Assertion Partly supported
Sridhar: Kinvey coined and created the 'backend as a service' category
“We coined the phrase and created this category, and now it's a thing.”
Opinion
Sridhar: M&A earnout handcuffs create a toxic post-acquisition company culture
“You're going to be motivated because you really want to work at the company. It's not tied to some artificial handcuffs, right? Which I think is a wrong culture.”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Kinvey Business Edition customers pay about $24,000 annually
“The next class of customer is what we call business edition, so this is a business that is typically just doing one app and these customers, because they have higher SLA requirements and more feature-rich requirements, They pay us on an average about 24,000 do…”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Kinvey charges enterprise clients six figures annually per instance
“And then we have large enterprise customers like Schneider Electric, Farmers Insurance, et cetera that have what we call enterprise edition, which is a pretty sophisticated version of the platform. And that's usually about six figures a year per instance.”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Kinvey's ASP is probably $80K to $90K annually
“Yeah, we have significantly more enterprise customers than we do business edition and startup customers. So it's probably in the 80 to 90 K a year is probably our ASP.”
Assertion Supported
Kinvey Raised $18 Million Over Six Years Prior to Acquisition
“So we raised a total of about eighteen million dollars over a period of six years before the acquisition.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kinvey Reached Millions in Revenue Starting in 2014
“We did about high six figures that year. And then we got into the millions of dollars starting in 2014.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sridhar: Kinvey maintained a 98% retention rate
“So we had about 98% retention rate for our business.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sridhar: 80% of Kinvey customers expanded contract revenue within year one
“Revenue retention was all, was moving towards expansions where 80% of our customers expanded revenue within the first year.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
All 44 Kinvey employees remained following the Progress Software acquisition
“Everyone has stayed, and we're actually now, we've gotten more people from Progress on board. We've actually hired more people. We're actually closer to about 65, 70 now, actually.”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Progress matched the highest acquisition offer for Kinvey
“No, I think to Progress's credit, they matched the best offer.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kinvey sustained a $100k CAC against a $2.2 million LTV
“It was about 95 to a 100,000 dollars cost of customer acquisition costs. Yep. For about an 80 to 85,000 dollar ASP, but the lifetime value of the customer was about 2.2000000.”
Disclosure
Progress paid Kinvey shareholders at close, avoiding earnouts for retention
“I thought the thing that they did really well was treat the investors and the stock option holders as part of a payout on deal close, and then really be thoughtful about how to retain employees with retention mechanisms, like things like RSUs, employee bonuses…”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Kinvey charges hobbyists either zero or $200 monthly
“The first is people that are building apps as a hobby or as a trial, and these customers either pay us nothing, so we have a freemium model, or they pay us 200 dollars a month.”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Targets four angel checks annually between $15K and $25K
“So I try to do about one investment a quarter. So about four, four a year. And it's usually anywhere from 15 to 25,000 dollars per investment. It's usually part of the first money that goes into a company, so it's super early stage. Yeah, it's, about 50% of th…”
