here." At first, the customer balked. But once they assessed the situation and realized how crucial the software was, they changed their mind. The startup is now on track to sign their first big deal. That wouldn't have happened without a difficult conversation. Early stage startups are fragile. Moving from pilot to contract is the first real test of so many things - your product value, your customer success, and the real competition. Unless you test your relationship by taking the leap, you'll never figure out if you've got something real.

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Early this year, we made tough changes at Brex to increase intensity, quality, and speed. 10 months later, after switching into founder mode, here’s how Brex is doing: 📈 Revenue growth accelerated nearly 3x in 2024, NRR up >15 points; burn rate down 70%. Customer acquisition up 50%; CAC paybacks improved 40%. 🏦 Enterprise business grew 91%, with NRR >130%. Now serving the largest organizations on the planet, with a combined market cap >$2.9T. ⚡️ 3 major product releases, 100+ features in each, and 4 new products in partnership with Stripe and Navan, serving startups through enterprises. NPS improved by 11 points. 🧠 Eliminated two layers of people management, elevating builders that operate at all levels and reconnecting leaders back to their craft. 💵 In 2025, we expect revenue growth to continue accelerating at scale, and to be the last year in which Brex burns money. … but the biggest change of 2024 is expecting nothing to ever come easy again. During our first 6 years of Brex, things just “happened.” We went from 0 to $100MM ARR in 16 months, despite many mistakes. This stopped being true in 2023, and it required a painful reset to bring our culture back into what it once was: a culture of builders, willing to go extra hard to build a generational company. This year taught me that taking the hard path, and running the company in a way that’s truly authentic to you, is worth the risk. The biggest risk of all is not gaining energy from the process itself – the only reliable source of energy to compound for decades to come. I hope this inspires other founders to make the changes they need to realize their company's full potential. ❤️ So grateful for everyone at Brex who made this year’s progress possible. Onwards! 🚀 Link in comments to read more.

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💌 Latest saas.wtf newsletter: The Rule of 40 and its applicability to small, profitable SaaS Just read an article by Sammy from Blossom Street Ventures about how most public SaaS companies are far from complying with the Rule of 40 - and that it may therefore lose its significance as a good rule of thumb / efficiency metric. My research, however, shows that those who demonstrate a good balance between growth and profitability currently trade at higher multiples than their less capital-efficient peers (based on data from Meritech Capital). Something similar can be observed in the private SaaS market - especially in the "micro cap" M&A space - as acquirers seem to favour companies with 20-30% growth + 10-20% profit margin over "growth at all costs". So you don't necessarily have to grow faster to get a better multiple at exit. More details and data in the article, link below. #saas #startups #founders #kpi #growth #efficiency

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Is double digit growth a sign of true product-market fit? Jason M. Lemkin at SaaStr does an excellent job at emphasizing the importance of metrics such as customer retention, engagement, and adoption rates in determining product market fit. Additionally, it discusses the significance of customer feedback, market demand validation, and the ability to solve a pressing problem for target customers. By focusing on these key indicators, startups can better assess and refine their product-market fit strategies for sustainable growth and success.

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We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

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You might be surprised by one of the key internal success metrics we track at Sequence: Volume of funds routed through our platform. Why is this so important? Because Volume of Funds Routed isn’t just a metric for us — it's a near-direct proxy to understand the growing trust and reliance of our users who are choosing to route their funds through our platform. At its core, this flow of money represents the core of our value proposition—enabling people and businesses to not only connect their financial accounts, but execute transfers with smart rules, all from a single platform. That's why I’m excited to share that we’ve now surpassed $150M in funds routed, a milestone that reflects double-digit growth from last month 🤯 A huge thank you to our customers for your trust and to our incredible Sequence team for driving this progress. Continuing to gather momentum into September 🚀

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Working with early stage start-ups I find that messaging and positioning is one of those fundamental things that requires a lot of attention and iteration. The stage of companies we invest in - have customers and are In Revenue;) - have early indications of product market fit - need to find go to market fit Clear and concise communication to the market is critical at this stage as it could be the difference between a great product that flounders and a great product that sells! My Partner Sean Kester wrote a fantastic 3 Part Series on SaaS Messaging and Positioning which focused on these three areas. 1. Development of clear and consistent messaging 2. Product positioning to different market segments 3. Alignment with Brand Strategy Check out the full breakdown linked in the comments and let us know if we missed anything. #GTMCheatcode

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A couple of weeks ago, I'd put out a post committing to helping 20 SaaS Operators become first-time CEOs (non-founders). https://lnkd.in/eX5gi2D2 Since then, 32 operators have reached out seeking support in getting to the seat. Majority being GTM leaders but also a good mix of Tech, Product, Finance, Operations, and HR leaders. Their collective experience ranges all the way from $2M - $21B ARR. Mix of VC, PE, bootstrapped & publicly traded companies. Here are a few common themes that emerged from their stories: 1. There is very little information available on "how" to get to the seat.     2. Most folks give up within a few months of the search, largely demotivated by the advice they receive from headhunters. While the need to connect with headhunters is understandable, remember most are simply working towards pre-defined criteria set by the Board/investors. Unless they are actively working with a Board/investor group open to a first-time CEO, there ain't going to be many words of encouragement.     3. Connecting the dots between current skillset / experience and the CEO's job feels like an insurmountable task. There's plenty of literature available on the CEO's role but very little that speaks to leveling up from a certain role (e.g CRO, CMO, CTO, etc)     4. Too many folks feel hamstrung talking about their story. "How do I cover for my skill gaps?" is a common question. In my experience, you don't! Instead, be brutally transparent about your strengths & gaps. That right company/role/board will find you. E.g. if a PE firm acquires a company with GTM being the biggest gap - they are likely looking for a GTM-savvy CEO.     5. "Not sure where to begin the search". It's true that most CEO opportunities are not publicly advertised, so the typical search approach may not work. One way is to begin by mapping out your ICP (replace customer with company) - industry, entry ARR, product category, etc, look for PEs/Holdcos that make acquisitions into that ICP, and request intros through your network. All of this is to say: Operators, please do not give up on your aspirations. Assuming the right intent, fit, foundational skills, and track record, not only is there a path to becoming a first-time non-founder CEO, but there are some great people out there specifically looking to make a bet on first-time candidates. On a separate note, this is probably my first time experiencing the power of LinkedIn. Given my limited reach (~3.4K followers), I wasn't expecting much of a response to that post, but the fact that over 30 first-time CEO aspirants reached out within 2 weeks encourages me to continue using this medium to "pay it forward." More soon!

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To double click on my post about controlling costs, you’d enjoy the introduction section of this Founders podcast episode on Sam Zell: https://lnkd.in/d5Hw_5xd All the way from Andrew Carnegie, some of the most successful business builders have stressed controlling costs as critical to long term success. It is crucial to understand that controlling costs and spending less are wildly different things. ps: David Senra of the Founders podcast has a number of examples of leaders who made cost control a key part of how they built their businesses. Just listen to the intro section of the recent 10 episodes for it. Also, if by any chance, you’ve never listened to Founders podcast before, you may have just discovered gold, or something even more valuable :)

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