David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
What are the leading indicators that early stage VCs dig deep on to assess the strength of product market fit? What level of traction both in enterprise and SMB would an early stage investor deem exciting enough to pursue? What levels of engagement are sufficient enough to suggest cause for a much larger and increased round?
How should founders assess sales rep productivity? What can they do to actively shorten the ramp time? How will early stage investors analyse the ramp time? What suggests repeatability of process?
Why does David believe there is no point focusing on CAC/LTV in the early days? What is the single biggest thing that founders can do to show repeatability of process and revenue as fast as possible?
What is the most common reason that people miss plan? How must the mindset of the founder switch from extreme frugality to hyper growth scaling? When is the right time for this transition to take place? What are the inherent challenges to this switch?
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
If you’re looking to simplify file version control, ensure data security and save time while increasing accessibility, Egnyte is the right solution for your business. Egnyte delivers secure content collaboration, compliant data protection and simple infrastructure modernization; all on a single SaaS platform. Founded in 2007, Egnyte is privately held, headquartered in Mountain View, CA and supports thousands of businesses worldwide. For more information, please visit egnyte.com/SaaStr.
MonkeyLearn allows companies to easily analyze text with Machine Learning. Customers like Clearbit and Segment are using MonkeyLearn to turn emails, support tickets, customer feedback, and documents into actionable data. Their platform makes it super easy to classify texts by topic, sentiment or intent or to extract specific data such as keywords, names, and companies. MonkeyLearn makes teams more efficient by automating business processes, getting insights and saving hours of manual text data processing. And if you would like to learn more, head to monkeylearn.com/saastr, that is www. m o n k e y l e a r n .com/saastr. Plus, listeners of the SaaStr podcast will have a very special opportunity to purchase monthly plans for half the price. So, check out MonkeyLearn and start getting more out of your text today.
Share this post