sutton020

Who ever said only startups love vanity metrics? Here's our revenge for all those misleading stats that we have to muddle through almost on a daily basis when startups pitch us! Yesterday I saw this post on the blog of Karlin Ventures. In response to a tweet by Paul Graham which was highlighted in Danielle Morrill's  excellent Mattermark Daily  newsletter,  the guys at Karlin Ventures revealed the "days since last contact" numbers for their portfolio. Here are the numbers for the 26 active companies in our current fund, Point Nine Capital II: As written in Karlin Ventures' blog post, frequent communication is by no means a guarantee for helpfulness. Sometimes companies are in a phase in which the best thing an investor can do is to shut up and let the founders do their jobs. More often than not, though, I feel that a very close relationship and between founders and investors is a good sign. So – take a look at the stats above but don't read too much into the...

First of all, a Happy New Year to all readers of this blog. I hope you've had a great start into the new year, and I wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous (and of course  SaaSy ) 2014. I've done a bit of reflection on what I've learned in the last couple of months. Here are six things that I think SaaS founders should keep in mind in 2014. This is obviously not meant as a definite or comprehensive list by any means. Rather, it's a synopsis of some of the things that keep me up at night these days. 1) Have the right mix of paranoia and patience In the spirit of Andy Grove  you need to be paranoid  about becoming and staying the #1 player in your market. For a variety of reasons, most SaaS markets have "winner takes most" characteristics, so you have to do everything you can to dominate your market. But since we're still in the early days of Cloud adoption and since it usually takes 5-10 years to build a large SaaS company, you also need lots of  pati...