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Gary Edwards

Announcing Usermind: finally harmony among SaaS apps… | Matt Murphy | LinkedIn - 0 views

www.linkedin.com/...ny-among-saas-apps-matt-murphy

Matt-Murphy Menlo-Ventures VC BizOps SaaS

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • One thing is clear: the shift to SaaS and its consumption and digitization of almost all enterprise processes, is unstoppable. Along with this transformation has come an explosion of vertical apps and data silos. If you want to check your user cohort data, send a customer an email or notification, make a payment, evaluate churn, or prioritize which customers to contact — there’s an app for that. However, if you want to write a simple process or workflow across those applications, it’s complicated, often manual, and slow.
  • The best apps focus on solving a key pain point, and thus end up having a fairly narrow scope. If you want to work in the best-in-class applications for your use case, you end up with a broad tech stack and disconnected processes. This is where Usermind comes in: a platform to automate cross-application workflows and business processes, and unify disconnected customer and product data from all of those applications.
  • It’s a great time to be investing in SaaS. We are particularly interested in the next wave of SaaS (affectionately called SaaS 2.0), which offers some combination of “mobile first,” integrates machine learning to make workflows smarter and better (e.g., Insidesales.com), and moves beyond "the system of record” (e.g., CRM, HRM) to reimagine a variety of new horizontal and vertical apps — or in the case of Usermind, enable them all to work well together!
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16
     
    "I'm thrilled to announce the public launch of Usermind, my first investment at Menlo Ventures, and one that I'm particularly excited about. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting Michel Feaster, founder and CEO of Usermind, I knew I had to invest. Michel is an impressive entrepreneur - smart, high-energy, passionate, thoughtful, and a big product thinker - and she just happens to be addressing an incredibly important problem in the enterprise that is getting more pronounced by the day."
Gary Edwards

Salesforce Ventures now a VC powerhouse - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/res-now-a-vc-powerhouse-2015-8

VC salesforce.com

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • InsideSales.com CEO Dave Elkington
  • VC arm Salesforce Ventures,
  • “Making larger investments is the biggest change recently,” said Menlo Ventures’ managing director Matt Murphy, who invested in the same round for InsideSales when he was general partner at Kleiner Perkins. “They are definitely one of the most active and collaborative corporate VCs in the valley.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Even compared to some of the other corporate VC powerhouses, Salesforce’s investment seems pretty high. Intel Capital, historically one of the most active corporate VC firms, spent $134 million during the first six months of 2015, while Qualcomm states in its latest filings that it is committed to spending only $105 million to fund “certain strategic investments” in fiscal 2015.
  • Salesforce currently has over 130 companies under its venture portfolio, 31 of which came in the last four quarters. It states that its investments range from $200,000 to $50 million, with eight investments individually exceeding $10 million.
  • “Corporate VC arms’ sweet spot is usually $1 million to $5 million,” Menlo Ventures' Murphy said. “What’s more unusual is Salesforce leading rounds and its willingness to invest $10 to $50 million.”
  • “The whole goal of the program is to increase the cloud ecosystem and to deliver more solutions for our customers,” John Somorjai, EVP of corporate development & Salesforce Ventures said. “So we’re really careful on making sure we’re investing in companies that really help that cause, and not just the next great startup.”
  • That means investing mostly in subscription-as-a-service (SaaS) providers that help grow the Salesforce platform’s overall reach. Most of them are built on top of the Salesforce1 platform and are part of the AppExchange marketplace.
  • Some of the biggest names its invested in include Box (which went public this year and now worth around $2 billion), Docusign (whose last reported valuation was $3 billion), and Dropbox (reportedly last valued at $10 billion). In fact, according to CB Insights, Salesforce has the highest number of investments in companies worth over $1 billion, surpassing Google Ventures for the top spot this year.
  • Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, a software that helps companies renew customer contracts, recently attended a two-day event hosted by Salesforce Ventures in Sausalito. There, he was able to meet over 100 SaaS company CEOs, all under Salesforce Ventures portfolio, and make connections that he was able to build upon for the long term.
  • Salesforce is sitting on top of $1.9 billion in cash,
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 15
     
    "Considering Salesforce is sitting on top of $1.9 billion in cash, the amount they spent on venture capital is still pretty small. The $145 million cash they invested last quarter is only a fraction of the $731 million it generated in operating cash flow, too. But the fact that Salesforce is increasingly looking for ways to find the next future growth engine through these investments sends a positive sign to the market, Stifel's Rodericks says, especially as Salesforce becomes a more mature company. "They're sitting on a ton of money on their balance sheet, so to a certain degree, investors would like to see them make these strategic investments in companies around this space," Roderick said. And that could potentially lead to more acquisitions, he noted, as Salesforce Ventures has been more active on the buy side too lately. It acquired sales intelligence software RelateIQ for $390 million last year, after spending $2.5 billion on marketing software ExactTarget two years ago. "This certainly gives them more visibility in the companies that they might look at as partners or potential acquisitions down the road," he said. We should be able to get to find out more about it on Thursday, when Salesforce reports its second quarter earnings. Analyst estimates are pretty much in line with Salesforce's forecasts at $1.6 billion in revenue for an EPS of $0.18."
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