“You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. We recently hosted the Point Nine Founders Summit, featuring several panels and presentations from founders, CFOs, COOs, and sales execs on building early sales teams and hiring your first successful sales…

Unveiling the 2023 SaaS Funding Napkin — At the annual SaaStr conference in San Mateo three weeks ago, I delved into fundraising trends in 2023, discussing the implications of investors’ new-found love for efficiency vs. growth at all costs for founders, and why you should expect AI to come up in (almost) every pitch meeting. Here’s a…

One of the lessons I, along with many other founders and investors, have learned in my roughly 15-year journey in SaaS investing is that most businesses adopt new technologies at a painfully slow pace. This might sound like an odd statement, considering how rapidly products like YouTube, Instagram, and, more…

The 2023 edition of our market map and some learnings — For those of you who follow us, it’s no secret that we, at Point Nine, have been big fans of market maps, of marketplaces, and, increasingly so, of B2B marketplaces, since 2016 and our investment in REKKI. Fast forward 7 years, and we’ve partnered with 11 B2B marketplaces, spoken to…

Introducing the Founder Salary Calculator 2023 — Several years ago, I did a bit of research into founder compensation and created a simple model that calculates what a typical founder salary might look like based on a few input factors. The post became surprisingly popular — not because it was based on particularly extensive benchmarking research…

…or why this software investor has a crush on hardware It’s hard to find a VC who doesn’t love software, and for good reason. For one, you don’t need much to get started. There are no supply chains to sort out, no factories, no purchasing huge amounts of inventory up…

Everything you always wanted to know about cohort analysis (but were afraid to ask) — Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post titled “Know your user cohorts”, which began like this: “One of the most important tools to better understand the usage of a web application — or a service, a game or a mobile app, it doesn’t matter — is a cohort…

Last week, Marc Andreessen published a blog post titled “Why AI Will Save the World”. He begins by enumerating the ways AI will improve all aspects of life. I 100% agree with everything here. I can’t wait until every child has an “infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful”…

Times for VC fundraising are tough. Led by a decline in listed stocks, the private markets have equally been caught by bearish investor sentiment and lower valuations. Later stages, where public valuations are a more important benchmark, are particularly affected, but investors in seed and series A rounds have become…