We had Richard Davis, an equity analyst from Needham & Co speak this morning at a SCV Entrepreneurs Breakfast. Given Richard's background, this one was for SaaS companies here in North Carolina. The room was packed. NC has a strong group of SaaS companies and we have been getting them all together on a fairly regular basis for a while. Like today, it usually revolves around an interesting speaker and we always have a lot of time before and after for general networking, questions, etc.
Here are some interesting things that came out of today's talk, stealing some of the content from Richard's deck:
- From 2000 to Q1 09, $70 billion has been invested by VCs into 5,000 new software companies
- Since 2003, there have been 1,300 exits. There are a lot of companies still out there
- At 7 years, the average age of a company in a VC portfolio is older now than any time since 1977
- The hurdle to get funded continues to rise. You need to be "awesome" to get funding.
- He talked about requirements to go public, named specific companies that have a shot - and why they are in that position to be able to
- Some tips -- for companies between 0 and 5m in revs, he mentioned that they should try and keep burn real low and when you raise money, try not to sell more than 25-30% of the business. He also added to try and not raise more more money than your revenue.
If you'd like a copy of the deck, which comes along with all their typical legal disclosures, email me - jason AT southcap.com. Also, if you are a local SaaS company and want to be invited to the next breakfast, let me know that too. We keep them very informal and try to pack them with as much useful information as we can.
A special thanks to SCV portfolio company, ChannelAdvisor for hosting this morning. CA is one of the larger SaaS companies in our region so this was the perfect place to have it.
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