Mark Leonard of Constellation Software is media shy so when he speaks I listen multiple times. This didnt fail.
Talks through vertical market software, capital allocation, growing talent from within, culture, incentives, and investing in network of people buzzsprout.com/832150/5135959
Given Constellation's niche focus on vertical market software, Mark prefers to promote from within to preserve culture but also knowledge compounding within this niche
He says if CSU were to expand beyond or become very big in one vertical, he would probably hire from outside
Keeps business units to small teams because communication overhead expands exponentially based on each new node's connections added to the previous group
If BUs became bigger, decision making would become more centralized vs preserving agility now
Important to note, he isnt against centralization but wants to only centralize decisions that need to be (large strategic moves, things that affect whole company) vs preserving ability for individuals to make smaller add-on M&A
Know when to centralize vs empower employees
Promotes experimentation (again through smaller teams) in business units, this helps to improve best practices and then share those throughout whole company in terms of incentivizing people and maintaining culture
Mark views his most important impact as continuously investing in his network which allows him the ability to connect business units and employees to key talent to help with various issues
Building network of specialized knowledge to each niche
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They built the 1st product within a different startup, bootstrapped to $300k ARR before taking any funding, and reached multi-million ARR on only $2.4M
Spurred on by the podcast between @collision & @patrick_oshag I continue to think one of the most fun things about studying public companies is the broader learnings you can use to apply to company building at the earlier stages, 👇🏾
Salesforce is the best model to study in terms of how to leverage a direct sales team, build a ecosystem of developers on app marketplace, SIs/consultants getting paid to distribute your product and how to use cash flows of a mature product to expand TAM through M&A
The main thing that impresses me about Salesforce is it’s a massive distribution model, and same goes for Atlassian which kinda flipped some aspects of the model on its head (build community, developer love, product led growth) but also still leverage mature cash flows to expand
Anaplan's FQ1 report was our first look at how SaaS businesses have been affected by Covid-19, 10% billings growth not all attributable to Covid but certainly impacted.
Some good learnings on how they're tweaking top down sales model to deal that I'll expand upon in this thread
Before getting into some of the transcript, I just wanna say hopefully multiples of public software businesses will show entrepreneurs and investors that the public markets do indeed think long term. PLAN just reported 10% YoY billings growth and still trades at 17x LTM rev!!
While going public certainly does have significant operational burdens, it helps the brand, grants easier access to capital and brings investors who truly value the long-term. These are valuable arrows to have in the quiver while trying to grow market share
Hello Twitter! For my first post, I thought I'd share the slides of a talk I've recently given at a large tech company and institutional investment funds on qualitative aspects of enterprise software investing and the way to identify the quality companies
Since I can't give you all the talk, some more detailed thoughts are also in this blog post which helped spur the ideas in the deck and the talk I gave around it.
So let's unpack some of these thoughts: 1) Business model guides strategy - this basically is the premise that bottoms up, product led models tend to move horizontally quicker than top down, direct sales models; examples include Atlassian, Elastic, Datadog, etc