SaaStr 148: Why Startups Die of Indigestion Not Starvation, Why Early Product Market Fit Can Be Misleading & Why Gross Margin Is So Crucial For SaaS Businesses From Day 1 with Rajeev Batra, Partner @ Mayfield

Rajeev Batra is a Partner at Mayfield, a firm that has championed bold entrepreneurs since 1969. Rajeev’s investments at Mayfield include the likes of Crunchbase, SmartRecruiters, Marketo (IPO then taken private by Vista Equity), ServiceMax (acquired by GE Digital) and more incredible companies. Prior to Mayfield, Rajeev was at Mobius (Softbank) Venture Capital and Austin Ventures. Before making the move into VC, Rajeev was on the operational side as an entrepreneur and executive with three of the companies he worked with going public and later being acquired, including the very notable Siebel Systems.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Rajeev made the transition from successful operator with 3 IPOs under his belt to investing in the next generation of enterprise companies with Mayfield?
• What does Rajeev mean when he says “startups do not die of starvation, they die of indigestion”? How does this realisation affect Rajeev’s approach to customer profiling and segmenting customers?
• Why does Rajeev believe that “early product market fit can be misleading”? How does Rajeev look to provide context and action from numbers and analytics in the early days?
• How does Rajeev feel that founders should approach gross margin from the early days? How should this relationship and thought process towards gross margin change over time?
• Why does Rajeev believe that retention is the number 1 metric for SaaS founders to focus on? In the stack of metrics, how does this compare to gross margin, CAC/LTV and payback period?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Enterprise investing is spreadsheet investing: True or false?
2. How does Mayfield use an internal budget to align themselves to entrepreneurs?
3. What does Rajeev mean when he says “I look for 2 act opportunities”?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Rajeev Batra