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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Twitter2013 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey
We worked together with Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a specific focus on SaaS, to survey 155 SaaS companies on a variety of topics such as growth rates, CAC (cost to acquire a customer), gross margins, churn …
SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
This blog post looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down layer by layer to expose the key metrics that will help drive success. Metrics for metric’s sake are not very useful. Instead the goal …
Customer Acquisition & Monetization
Presentation describing how Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) and Monetization (LTV) are they key elements to get right for a successful business model. Also describes the latest techniques for reducing CAC, including Inbound Marketing, and the author’s own methodology: Building …
Designing Metrics for Success
Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. And great management teams know that the only way to improve a process is to start by measuring it. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In …
Pacific Crest’s 2011 SaaS Survey
Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a strong focus on SaaS, has surveyed a 70 SaaS companies with very interesting results. There is some great data on topics such as growth rates, cost of customer acquisition, churn/retention, expense models, …
Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition
In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. …
Lessons Learned – Viral Marketing
A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: …
How JBoss Rose to the Top
This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide a case example to describe how one successful company built their Sales & Marketing machine.
JBoss was an Open Source company …
Is Your Startup Idea Viable?
As a serial entrepreneur, I learned a lot of lessons from things that didn’t work. These lessons later on shaped my ideas on what would be needed to build a successful startup company. When I became a VC, I realized …
The 8 Dangers of Channel Sales
This post is part of my series An Analysis of 5 Business Models.
Channel sales can be used to create extremely successful business models. The channel gives powerful leverage to an organization, adding additional sales resources, and taking advantage …
Field Sales: The Most Expensive Acquisition
This post is part of my series An Analysis of 5 Business Models.
Direct sales using a field salesforce is one of the most expensive ways to pursue customer acquisition, and as a result only works for larger deal …
Viral Acquisition? Great if You Can Monetize
This post is part of my series An Analysis of 5 Business Models.
Many businesses talk about Viral marketing, but in reality, only a few are actually able to pull off true viral marketing. The effect of viral marketing …
The Power of Free
This post is part of my series An Analysis of 5 Business Models.
One of the most powerful techniques available for customer acquisition is giving away a free product or service. You can see the success of this with …
One of the Best Business Models: Recurring Revenue
This post is part of my series An Analysis of 5 Business Models.
Recurring revenue is the business models that I prefer. It has the benefits of being highly predictable over time, and reducing the stress of having no …
Intro: An Analysis of 5 Business Models
In the past most startups occurred because a new technology had come along that would provide solution to a problem that could not be solved previously. (As an example, an unmet need was the pain of creating and editing documents. …
