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Showing posts from January, 2017

Impressions from the 5th annual PNC SaaS Founder Meetup (AKA PNC SaaS Camp)

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We have a tradition here at Point Nine that once a year, we organize a meetup for the founders of our SaaS portfolio companies. The first meetup took place in SF back in 2012 and gave the founders in our (at that time still rather small) portfolio a unique opportunity to learn about what works and what doesn't work in SaaS, compare notes and share war stories. About two months ago, the 5th annual PNC SaaS Founder Meetup took place in a small lake town a little bit outside of Berlin. To celebrate the 5th anniversary, we turned the meetup into a 48-hour long "camp" and invited about 150 founders and key people from our SaaS portfolio companies, along with a handful of external SaaS experts, to a nice resort close to Potsdam. Here's a short video that we recorded at the meetup: Spending two full days and two full nights together not only allowed us to put together an amazing agenda with more than 60 presentations and workshops; it also led to countless great conversatio...

SaaS Funding Napkin, the 2017 edition

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Today is January 10, 2017. That means that in ten days, this jerk will become the leader of the free world. Ugh. It still feels surreal to me. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. As a reminder, in the original post I tried to give a "back of a napkin" answer to this question: What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016? Today I'd like to take a stab at the (early) 2017 answer to that question. Like in the 2016 version, the assumption is that the founding team is relatively "unproven". Founders with significant previous exits can raise large seed rounds at high valuations early on, so the "rules" are different for them. On another note, when I say "what does it take to raise capital" I mean "what does it take to have an easy time raising capital from great investors ". If your company doesn't meet the (very high) bar pic...