16. What is your advice for the 21st Century Startup Founder? One thing I’ve learned from the next generation of SaaS companies I’m involved with versus the last two generations of ‘05-’07ish and ‘08-’11ish is just how agile they are. I am amazed at the features Talkdesk pushed out last month at their user conference, (even, when they were just 5 people) how many they push out every month. I am amazed at Algolia’s agility in search as a service. I am amazed at RainforestQA’s ability to manage 50,000+ QA crowdtesters and still deliver an amount of functionality every 6 weeks deliver. It would have taken me 18 months to ship. Old SaaS Companies just aren’t agile. Their architecture is too old. It’s too much work to change. It’s too risky to impact existing business workflows. If you can be 10x more agile AND have product-market fit, you have something special the others don’t. Most of us can barely keep up, barely keep our heads above water, on the product side. 17. When should a startup get acquired? Let me take a stab at this, having been through the acquisition process 4x -- twice as a founder, twice as a start-up exec. When A Start-Up Should Get Acquired: • Before You Fail / Run Out of Money / Etc. If you are slightly hot but with few revenues or have something but not enough, sell while you still have time. Don’t wait until you have 30 days of cash. Way, way, too many start-ups wait too long in this scenario. • When the Team Isn’t Good Enough. Even if you are growing nicely and cash-flow positive, and all the quantitative metrics look good ... if the team isn’t good enough, and can’t fix itself -- sell if and when you can. Bad teams kill start- ups. Every day. Sell before then if you can’t fix it. Sometimes great individuals just don’t make great teams and it can’t be fixed. It’s sad, but not uncommon. SAASTR.COM 14