As a child I collected baseball cards. As an adult, I now collect benchmarking reports.
Do yourself a favor and bookmark this list in your Chrome browser (or Microsoft Edge browser, if you’re a complete psychopath) for ease of reference. It will be especially helpful during annual planning season when you’ll need to sanity check:
Revenue Growth
Productivity
Profitability
Speaking of planning, this Thursday we’ll be releasing Part 4 of our 5 part series on Annual Planning. Here are the first 3:
You can get access to the complete series and templates by upgrading to paid here:
Operational Benchmarks:
SaaS Benchmarks Report by OpenView (2022 results)
Financial and Operating Benchmarks Report by OpenView (2021 results)
Expansion SaaS Benchmarks by OpenView (2020 results)
Expansion SaaS Benchmarks by OpenView (2019 results)
Topline Growth & Operational Efficiency by ICONIQ (As of September of 2022)
The Cloud 100 Benchmarks by Bessemer (2022 results)
Scaling to $100M by Bessemer (As of September of 2021)
The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index by Bessemer (As of 2023)
Public SaaS Comparables by Meritech (As of 2023)
KBCM Private Company SaaS Survey by Keybanc (2022 results)
KBCM Private Company SaaS Survey by Keybanc (2021 results)
KBCM Private Company SaaS Survey by Keybanc (COVID) (2020 results)
KBCM Private Company SaaS Survey by Keybanc (2019 results)
KBCM Private Company SaaS Survey by Keybanc (2018 results)
KBCM Private Company SaaS Survey by Keybanc (2017 results)
Pacific Crest Private SaaS Company Survey by Pacific Crest (2016 results)
Pacific Crest Private SaaS Company Survey by Pacific Crest (2015 results)
Pacific Crest Private SaaS Company Survey by Pacific Crest (2014 results)
Procurement Benchmarks:
The SaaS Trends Report by Vendr (As of Q1 of 2023)
Talent and Compensation Benchmarks:
State of SaaS Talent by OpenView (As of 2023)
The Definitive Guide to Sales Compensation by ICONIQ (As of May 2023)
The SaaS Org Chart by David Sacks (As of July 2021)
Revenue per Employee Benchmarking by SaaS Capital (As of November 2021)
The “Run the Numbers” Podcast
If you’ve been granted equity in the company you work for, do yourself a big favor and listen to this episode. A couple of items we touched on:
Why employees should cash in on secondary transactions
How to ask your CFO about your equity
When someone once tried to expense a chainsaw (no, seriously)
Episode 2 with Ivan Makarov of Webflow live on:
Mostly Mountains
I’m fresh off a week in Leadville, Colorado, where we held our finance team offsite. Planning for next year is hard. Planning at 10,000 feet altitude will make your head spin.
Quote I’ve Been Pondering
“Every successful business is a loosely functioning disaster”
-Brent Beshore, via Morgan Housel
What I’m Looking Forward to
Dates: Sep 12—22, 2023.
My friends and are putting on a kickass bootcamp for tech professionals, SaaS operators, SaaS investors, and Cybersecurity professionals.
Thomas Robb used to be a leading software research analyst at Morgan Stanley's NYC SaaS research team and is currently a senior finance director at OneTrust. And Francis Odum is a leading voice for the cybersecurity community.
The program is built around in-depth case studies of Datadog, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, with expert guest speakers from these companies.
