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 85 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: 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 …”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
Debates over being product- or sales-driven are purely internal company 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.”
Kellogg: The most common metric deception in SaaS is cherry-picking
“The most common form of misleading is what I call cherry picking, right? You just don't put up the bad numbers, right? You put up different numbers every quarter.”
Kellogg: A 90% confidence sales forecast allows missing once every 2.5 years
“And when I give the forecast to the board, I want to give a 90% confidence interval. So I'm giving them the lower bound of a 90% confidence interval. Now people hate that. And if people get scared when you use those words, I have advice. Just say you get to mi…”
Kellogg: Board members recalculating metrics indicates broken trust in management
“I have one of my MBA is recalculate everything. And I'm like, this is a symptom of a very serious problem, right? We don't trust the management team to present the correct numbers. We don't correct them to do the trust them to do the right formulas.”
Kellogg: Missing ARR while pipeline metrics look good signals measurement failure
“If the top two important numbers are not being achieved and you can't see why in all the other numbers, I can't diagnose what the problem is, but I can tell you have a problem and it does happen from time to time.”
Kellogg: Only CFO and RevOps knowing metrics signals organizational innumeracy
“The symptom is very simple. You go to a board meeting or QBR or management meeting, and the only two people who ever asked numbers, answer numbers questions are the CFO and the head of rev ops.”
Kellogg: High growth increases enterprise SaaS CAC due to ramping resources
“That's going to drive your CAC up because CAC is a function of growth rate in enterprise software because you're carrying unproductive slash ramping resources, right?”
Kellogg: SaaS Benchmarks Should Be Segmented by Company Aspiration
“I actually think the best way to segment them is by aspiration. That, that if we could, and nobody offers these yet, but I want you to just consider this concept that we should segment benchmarks by aspiration, which is if I want to sell for 18 times EBITDA in…”
Kellogg: Establishing SaaS metric foundations takes quarters, not 30 days
“Even layer one has taken me with certain companies I work with quarters. And I walk in every time I have this kind of entrepreneurial blind spot going, this is going to be easy. Me, head of FP&A, CFO, we'll get this nailed in 30 days, 60 days. Every time I do …”
Kellogg: SaaS metrics cannot be calculated from nature-based P&Ls
“They produce a nature-based PNL, not a function-based PNL, and you can't do SAS metrics off a nature-based PNL.”
Kellogg: Standardized reporting templates build trust by preventing data cherry-picking
“Templates build trust. Why? Because there's no cherry picking, and the most common form of misleading is cherry picking.”
Kellogg: Startups should aim to raise capital every two years
“If you step back and take a more kind of macro view on it, you should try to raise money about every two years.”
Kellogg: Divide competitor funding rounds by 8 to 10 to estimate burn
“You know, one interesting thing about this phenomenon is you can often take the size of somebody's round and divide it by eight to 10 and get a pretty good approximation of their burn rate.”
Kellogg: Large Horizontal Categories Inevitably Face Massive VC Spending Arms Races
“The perverse thing about this is, the better your category, the more likely that is to happen. If you're selling some very Focused vertical SaaS app, you're unlikely to find a spending arms race, right? But if you're in some horizontal platform category, peopl…”