Matt Fates, partner at Ascent Venture Partners, kicked off MassTLC’s cloud seminar on “Business Decisions and Models from the Cloud CFO” at Acquia in Burlington, MA. A good crowd gathered to hear from Matt the SaaS metrics that matter and how to measure them. He put forward the idea of the impacts of using SaaS: cash vs. revenue vs. bookings vs. CMRR. Matt’s presentation is available here.
Panelists Tyler Sloat, CFO at Zuora, Radhika Samantha, CFO at EnterpriseDB and Jim Pluntze, COO at Navisite shared their business models and what they are looking at to achieve success. Tyler presented the basic business model of the subscription economy and the “only 3 SaaS metrics that matter”. Take a look at Tyler’s presentation for examples of SaaS front-runners and their growth rates.
Radhika shared EnterpriseDB’s models in moving from early stage to a mature model. They monitor ACT vs. TCV, ARR, and churn. Jim Pluntze from Navisite took a look at what they had to consider when shifting to a consumption model. Also, having just been acquired by Time Warner, he discussed the evaluation metrics that matter in an acquisition. Jim’s presentation can be found here.
Matt Fates lead a great discussion with the panel discussing cash flow and recognition, sales tax for a SaaS company and sales compensation – always a popular topic. Some of you may remember a seminar last year with Liz Cobb and Brad Coffey from HubSpot focused on sales compensation. If you are interested in learning more, the detailed presentation is available here.
Thanks to Acquia for hosting the group, Cluster sponsors Progress Software, Oracle and Zuora and our global sponsors for supporting MassTLC programming. Lastly, special thanks to Oracle and Josh Reynolds for the Jawbone raffle! A winner was selected this afternoon. Congratulations to Stephen Rines from Autodesk!
Due to the overwhelming interest in the sales compensation topic, we are going to schedule a member roundtable for a deep dive discussion on the topic. In addition, MassTLC’s cloud community is scheduled for October. Members are invited to participate in the planning of the summit. Please contact christine@masstlc.org if you are interested in getting involved.
