SaaStr 180: David Skok on Why You Should Not Focus On CAC/LTV In The Early Days, What Is The Right Way To Analyse Sales Rep Productivity & The Leading Indicators Early Stage VCs Use to Assess Product Market Fit

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• What are the leading indicators that early stage VCs dig deep on to assess the strength of product market fit? What level of traction both in enterprise and SMB would an early stage investor deem exciting enough to pursue? What levels of engagement are sufficient enough to suggest cause for a much larger and increased round?
• How should founders assess sales rep productivity? What can they do to actively shorten the ramp time? How will early stage investors analyse the ramp time? What suggests repeatability of process?
• Why does David believe there is no point focusing on CAC/LTV in the early days? What is the single biggest thing that founders can do to show repeatability of process and revenue as fast as possible?
• What is the most common reason that people miss plan? How must the mindset of the founder switch from extreme frugality to hyper growth scaling? When is the right time for this transition to take place? What are the inherent challenges to this switch?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

David Skok

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