Stories from Cracking the Code
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"10 Things Every CEO Needs to Know About Product Design" unveiled at the Bessemer Annual Cloud CEO Conference
Cracking the Code &bull May 25, 2010
For the third year in a row, Bessemer hosted its Cloud CEO Conference, assembling roughly 100 CEOs/CxOs of our cloud and rich internet applications portfolio companies (Yelp, LinkedIn, Playdom, Zoosk, Smule, Wix, Eloqua, Teamviewer, Cornerstone OnDemand, Intacct, Criteo, Bizo and many others)… Full Story »
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Getting through the downturn: a few thoughts for SaaS companies planning their 2009 budget
Cracking the Code &bull Nov 13, 2008
A few days ago, Bessemer West Coast SaaS Practice - David Cowan , Byron Deeter and myself, hosted a CFO Dinner for our SaaS portfolio at John Bentley's in Redwood City . A couple months ago, when we started planning this dinner, we thought we would use most of the time to debate SaaS metrics, the business model as well as our recent update on the "Bessemer 10 laws of SaaS" , but, in the meantime, the macro-economic climate changed drastically and we decided to focus the discussion on the impact of the current environment on 2009 planning. Fifteen CFO's… Full Story »
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The Bessemer 10 laws of SaaS - Fall 2008 Release
Cracking the Code &bull Oct 10, 2008
When we first published Bessemer's Top 10 Laws for Being "SaaS-y" in early 2008 in conjunction with our annual invitation-only SaaS CEO Summit, we were overwhelmed with the positive response and feedback we received. We continue to incorporate the best elements of this feedback into our evolving SaaS success profile that follows below. Like SaaS products themselves, we now intend for these laws to be periodically refined through major releases to reflect the changing landscape of the SaaS world. Tune before you scale: the Sales Learning Curve is even more critical for SaaS and it takes at least $300k MRR… Full Story »
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Churchill Club 2008 Top 10 Tech Trends
Cracking the Code &bull May 15, 2008
I attended yesterday the 10th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends organized by the Churchill Club at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. This year, the panel included Steve Jurveston from DFJ, Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital, Roger McNamee from Elevation Partners and Joe Schoendorf from Accel. The panel was moderated… Full Story »
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The 10 laws of SaaS unveiled at Bessemer CEO Summit
Cracking the Code &bull Feb 4, 2008
A few times per year, Bessemer organizes a CxO event for our portfolio companies and we decided to focus our first session of 2008 on Software-as-a-service (SaaS). The response rate has been overwhelming and we ended up with 40+ companies and 80+ attendees, most of them CEOs and CxOs of leading public and private saas companies representing around 80% of the revenues of the SaaS industry in 2007.The conference began with an optional golf outing in the afternoon of the 22nd, followed by cocktails and dinner. The dinner gave us opportunity to hear the war stories of Postini… Full Story »
