The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 111 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kellogg: The SaaS IPO Bar Has Risen to $500M ARR
“The IPO bar is just spectacularly high right now. I think it's around five hundred million in ARR by my math.”
Kellogg: PE Firms Want SaaS Companies Fixed Before Acquiring Them
“The biggest thing I've learned about working with PE is I thought they were fixer upper people... And I don't actually think many of them like to do that. They want it fixed first.”
Kellogg: Private Equity Can Turn Most Stagnant SaaS Companies to 20%+ EBITDA
“A lot of times founders think it's not possible and give that company to a PE person. And I guarantee you they're going to have 20% EBITDA, maybe 30% EBITDA in a couple of years. It can be done.”
Kellogg: Executive infighting is a direct reflection of a weak CEO
“Another friend of mine has this expression from Machiavelli that warring princes means one thing, a weak king. And if you're CEO of the company, you cannot allow warring princes in your company. Everybody sees it. The whole company knows if two E staffers are …”
Benioff dismissed early Zendesk threats to Salesforce to avoid fear-based leadership
“I did a year at Salesforce in the middle of all that, and I was mentioning Zendesk. I was like, hey, there's these guys called Zendesk, and they might be a problem for, like, our customer service business and I got the kind of uh-oh moment where, like, oh, and…”
Kellogg: Companies must be vision-driven publicly, customer-driven culturally, competitor-driven strategically
“Avoid this fake either or framing, which is you need to speak like you're vision driven. So when you're talking to customers and analysts, the markets, talk about the desired end state. Talk about the vision. Don't talk about competition. When you're building …”
Kellogg: 80% quarterly rep quota attainment in enterprise SaaS is nearly impossible
“First, you did not have on a quarterly basis in an enterprise company, 80% of your reps every quarter. You might have had 80% every year. You might, right? 80% at a hundred percent of quota on an annual basis is very good. On a quarterly basis, it's almost imp…”
Kellogg: Startups Scaling Past $10M ARR Should Redeploy Early Leaders
“I've worked with many startups where the figure it out sales VP had to leave when we hit ten million. And I always feel bad about that, because I don't actually think they have to leave. I think they should be redeployed. Like, my answer is, what do you do wit…”
Kellogg: Enterprise SaaS startups should wait until $100M+ ARR for second product
“In terms of second product, I talked about Jason Lemkin's work before, but he's done a series of tweets and blogs, and from his research to me, for most companies, it's probably a hundred million plus in ARR, and maybe multiple, for the companies I work with, …”
Kellogg: SaaS Startups Should Charge Above Market for Services to Enable Partners
“Create your own agency or your own services org. Charge for it. Charge market rates. Maybe even a little more than market rates. Actually, not maybe. Charge more than market rates, and then build a partner network.”
Kellogg: Most marketers lack rigorous thinking and confuse executives with jargon
“You're confused by ill-defined terminology and process, most marketers are not that rigorous in their thinking and you're drawn into conflict between sales and marketing, right?”
Kellogg: CMOs should quarterback overall pipeline coverage across all sources
“Now to me, the best practice here is that marketing should be the quarterback of the pipeline, because if you think about those four funnels, the only person they all report to is the CEO. So either you're going to be the quarterback of the pipeline, or you're…”
Kellogg: ARR is a fact while churn rates are an opinion
“There's a semi-famous quote that but cash is a fact, profit is an opinion. I feel the same way about ARR and churn, that ARR is a fact churn, And churn rates are an opinion.”
Kellogg: Net Dollar Retention Shows Almost Zero Correlation With SaaS Multiples
“The R squared is only .O six between net dollar retention and enterprise value to next 12 months revenue.”
Kellogg: NDR Is a Financing Enabler, Not a Valuation Driver
“So it's not a valuation driver. I now think of it as a financing enabler, right? Okay. So a higher one isn't necessarily by itself going to drive a higher valuation, but I could tell you if you don't have a high enough one, you're not going to be able to raise…”
Horizontal SaaS startups facing heavily funded rivals must out-raise them or pivot
“If you're in some horizontal platform category, people may throw hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of VC at the category. And you don't get to not play. So, if you find yourself in this situation, it's probably a sign that you're in a really good cate…”
CEOs must proactively assign board members work or risk unhelpful meddling
“If I'm not keeping the board busy, Helping me drive the company, they are going to come in with ideas and ways to help that I may not find helpful.”
Startups must be publicly vision-driven, culturally customer-driven, and strategically competitor-driven
“Avoid this fake either or framing, which is you need to speak like you're vision driven. So when you're talking to customers and analysts, the markets, talk about the desired end state. Talk about the vision. Don't talk about competition. When you're building …”
Kellogg: Customer Success Should Not Report to Sales or the CRO
“By the way, for whatever it's worth, I don't actually think customer success should report to sales. I think that's a stress reaction to save money. I think the company hits a downturn. There's too much sales expense, which customer success is usually classifi…”
Kellogg: Startups Should Copy Standard Pricing Models Unless Disrupting
“Unless your business plan is predicated on price model disruption, do what everybody else does.”
Kellogg: Enterprise software manages pricing friction via consistency or complexity
“There's two ways to solve that problem. One is to have super consistent pricing, which in my experience in enterprise is very difficult. The other is to have very complicated pricing. So it's very hard for them to figure out who got the better deal.”
Kellogg: VCs trust founders' CAC while PE firms recalculate it themselves
“Because the VCs tend to be trusting and say, what's your CAC and tell me how you calculate it. And isn't that interesting? Whereas the PE people just said to say, give me all your data. I'll tell you what your CAC is fundamentally. Especially in the context of…”
Kellogg: VCs bludgeon founders by expecting best-in-class metrics across every single category
“You know, a VC will look across their portfolio and think of the best CAC payback period, the best LTV to CAC, the best rule of 40, and ask you to do, you know, beat them on all four, right? It's inherently unfair. It's a form of bludgeoning, right?”
Kellogg: Upgrading SaaS metrics often requires replacing non-strategic RevOps and FP&A staff
“The change management is hard. It may require staff upgrades, particularly key analytics roles like RevOps, FP&A. Sometimes those people are not that strategic. They're not that fast, right? That they're good at making a budget and they're good at getting comp…”
Kellogg: Only startups that raised huge pre-crash rounds survived 2002
“In 2002, there were only two types of startups in existence. Those that had raised a large amount of money at a ridiculous valuation prior to April 2001, or dead. There was no other type of startup in 2002, when the internet bubble burst.”
Kellogg: Founders should take $50M even if planning to raise $25M
“You might go out thinking you're gonna raise twenty-five million, and in this world, find out that you can raise 50. Should you take the 50? In my opinion, yes.”
Kellogg: In a VC Arms Race, Founders Must Out-Raise or Pivot
“So, if you find yourself in this situation, it's probably a sign that you're in a really good category, but you either need to play to win, and go out raise the other guy, or you need to find pivot into some sub-segment where you're not directly competing with…”
Kellogg: Startup board members often assign executives a sell-by date for their roles
“And this notion of having a sell by date, it may not be polite, but often board members have it, and if they have it, I'd advise you to understand what they are. And to try and reframe the issue that it shouldn't be that John or Mary is with the company or not…”
Kellogg: Debating sales versus product drivenness is pure corporate politics
“The last three I just exclude is politics, period. Because what you're saying is you want your function to be more important than the other function. So I throw those out.”
Kellogg: Fully loaded cost of hiring an enterprise AE is $700,000
“Their OTE, their on-target earnings, is 300 K. They're gonna cost a 180 K for two-thirds, and you can adjust these numbers to your local market, but do the exercise, right? So I'm hiring a seller. I'm hiring two-thirds of an SC. I'm hiring two-thirds of an SDR…”
Kellogg: Scale-Up Phase Replaces Individual Heroics With Repeatable Systems
“Scaling is very different. It's about a small number of amazing process and infrastructure oriented leaders leveraging a large number of great, but not necessarily amazing people, right? They're not solving problems. They're building systems and processes. Qua…”
Kellogg: Startup CEOs should listen to board ideas but mostly reject them
“Anyone with an idea is trying to help, and your job is to listen, to understand the idea, and then by and large not do it, right? Because if you have a good plan and a good strategy, you need to go execute that.”
European founders mis-hire in the US by trusting inflated resumes
“Americans always inflate their resumes, and Europeans are pretty modest by comparison, and that's a terrible intersection, right, because you have someone who's kind of modest interviewing someone who they think is modest, and that person has created this resu…”
Kellogg: Placing Sales Reps in NFL Cities Is a Terrible Strategy
“A lot of people do NFL cities, which I think is a terrible strategy, but you could do that if you want. Just, if there's a football team, put salespeople there. Not, not my recommended one, but people do it.”
Kellogg: Startups should hire a sales director before a VP of sales
“Don't hire a VP of sales, hire a director. And let them try and earn the job.”
Kellogg: Small PE firms are better than VCs at solving technical debt
“I actually believe private equity people are better than VCs at solving it, right? Because that's what they do for a living. They buy old, not those super big ones like Tomo Bravo or Vista, but the smaller PE firms who buy, kind of, 20 to fifty million dollar …”
Kellogg: Services Revenue Exceeding 20% to 30% Labels Software Startups as Services
“If you go that route, then you got to be careful because if it gets too big, people are going to say, you're not a software anymore. You're not a software company, Nick. You're a services company pretending to be a software company, right? So you have to be ve…”
Kellogg: SaaS founders start product companies but end up running distribution companies
“So, in my opinion, the founder experience that happens a lot is you found a product company, and one day you wake up and you're running a distribution company, and you go, what happened?”
Kellogg: Enterprise buyers will read 12-page white papers and attend hour-long demos
“The fact of the matter is, if you're talking to your buyer, and it's a high consideration purchase, they will have time to read a twelve-page white paper. They will have time to go to a one-hour demo, right?”
Kellogg: CEOs should only hold teams accountable for pipeline coverage and sales
“I think the number one mistake I've seen founders make is they hold people's feet to the fire on all those cells, and I think that's wrong. I think it's demotivating. I think it doesn't reflect an understanding of the fact that the model deviates from reality.…”
Kellogg: No marketing executive is top-tier in both product and demand generation
“There's nobody who's a five-five. God doesn't make them, right? You either grew up in product marketing, or you grew up in demand generation, right? You also don't get 20 pointers. I think 15 is the maximum number of points you can get on this scale.”
Kellogg: Ability to raise money separates winners from losers in Silicon Valley
“The ability to raise money is what separates the winners
From the runners up and the losers.”
Kellogg: Calling SaaS Churn Uncontrollable Is Often an Organizational Cop-Out
“So to me, controllable versus uncontrollable churn, it is a concept people talk a lot about. But I get super uncomfortable because I think it could easily be a cop out, right? You know what? Like my last company, they got a new CFO and they didn't renew. We ca…”
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.”
Kellogg: SaaS Companies Experiencing Mid-Contract Churn Should Stop Multi-Year Deals
“To a certain extent, I'd also stop doing multi-year deals, because if you're giving someone a price lock for a multi-year deal and they're not renewing, you gave something and got nothing.”
Unchanneled venture capital board members will pattern-match a startup to death
“And one of the things VCs do is pattern match, and if you don't channel their energy, you are likely to be pattern matched to death.”