About David Skok
David is a serial entrepreneur who founded a total of four companies, and did one turn-around. In 2001, he joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a VC investor. Successful exits as a VC include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, Apollo GraphQL, CloudBees, Namely, and Salsify.
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TwitterClarity of Message: Why You Need A Great Message & How To Create It
Intro
In the early stages of their business, founders often struggle to come up with really strong messaging to describe what they are selling, and this has a huge impact on their ability to raise money, find customers, and attract …
The Team Slide: You Had Me At Hello
This is part of our series “Pitching to Investors” that shares real examples and practical advice from the Matrix General Partners on creating your pitch deck. See intro to the series here: Five Ways to Nail Your Pitch and Win …
Five Ways to Nail your Pitch and Win Over Investors
There are many opinions on creating a pitch deck and presenting to potential investors, but there is still a big gap between what entrepreneurs perceive to be important and what investors really value during a pitch presentation.
This post is …
When to Pay and Account for Commissions
This post is a companion piece to our how-to guide on SaaS Sales Compensation: How to Design the Right Plan. We recommend starting with this first, broader post.
When to pay commissions
Another important consideration in your plan, in …
Figuring out Quota and Commission Rates
This post provides an in-depth look at how SaaS companies can approach setting sales quotas and commissions. It is a companion piece to our how-to guide on SaaS Sales Compensation: How to Design the Right Plan. We recommend starting …
SaaS Sales Compensation: How to Design the Right Plan
Intro
Sales compensation is a more complex topic for SaaS/subscription revenue companies. Unlike traditional software sales, the job of sales doesn’t end when a new customer signs a contract. Instead, it is crucial to retain customers over many years, as …
The Key Drivers for SaaS Success
SaaS/subscription businesses are much more complex than traditional businesses, and SaaS performance cannot be measured in the same way as traditional businesses are measured. Based on a talk given at the SaaStr Annual Conference in San Francisco, this slide deck …
Executive Hires: The Case for Extreme Referencing
Hiring a strong executive management team is one of the most proven ways to ensure startup success. Yet, hiring executives is a very different undertaking than hiring for other roles in your company and requires a different process, skill-set, and …
Best of forEntrepreneurs
forEntrepreneurs is focused on writing about pressing topics founders are encountering and sharing the best resources and advice we can find to help you build your company. Based on readers’ feedback, we’re sharing the top articles from forEntrepreneurs in the …
How to calculate the Discount Rate to use in a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Analysis
We look at how to compute the right discount rate to use in a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis. This post is a supplement to a blog post titled “What’s your TRUE customer lifetime value (LTV)? – DCF provides …
What’s your TRUE customer lifetime value (LTV)? – DCF provides the answer
Overview
The old formula that everyone uses for customer lifetime value (LTV)) –average gross profit per customer divided by churn – ceases to work properly when you have very long customer lifetimes and negative churn. LTV can become infinite, which …
How Startups Can Build a Recruiting Machine (Webinar)
The competition for hiring the best top talent in startups has never been higher. The best people are almost never on the market, so it’s imperative to develop recruiting processes to find and sell passive candidates. It may take months …
2015 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey – Part 2
Last week I posted the results from Part 1 of our survey in which 300+ SaaS companies shared data on their growth and go-to-market strategies. This week I’m sharing the results from Part 2 of the survey where we compare …
2015 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey – Part 1
For the fourth year in a row, we worked together with Pacific Crest Securities, an investment banking firm with a specific focus on SaaS, to survey 305 SaaS companies. This survey represents deep benchmarking data and insights on the growth …
forEntrepreneurs 2015 SaaS Survey Infographic
We’re excited to share the forEntrepreneurs SaaS Survey Infographic, which highlights major parts of this year’s SaaS Survey results. With all the data in the survey to help SaaS companies benchmark their growth, we thought it would be useful to …
