Analysis, forecasting, and thoughts on all things venture
Since 2015, 70%+ of our investing has focused on AI applications and infrastructure. We’re proud to have led early rounds for companies like Viz.ai, Observe.ai, Socure, and Forter well before LLMs or diffusion models brought AI into the mainstream. But we’re…
We can clearly see above that public tech companies are seeing similar drop-offs in NDR to private SaaS startups. The median public SaaS NDR has fallen 10% from 121% in Q221 to 111% in Q123. While it’s a bit bumpy, the median NDR for SaaS startups has fallen a similar amount - down 8% from 112% in Q221 to 104% in Q123.
Q123 data indicates that the growth slowdown is continuing - and most companies failed to meet even the conservative plans they set earlier this year. This was the fourth consecutive quarter of decrease in both top-decile and median year-over-year ARR growth, with only 22% of companies achieving their Q123 plans.
it is nearly impossible to define alignment, let alone achieve it. Human beings, in all their variance, capacity, and folly, make up the entire training pipeline, and we take such comfort in the fact that we call them all by the same name. But every human is individual, and models will change as their trainers do.
Segment-specific startups frequently outperform their horizontal counterparts and do so with greater efficiency, lower churn, and simpler GTM motions. So why the aversion from some investors?
We believe that we are at an inflection point where stream processing will become the standard that powers user-facing analytics. The growing importance of the use cases enabled by stream processing is being met with solutions that are increasingly easy to adopt.
No one can tell exactly what 2023 will bring, but one thing is for certain: there is a sprint to efficiency with improving burn multiples and slowing revenue growth across the board. Comparing 2022 performance with 2023 plans shows the stark reality. The slowdown in ARR Growth we saw in 2022 will result in a slowdown in GAAP Revenue Growth in 2023. At the same time, startups have tightened their belts to become more efficient.
Some high-level thoughts about how CFOs of technology companies should be thinking about their annual planning ahead of 2023.
Here's the data we're sharing with our portfolio companies as they develop 2023 annual plans.
With the bulk of 2022 behind us, attention now turns to planning for 2023. The topic of conversation in every boardroom is the corresponding tradeoffs between growth and burn. Check out the tool that we built that helps you understand how you compare with other companies. Stay tuned as we’ll also be publishing our 2023 Whisper Numbers later this month.
