There is a correlation analysis in Jamin Ball's "Clouded Judgement" substack [1] which shows the correlation between next twelve month ("NTM") Revenue Multiples and Revenue Annual Growth Rates for public market tech / SaaS stocks.
The current Slope-Intercept is (NTM Revenue Multiple) = 36.677*(NTM Rev Growth Rate) + 2.0013. If Wiz is doubling revenue (100% Growth Rate) and they are at about $500M of revenue today [2], then the multiple according to that calculation is ~38.7 X Next Twelve Month Revenue ($1B) or $38.7B.
So, the price is in line with the market...or you could argue even a discount to it.
Congrats! Seems like a Retool competitor but focused more on developers? I'm not sure if that's the direction I would go since developers already have pretty good tooling for their level of expertise, IMO.
Although, I could see how building an app that uses data across the various SaaS tools a company uses without requiring that data to be dumped into another database could be useful. Maybe I'm missing the point.
As an aside, I'd love to see Retool but for less technical people. Specifically, a way to make Google Sheets available for multiple people in a company to use. We have multiple quick and dirty "calculators" (think pricing for sales, comp for recruiting) that we roll out across our company. Eventually they get operationalized and converted into proper applications (or we buy a SaaS product for it) but would be nice to have an interim solution. Some requirements:
- Ability to create a very simple CRUD web UI
- Authz/n with ability for IT to integrate into their SSO.
- Google Sheets backend and integration so financial analysts can update and manage.
The 409(a) valuation is the value of the common shares. They are generally valued at a discount to the preferred shares (or company valuation) due to the fact that the preferred shares have a pay back preference and the common are considered less liquid. The discount is generally higher (70-80%) during the early stages of a company when a liquidity event is less certain and the discount decreases over time.
Teleport (https://goteleport.com) is an open core software company that enables engineers to quickly access any computing resource anywhere.
We are hiring our first in-house recruiter. We need a full cycle recruiter to manage 50 engineering hires next year across the stack of (Go / Rust, React, Linux and Cryptography engineering), along with helping with Sales/Marketing hires.
There is a pretty simple feature that would alleviate a lot of pain with Stripe’s billing service when invoicing enterprises - allow for attaching a pdf of the invoice in the automated email.
Many enterprise A/P departments require it. The lack of this feature has prevented us from moving off our existing invoicing system to Stripe. I’m guessing we are not unique.
Are there non-PEO solutions to alleviate the administrative burden of having employees in many states? Keeping up with employment and tax compliance requirements is not trivial. Most HR systems (for smaller companies) I’ve seen still require the employer to register with each state. Might be a good startup idea.
We build an open source solution[1] to deploy autonomous Kubernetes clusters into on-prem or air-gapped environments but it's also useful for limiting cloud lock-in (even has its own "IAM" built in). Of course, you have to also limit your use of proprietary services (which definitely has its trade-offs) but might be worth poking around if you believe reducing lock-in is worth it.
I'm surprised Quickbooks Online is not listed here [0]. I'm guessing they are the blocker here? I have fallen back on using Zapier but the sync often breaks. Native integration would be preferred.
"I think in the article SaaS is used to refer to proprietary SaaS companies."
That's true and covered in a previous post [0]. I also recently saw this tweet from @asynchio that also agrees there are different dimensions [1] and will be covering that further.
There is a google sheet which has the data I used for this post [0].
I had also looked at companies like Slack and Zoom which target lower average deal sizes and it was quite remarkable how much better their metrics were. But didn't feel like it was apples to apples. That data is the spreadsheet though.
Author here. As an intro, this is admittedly high level but hope to get more in the weeds on how the two models compare and overlap in the next few posts. Happy to discuss some of my (or your) thoughts here in advance of those. Thanks for reading!
Matt Levine's take is this is due to fact that "private markets are the new public markets"[0]. The lines between public and private markets are blurring so this is a prudent move by A16Z.
TLDR;
As companies stay private longer, and get bigger and raise more money while staying private:
* The secondary market for private shares becomes more important.
* VC's now may have more asymmetric information or more reasons to invest in public markets.
* Mutual funds are competing with VCs in later private rounds so why should VCs be able to compete with Mutual Funds in public markets.
* The obligatory crypto reference.
Another one he doesn't touch on is maybe it's difficult to efficiently deploy > $10 billion in just private markets?
“Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.)”
Finding and accentuating strengths was a big focus of my previous employer, Rackspace. They used a program based on Strengths Finder [1] to determine your “strengths” and even had them displayed on your corporate ID badge. Their management philosophy was based on putting people in positions based on their strengths.
It seemed a bit hokey at first and it had its problems but it was pretty refreshing compared to the typical corporate environment that espouses working harder to overcome your weaknesses.
We also ran into issues with using the Okta OAuth/OIDC integration with Teleport and ended up using SAML [0]. Perhaps more painful, especially if you are more familiar OAuth/OIDC but it worked. This was when Okta OAuth/OIDC was still in beta so perhaps it has improved since then.
I was recently told about Tidelift [0] who represents that it wants to improve funding for OSS. I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about it before on HN in similar discussions.
Gravitational builds open-core software to automate the delivery and operations of cloud-native software across multiple locations (multi-cloud and on-prem). We are looking for ambitious and talented people across engineering and go-to-market (sales/marketing). Here are some of the things we have built in the past: Mailgun[1], Vulcand[2], OnMetal [3]. And some of the things you will help us with currently: Teleport[4], Gravity[5], Teleconsole[6].
Open positions include:
* Fullstack engineer (React expertise a +)
* Head of marketing (demand gen, content marketing, dev evangelism and general growth)
* Sales Development Reps (qualifying inbound and participating in outbound campaigns for handoff to sales reps)
https://www.moltbook.com/post/5bc69f9c-481d-4c1f-b145-144f20...