1. DUE DILIGENCE - PART THREE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES. This five-part series (delivered over five weeks) covers how most VC's approach the quantitative part of doing diligence on potential investments. PART 3: COHORTS AND REVENUE - The Curve is Important!
2. BIG TECH: A few years ago, Ben Thompson from Startechery, proposed the Aggregation Theory, where Tech companies at scale provide a commoditization affect into markets (as they are uniquely enabled by very low marginal costs and high user preference). Think Airbnb and Uber for trust, Amazon and Netflix for choice, and Google and Facebook for advertising. This week we reached a deep inflection point of this aggregation with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) announcing large scale Antitrust reviews into Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.
3. SAAS METRICS: Customer Churn Rate (CCR) is an important part of understanding big churn trends (with its sibling being revenue churn). High growth businesses that are increasing Life Time Value per customer (LTV) are likely experiencing negative revenue churn (where LTV is expanding at a pace greater than revenue churn). A counterintuitive net result from this may also be a high customer churn rate (as low-value customers exit). Check this in-depth post from Loomly on how they approached CCR and LTV/CAC ratios.
4. SEGMENTATION: A SaaS business doesn’t cater exclusively to just one type of customer. So in order to focus in on engagement strategies and cater to the needs and problems of these different customer types, segmentation is key. Forbes provides 3 segmentation strategies here and from SaaSx, a well thought our segmentation caveat article (and accompanying podcast).
5. NEWSLETTERS: Email Newsletters are powerful marketing tools and very popular (you’re reading one right now!). Brian Dean has written The Definitive Guide on what he has learned building out a list with almost 150k subscribers (almost as many as this one ;-))
6. PRICING: Pricing will never be perfect and a constantly evolving problem to solve. Here is a great list of the top 5 common SaaS pricing mistakes (and also how to avoid them).
7. CUSTOMER JOURNEY: Visualizing the various interactions via customer journey mapping is replacing traditional sales funnel strategies as a means to close sales. 
8. FOUNDERS: A great article on the lessons learned through the journey of a startup……..which may not end with a founder in charge: "A founder creates something from nothing. A CEO manages something that already exists. They’re two totally different jobs"
9. CX TRANSFORMATION. The Customer Experience (CX) has never been more critical in todays business environments. From McKinsey comes the A, B, Cs of pulling together the building blocks of a customer-experience transformation
10. WEWORK: 2019 has been quite the year for tech IPO’s (so far) and WeWork has (officially) thrown their hat into the IPO ring, announcing that they plan to go public in September, targeting a share sale of about $3.5 billion.

POD OF THE WEEK: From our good buddy David Skok, choosing the right metrics for the right growth stage.

BONUS: Spread the word! LAUNCH Scale conference is October 7-8 in San Francisco. Designed for founders to learn next-level growth and fundraising strategies from the best founders and investors in Silicon Valley. They are giving away the first 1,000 tickets to founders for free.  launchscale.net/founderpass

1. DUE DILIGENCE - PART TWO OF A FIVE PART SERIES. This five part series (over the next five weeks) covers how most VC's approach the quantitative part of doing diligence on potential investments. PART 2: REVENUE GROWTH (and the dreaded Churn!)
2. CAC PAYBACK: In the SaaS world, Cash is king. Understanding cash flow over time is critical and one of the most important metrics for cash is CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) payback. It’s the single best measure of efficiency. Here is a great deep dive from Open View on how to calculate it (and why it matters) with a complimentary article on how to drive that number down.
3. INFLUENCER MARKETING: From Business Insider we have a report on the power of influencers in Brand Marketing and Google provide handy insight on how to build a full-funnel influencer marketing campaign. To finish here is some crazy data on the amount of screen time influencers consume (it’s crazy high)
4. SHAPE UP: Another term for your tech dictionaries. Software product development requires innovative strategies based on todays cadence expectations of continuous integration, micro-services, feature delivery, and scale. The team at Basecamp (I’m an old school fan) have developed ShapeUp, their publications and toolbox of techniques designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to designing, prioritizing and shipping product/features.
5. BOARD: Anu Hariharan shares some collective wisdom on best practices in managing a board (including running board meetings and overcoming board issues).
6. LIFECYCLE: A really great article (and PDF) on understanding the the SaaS customer lifecycle from CoBloom and the stages within the acquisition, engagement and retention phases.
7. sCOMMERCE: Not really a thing yet for your dictionaries yet as I just made the term up. But it stands for Social Commerce. Here is a Business Insider report on Social Commerce. Little teaser fact: The US social commerce market will be worth $22 billion in 2019 and soar to $84.2 billion by 2024.
8. AI: How many Artificial Intelligence projects do you currently have underway? Well according to Gartner, organizations working with artificial intelligence and machine learning have an average of four projects currently in place, and plan to add 15 more within the next three years (and have 35 in total). Revenues from the AI market worldwide are expected to hit $118.6 billion USD by 2025 according to Statista/Tractica.
9. MMM: Another acronym! This one means Marketing Mix Modeling. This method helps measure the impact of efforts across different channels, and it’s a crucial tool for guiding budget decisions. Google break it down as a step by step guide for digital/media/video efforts.
10. SPACE TECH: Who are the biggest VC Investors in Space Tech? PitchBook take a look.

 
POD OF THE WEEK:  From Y-Combinator. A short and sweet (sub 2 minute) snippet of what successful Founders choose to focus on.  

BONUS: This one is a hilarious Chrome Extension featured on Product Hunt called Netflix Hangouts. It basically disguises Netflix in a fake four-person conference call. Such a terrible idea! 

1. DUE DILIGENCE - A FIVE PART SERIES. This five part series (over the next five weeks) covers how most VC's approach the quantitative part of doing diligence on potential investments. PART 1: USER GROWTH (and getting beyond vanity metrics)
2. CAC PAYBACK: Cash is king in the SaaS world and the shorter the payback period is for the acquisition (CAC) the better (getting to cash flow positive). Here is an article that looks at ways to shorten CAC Payback.
3. UNICORNS: The Unicorns of 2019 are looking a lot more American and Autonomous (and there are about 50 so far)
4. CAPITAL: Series B rounds put tech companies into a new category and really signify a maturity of a company. Because of this, it’s also a really challenging round to raise. Tomasz Tunguz writes here on Series B Challenges and 
5. B2B GROWTH: How to scale B2B sales and build a revenue rocket ship - this is a fantastically detailed guide from Juro (and a might fine example of content marketing with teeth) 
6. AI: Air Street Capital shares their perspective of AI developments over the last 12 months. It’s a whopper of a slide deck (and not pretty). But the info in there is incredible, covering research, industry, politics, and talent.
7. ATTRIBUTION: In the digital and ecommerce world, more and more efforts are Direct to Consumer (DTC) and the biggest challenge when leveraging digital marketing channels is around attribution (as they are all trying to make the claim). This article really breaks down how to measure attribution in a world where you don’t have to give Facebook all of your money.
8. SALES COMPENSATION: Recruiting is hard - motivating and retaining sales people is harder and understanding compensation levels is a key motivating crucial lever. This article outlines great insight on how to identify the right KPI’s and set the right targets.
9. FEEDBACK: G2 is a highly regarded software review site, G2 and its competitors such as Capterra are amazing places for product discovery and need to be a part of every B2B and B2C SaaS companies marketing agenda. G2 just published it’s latest list of the top Enterprise Feedback Management Software products (based on user satisfaction) and NZ’s own Ask Nicely topped the list.
10. SHE VC: Only 2.2% of VC money goes into female founded startups and Female venture partners make up just 9% of the VC industry so earlier this week Gayatri Sarkar (a General Partner at Blockchain VC Fund SportVEST) launched SheVC which will feature unconventional investment stories and women VC voices to bring change to the venture investment world.

​
POD OF THE WEEK:  From SaaStr a practical perspective on the frameworks that can help SaaS businesses move upmarket.

BONUS: Share with anyone traveling to the US. Watch out AirBnB and WeLive, Sonder is a startup that rents serviced, furnished apartments in hip urban neighborhoods - they raised $225 million this week (with a valuation north of $1 billion). The company says it tripled the number of rentable units in its online marketplace last year to top 8,500 spaces in 20 cities. 

1. UPSELL: Sammy Abdullah of Blossom Street Ventures backs up my on-going opinion that net dollar retention (and by proxy upsell) is the most important metric in SaaS
2. SAAS MULTIPLES: Tomasz Tunguz frequently reviews public traded SaaS companies forward multiples. They are currently edging up to a seven-year high average at 9.6x (which is a recovery as it dropped to 7.7x at the end of 2018). Check out newly Public Company, Zoom in his article - an amazing 44.1x forward multiple!
3. SAAS: Complimentary to the above article, Global spending on cloud-based software generated $23 billion in Q1 and is set to pass $100 Billion ARR for the year. It’s a big milestone. And the company on top of that? Well, it’s not Salesforce anymore. That perch has been poached a while back by Microsoft as the company continues on its strategic business model pivot and they now represent a whopping 17% of the enterprise SaaS market. Interesting to also see Adobe creeping into 3rd place (and past SAP and Oracle). 
4. CADENCE: The cadence at which a company operates is set by Senior Leadership, who keeps the rhythm and beat. Startups and Tech companies operate at a fast cadence, often reporting on a weekly basis, some teams daily. But even in larger scale corporates, the top economic performers follow a faster rhythm than their industry counterparts.
5. GROWTH: Two-sided marketplace businesses (such as Uber and Airbnb) face chicken/egg dilemmas when it comes to supply and demand. Here is a curated list from a16z’s Andrew Chen’s on 28 ways to grow the supply side of a marketplace.
6. 5G: This next generation of wireless tech will really blur the line between internet and cellular data connectivity. This report from Business Insider focuses on the threat to the home internet market in the US from Cellular telcos and this report focuses on 5G deployments (Stateside) so far. 
7. CUSTOMER: Survey Monkey has a downloadable PDF on 7 ways a company can actionably put customers first, compare that to HubSpot who also have their (CRM Focused) 7 step version.
8. FUNDING: Point Nine Capital have just updated their famous SaaS Napkin for 2019 (it’s awesome) and also provided a complimentary publication on what it takes to raise capital (in SaaS) in 2019.
9. MOBILE METRICS: When it comes to being a Mobile-first business, what are the metrics that matter? ChartMogul has put together this ultimate guide/Cheat Sheet (downloadable as a PDF!)
10. SAASTR: SaaStr just hosted their first European conference last month and it was hugely successful (with Cecelia Shand from our London offices attending). Here is an attendee report on top lessons for B2B SaaS companies learned at SaaStr Europa. SaaStr have also recently announced a new event this August in SF called SaaStr Scale.​

POD OF THE WEEK: From Y-Combinator. Great discussion on organizing and running Growth Teams. A fantastic discussion on what to do beyond founder-salesian a startup.

BONUS: Y-Combinator run a (FREE!) online course for founders called Startup School (FUN FACT: Thematic were recruited into the physical Y-Combinator Accelerator from this online class and are featured on the landing page). The 10 week course begins July 22, 2019 (Did I mention it’s FREE for everyone to participate). Registration here.