Last Friday was a huge day in the world of ‘software that sells into corporations’ as Tableau and Marketo went public on a $2B and $550M valuation respectively. Beyond most of what the press has written, there were some interesting thoughts that we felt were relevant to any entrepreneur.
- You Don’t Need To Be Big. At $2B and $550M these are not gigantic companies from a valuation standpoint that we hear about in our world every day. Building a repeatable, scalable sales engine that gets you to revenue growth and profitability will be rewarded in the public markets at whatever valuation.
- Building Great Companies Takes Time. Both companies went public in 10 and 7 years respectively. We all want to get there, but remember this is a slog and takes a long time to build a big company like these guys did.
- Could You be This Efficient? Tableau is a story that every CEO should think about having raised just $15M from VCs and never spending a cent of the capital raised. They continue to own 60%+ of the company and grew to 800 employees and over $100MM on just $15MM in outside money. It is incredible to challenge yourself to think that efficiently in this environment with so much supply available
- This Is Great For Our Industry. Atlassian, Palantir, HubSpot, MobileIron and Veeva Systems, etc are all in the IPO near term pipeline. The public continues to reward companies in this space for strong pre-public performance and this is good news for us as well as the overall tech and corporate software industry.
