Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com.
In Our First Ever Episode of This Week in SaaS
1. PluralSight Goes to Zero:
WTF happened to PluralSight? How did it go from $3.5BN to $0? Will this have a wider impact on the willingness of PE to buy tech companies? Who are the next contenders to go from hero to zero? Zendesk? Anaplan? Will this generation of PE funds be let off by their LPs for a poor vintage?
2. Salesforce's Worst Stock Market Drop Since 2004 + Mongo Takes a 23% Hit:
Why did Salesforce lose $50BN of market cap in a single day? Is the same true for MongoDB taking a 23% hit in one day? What does it mean when the new normal is these once hyper-growth companies now growing only 6% per annum?
3. The Settlers into Slow Growth:
Why does Jason believe that Dropbox and Box have both settled into a world of slow growth? What happens to Twilio from here in a world post Jeff Lawson? What happens to Retool from this point on? Would Jason be a buyer of Notion at $10BN?
4. Venture Capital is Broken:
Why does Jason believe that we need to see a relation of public multiples for the math in venture capital to work again? Why does Jason believe that the way we mark portfolios with TVPI leads to corrupt and bad behaviour? How does Jason think we will solve the problem of liquidity with IPOs being shut, M&A being out of the window and now PE being a doubt as the source of buyers?