This Week in SaaS: PluralSight Goes to Zero, Salesforce and Mongo Hit Hard, The Next IPO Candidates and How Do We Solve the Problem of Liquidity in Venture Capital
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2024
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com.
In Our First Ever Episode of This Week in SaaS
1. PluralSight Goes to Zero:
- WTF happened to PluralSight? How did it go from $3.5BN to $0?
- Will this have a wider impact on the willingness of PE to buy tech companies?
- Who are the next contenders to go from hero to zero? Zendesk? Anaplan?
- Will this generation of PE funds be let off by their LPs for a poor vintage?
2. Salesforce's Worst Stock Market Drop Since 2004 + Mongo Takes a 23% Hit:
- Why did Salesforce lose $50BN of market cap in a single day?
- Is the same true for MongoDB taking a 23% hit in one day?
- What does it mean when the new normal is these once hyper-growth companies now growing only 6% per annum?
3. The Settlers into Slow Growth:
- Why does Jason believe that Dropbox and Box have both settled into a world of slow growth?
- What happens to Twilio from here in a world post Jeff Lawson?
- What happens to Retool from this point on?
- Would Jason be a buyer of Notion at $10BN?
4. Venture Capital is Broken:
- Why does Jason believe that we need to see a relation of public multiples for the math in venture capital to work again?
- Why does Jason believe that the way we mark portfolios with TVPI leads to corrupt and bad behaviour?
- How does Jason think we will solve the problem of liquidity with IPOs being shut, M&A being out of the window and now PE being a doubt as the source of buyers?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Salesforce lost $50 billion in market cap. The issue is that Salesforce said we have fallen to |
| 0:05.6 | single digit growth and we're not coming back. Hello and welcome to a new show for 20VC. You are listening |
| 0:10.7 | to the very first episode of this week in SaaS. This is a weekly show where Jason Lemkin and me |
| 0:16.7 | sit down to discuss the biggest news in SaaS, analysis, breakdowns on company performance, |
| 0:22.6 | you name it, and we could not have chosen a better week to start. This week, we saw Salesforce |
| 0:27.2 | crater to their worst drop since 2004. MongoDB sank 23%. And UiPath CEO Daniel Dines announced |
| 0:35.7 | his return with the stock dropping 30% on the news. And so we have a lot to cover in this first episode. Let us know what you think of the new style of show on Twitter. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the show. But before we dive into the show today, we're all trying to grow our businesses here. So let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be this static |
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