The Four Vital Signs of SaaS For Early Stage Startups
While there are many metrics used to measure a SaaS startup, there are four basic metrics that provide the fundamental “Vital Signs” for business health: Growth, Sales Efficiency, Burn Rate, and Churn. Using proprietary data gathered from over 1,000 private companies in Scale Studio, Dale Chang - Operating Partner at Scale Venture Partners - will discuss the four SaaS Vital Signs and reveal benchmarks you can use to gauge the health of your business as well as how to present this data to VCs for your next funding round.
This is an intimate event co-hosted by Fika Ventures and Scale Venture Partners with Q&A at the end.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
SaaS metrics you need to track at the Seed, Series A, Series B+ stages
Vital Signs calculations you can start using immediately
Board deck formatting and presentation best practices
SPEAKERS:
Dale Chang, Operating Partner at Scale Venture Partners
Dale advises Scale’s portfolio companies on optimizing their go-to-market strategies and orienting decision-making around data and performance benchmarks.
Previously, Dale was a Director at the Alexander Group, a consulting firm specialized in go-to-market strategy. At the Alexander Group, he was the leader of the Cloud practice and advised companies including Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Box, Docusign, New Relic, Optimizely, and MixPanel. Prior to his career in consulting, he worked in sales and sales operations roles at startups including Proofpoint and Jaspersoft.
John Chen, Principal at Fika Ventures.
John has spent his entire early career working with SaaS entrepreneurs, both on the operating and investing side.
John began his journey in the world of enterprise at Box, where he served as Chief of Staff to Aaron Levie. Having joined during the pre-IPO growth phase, John drove numerous strategic initiatives in sales, marketing and business development including the launch of Box.org, which today serves over 9,000 nonprofits including The World Bank, Teach for America, Charity Water, and Kiva.
Later, John joined Emergence Capital, a leading early-stage venture capital firm in enterprise cloud. At Emergence, John co-led Series A investments in CrunchBase and SimpleLegal, where he served as Board Observer and was also closely involved with Emergence’s investments in LogDNA, Project44, DroneDeploy, UpKeep, Guru, and Blend Labs.
Chris Yin, Principal at Scale Venture Partners.
Chris focused on investments in intelligent business software, vertical AI companies, and data-first businesses. He helped source Scale's investment in Archipelago (2021), Flatfile (2021) and Spruce (2020). A veteran Product Manager, he has held senior roles at several successful startups. Prior to joining Scale, Chris was VP Product at Rainforest QA, a QA automation platform where he built and led the product, design, support, and community teams and developed the company’s product strategy and roadmap.
Chris was also Director of Product Management at Coupa Software, helping to grow the company from a startup to a publicly traded company. He started his career at Xpenser, an expense management product that was acquired by Coupa.
Special thanks to our valued sponsors for their generous support:
First Republic Bank, Wilson Sonsini, Prospera Law
Carta, Deloitte, PWC, Justworks, Safire Partners