sutton020

In our weekly investment team call earlier this week we decided to pass on two early-stage SaaS startups that were both on track to grow from zero to $100k in MRR in their first 12 months of going live. Both companies clearly had impressive traction, but in both cases we weren’t convinced of the market size and the opportunity to build a large, sustainable company. (We of course might be wrong, and maybe we’ll have to add both companies to our growing anti-portfolio list in a couple of years. I’ll keep you posted.) Had I seen a SaaS startup with this growth curve in my first 2-3 years of SaaS investing (in 2008-2010) I probably would have asked “where do I have to sign?”. And chances are that it would have been a good investment. The reason is that at that time, growing from zero to $100k in MRR within 12 months was extremely rare and an indication of not only a great product and excellent execution but also a great market opportunity. One could argue that I saw much fewer deals in ge...

[This post first appeared on Point Nine Land, our Medium channel .] A few years ago I wrote about some of the tools that we’re using to run a VC fund in the Cloud . Nicolas later followed up with more details about our tech stack . Today I’d like to provide a quick update on how our SaaS stack has evolved, as well as share a couple of little tools and hacks that help me (sort of) keep (a little bit of) my sanity. Part 1: The Basics Zendesk continues to be our lifeblood. Since we started using Zendesk to manage our deal-flow about six years ago, we’ve logged more than 18,000 potential investments, and every month, several hundred new ones are being added. Processing so many new deals in a timely fashion is no easy feat (kudos to Savina , Louis and Robin who are doing the bulk of that work!) and wouldn’t be possible without Zendesk. Zendesk obviously hasn’t been built for this use case, but the ability to customize the software with triggers, automations, macros and other features has...