COGS
topic on 7 shows · 11 statements across 11 episodes
the Pitch 
My First Million 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 
WTF is with Nikhil Kamath 
Top Founders 
the a16z Podcast 
20VC
11 statements about COGS, every show
Franceschetti: Early hardware BOM and COGS projections are usually off by 50%
“That probably the funders in the first year of the company or in the first probably, let's say three months, they don't fully understand what the cost of producing that device will be. They don't understand the return rate. And so everything they tell you abou…”
Greze: Moving to open-weight models improves COGS without providing product advantage
“I can improve our cogs by moving to open weight, but it doesn't give me much product advantage. It doesn't make my product work better.”
Bessemer's Talia Goldberg: COGS Is the New CAC in AI Business Models
“I have a saying at Bessemer that I started saying a year ago, which is that COGS are the new CAC, which is that you can spend a lot on, on COGS, but it means that you also can't then be spending a lot on CAC in customer acquisition.”
Eberhardt: ReCraft saves up to 30% of total beer COGS
“Yeah, so we can save up to 30% of the total cogs of the beer.”
Puri: AI will drop porn COGS down to GPU costs
“I think for the companies, you drop your cogs down, right? So like, you don't have to worry about all the takedown notices and copyright issues and lawsuits that you're gonna, that you have from people uploading stolen works or having to share revenue with all…”
Gauthier: Failing to Break Out COGS by Revenue Line Obscures Margins
“I see a lot of companies where they will, you know, maybe have subscription revenue and professional service revenue broken out, but they don't necessarily break out the cogs, and as a result, it makes it really difficult to understand your gross margin by rev…”
Kellogg: Customer Success Belongs in Sales Rather Than COGS
“Customer success, in my opinion, does not belong in COGS. They, it belongs in sales. And most companies will put customer success in sales.”
Zafar: Hardware Startups Must Strictly Separate COGS From CAC
“And as a professor of entrepreneurship, I'll insist they should not mix the two. That will cloud the scenario because I'm a professor. I teach this topic. They must separate cogs from CAC. Otherwise, they will be confusing themselves.”
Shafiq: Most customer success expenses must be classified as COGS, not CAC
“You could account for some of this as CAC depending on how much of upsells they're driving. And if you actually have a formula, That, you know, is put against the new ARR that they're able to drive, and you might be able to justify it as CAC. But mostly it's C…”