Just got an email from the CEO of new SVB Tim Mayopoulos. This means that @FDICgov completed a bank take over, got the operations back on track (monies moving today) and now closed a CEO search all within four days. US Government For The Win
Rory O'Driscoll
1,064 posts
Rory O'Driscoll
@rodriscoll
venture capitalist @scalevp
- At the end of the SaaS era, it wasn’t totally clear where the industry was headed. There were some false starts and evolutionary dead ends. Since ChatGPT, however, the direction of enterprise B2B for the next decade has been made obvious: rearchitecting the enterprise stack to
- Simple but huge insight. VC wants companies to get big fast. PE wants moderate growth, low competition and the ability to raise prices without huge churn. This may mean that PE is not the savior for stranded formerly high growth venture backed companies in competitive markets.vSaaS companies almost always have gotten valued lower than their horizontal peers when raising VC. Why? Probably growth, they just typically grow slower. GTM's are harder. Less marketing/product led due to industry requirements. More sales led. But when it comes to PE the
- Given yesterday's SaaS Apocalypse I feel good about this post from 2019. Summary, (from 2019) SaaS growth will slow, markets will consolidate and the best survival strategy is move to AI.
- Best reason for blogging is it forces me to distill my thoughts. Finally got my post done on SaaS growth rates, and the Mendoza line, @TechCrunch tcrn.ch/2Ca6FPb.
- We are buying at 200 to sell at 6 What could go wrongThe entire software category has crashed in public markets but thankfully AI startups still raise at 200x ARR, so we’re still BACK, all good
- Congrats to @WalkMeInc and the team led by @DanAdika on the acquisition by @SAP. It has a pleasure being on the board for the past ten years and seeing the company grow from from a $1.5M run rate to almost $300M. Learned a lot, hopefully helped a little and did right by our LPs!We’re excited to announce that WalkMe has entered into a definitive agreement to join the @SAP family! This acquisition integrates our digital adoption platform with SAP’s extensive ecosystem and generative AI capabilities, including SAP Copilot Joule. news.sap.com/2024/06/sap-en…
- Corp Dev to @JeffBezos. Spend $9bn & get a $200m software business or spend $4bn more and disrupt the $5 trillion grocery market. Jeff: "ok"
- Working backwards from a higher, but still realistic IPO bar of a $250 MM run rate at IPO this post shows how much faster startups have to grow at every step along that journey to be a realistic IPO candidate. Its a sobering message.We created a tool to help founders sketch out what their path to IPO might look like—how big they need to be and how fast they need to grow at every stage in their journey. scalevp.com/insights/the-p…
- Latest post is on Vital Signs for SaaS, four simple SaaS metrics that allow you to benchmark v hundreds of companies. techcrunch.com/2019/02/26/mea… Hard numbers on Revenue Growth, Sales Efficiency, Churn and Burn @scalevp Numbers not anecdotes
- Base case planning assumptions right now scalevp.com/blog/admitting… First flash results Q1 - significant company specific variations in impact - based on IT reprioritization for Covid
- The most aggressive person will look the smartest just before the crash because the more risk you’ve taken, the more money you’ve made. That same person is going to get hurt the most on the downside. Logically, what you’re actually trying to figure out is how aggressive you can
- After five thousand years signing is digital scalevp.com/blog/docusign-… congrats to the whole team, @DocuSign from @scalevp @rodriscoll #WeDocuSign
- It may be apocryphal but the Red Army quote applies to A16Z at $10Bn : “Quantity has a quality all its own.” They are a wildly talented team and could win at any fund size from a $100M seed fund on up but it’s extra nice when your strategy means you can flood the zone and
