The first of a four part post on the changes in the venture capital industry over the last five years, who wins and who loses and why. Continue reading

What is the opportunity for SaaS in the next ten years Continue reading

I recently had to give a talk on trends in SaaS and the cloud. Attached is the full powerpoint. Some of it is plain vanilla, but doing it helped crystallize in my mind what drove the last ten years and what are the key trends that will matter over the next ten years. This slide shows what I would say are key learnings from investing in SaaS over the past ten years. First SaaS is a business model, and a computing architecture, it is not a market. CRM is a market, web analytics is a market, ERP software is a... Continue reading

China, India, Israel, Russia, even France...They probably have not been all on the same side of a UN vote since World War II but all of them have looked at the US venture model and said “we want that.” Continue reading

Facebook is used as a case study in benchmarking private growth companies against their public market counterparts to establish realistic valuations for investing as a venture capitalist. Continue reading

The eight years from 2001 to 2008 has been the period of the Great Slow Reset. But now in the period of the New Normal, lower amounts of capital in the venture ecosystem will result slowly but inexorably in better returns for the industry as a whole. Venture returns are going up. Continue reading

For the last seven years the venture capital industry has been saying that the IPO process is broken and start ups will suffer as a result. In a fine display of Wall Street’s can do attitude; Goldman Sachs has gone and produced an alternative to an IPO; one where the clear winner is the start up, Facebook. Continue reading

Scale Venture Partners Managing Director Rory O'Driscoll explains the exceptions to the firm's launch or later investment approach and how vision and conviction about a business is crucial. Continue reading

VC common wisdom says you should never recruit a COO because it's likely a weak compromise for replacing the CEO. Scale Venture Partners' Managing Director Rory O'Driscoll highlights the exceptions to the rule from companies like Facebook and to ScaleVP portfolio companies Box.net and Zonelabs. Continue reading

Winning on the Internet is distinctly different for consumer web companies and Software as a Service companies. SaaS companies must develop an efficient and predictable marketing and sales machine, then decide when and how aggressively to fuel that machine with investment. Continue reading

What should a founder really be looking for in picking a venture board member? Continue reading

Reviewing the financials of twelve public software as a service (SaaS) companies to see what metrics are the best predictors of success in a subscription business. Continue reading

First of three posts that show how an easy to calculate metric for sales efficiency is a great guide as to when to invest aggressively in a subscription revenue business. Continue reading

Last week Box.net announced Scale Venture Partners had made an investment in Box.net. We are happy to finally be investors, after having been foolish enough not to invest in early 2009. We were admittedly distracted by financial armageddon but there can be no good excuse for missing a great deal. The only mitigation is to follow up, and invest later. This we have now done. The team, led by founders Aaron Levie (CEO) and Dylan Smith (CFO), has built a great service and are building a great company. Box allows users to store content “in the cloud” and access it... Continue reading