sutton020

One thing I've been thinking about for a while is how to make Board Meetings as effective as possible. If you want to read some great posts about the topic by people who've been to many, many more Board Meetings (and apparently Bored Meetings!) than I, check out these links: Brad Feld's initial post on the topic back in 2004 Reactions by Fred Wilson ( post 1 , post 2 , post 3 ) More recent posts by Brad Feld and Fred Wilson , as well as Mark Suster In my opinion it's not that much about whether a Board Meeting is boring or not (but the little pun makes for a good headline so I used it too). It's easy to have a good time in a Board Meeting – you talk about a variety of business issues, you learn from other Board Members' experiences, people tell anecdotes etc. It happens rarely that I'm bored in a Board Meeting, but non-boring does not yet equal effective. The questions that I often ask myself after a Board Meeting are: What are the real, tangible, actionab...

I recently wrote that investors (myself included) should do a better job of making their investment criteria transparent to founders. Today I'd like to tell you a bit more about what we at Point Nine Capital are looking for in SaaS startups (other sectors are something for another blog post). To put it as simple as possible, the health of a SaaS business is mainly determined by two factors: Customer lifetime value (CLTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC). One could almost say that CAC and CLTV are for a SaaS company what wholesale price and sales price are for a retailer. Just like a merchant needs to buy products and sell them at a higher price, a SaaS business needs to acquire customers at costs that are lower than the customers' lifetime value. Costs of goods sold are minimal for a company selling software over the Web, and costs like product development decrease as a percentage of revenue when you get to bigger scale. So for a bigger SaaS player, sales and marketing co...