sutton020

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. you're successfully  hunting flies or mice ), someone needs to build a scalable sales organization, whether it's an inside sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting elephants ). It's also one of the toughest hires. Jason M. Lemkin gave an epic talk about the subject at our 3rd annual SaaS Founder Meetup, last year in San Francisco . Jason also wrote extensively about the topic on SaaStr . If you haven't read his articles yet, make sure you read all of them. As Jason explained in this post , one of the things that makes hiring the right VP of Sales so hard is the timing. If you try to hire your "Mr. Make it Repeatable" or your "Ms. Go Big" VP of Sales too early , say at $500k in ARR, you'll almost certai...

When founders reach out to us to pitch us for an investment, they usually have a fundraising deck which they’re happy to send over. But every so often it also happens that a founder wants to set up a call or a meeting before sending over any material. In these cases I usually ask the founder if he or she could send us a deck first, with a view to have a call or meeting as a potential second step. But every time I do this, it makes me feel uncomfortable because I don’t want to come across as impolite, arrogant or unapproachable. In this post I’d like to give some background on how we work, which will hopefully make it easier to understand our behavior in the scenario I described above. I have understanding for founders who want to walk us through their story and vision rather than sending over some slides. A startup is a founder’s baby which they often have a deeply emotional relationship with, and it’s understandable that when they pitch it, they want to leave the best possible first i...

Today we’ve announced Point Nine Capital III, our new €55M fund. Investors in PNC III include institutional investors like Horsley Bridge Partners , Sapphire Ventures , Flossbach von Storch and Vintage Investment Partners as well as a number of highly successful Internet entrepreneurs. To our existing LPs: Thank you for your continued trust! To the new ones: Welcome on board! When we raised PNC II , our goal was to build a leading independent European early-stage venture capital firm. While it’s still very early days for us, we think we’ve made good progress towards that goal in the last years. PNC II was based on a couple of ideas and principles: Live Berlin, think world We saw a strong need for a Berlin-based seed VC because Berlin was starting to become a great startup destination, yet there was not a single VC that was headquartered in the city. At the same time, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to investing only in Berlin (or only in Germany for that matter) because we saw grea...