Founders should know the sobering reality for enterprise SaaS

Founders should know the sobering reality for enterprise SaaS venture funding today. Here’s the math. Say you’re a $1M ARR company raising a Series A with a classic 33222 growth expectation. That gets you to $72M in 5yrs and say $250M in 8yrs. By then you’re usually growing <<50% and the public markets might give you a 7x or $1.75B, if you can even go public. If you get $10M at $100M post-money for the A, that’s a 17.5x and maybe 10x after dilution. That would be ~33% IRR and $10M invested becomes $100M. In the venture model, you have to outperform the SP500 which is 15% and a Google which is 25%. Here, with perfect execution, a lot of work, time and risk, you get 33% in a near optimal (95 percentile) case. And usually, you expect 7/10 things to not work out: execution risk, market size, competition. Plus, this math is for a Series A. You need investors to underwrite even more growth at the B / C / D. It’s really hard to see this sort of deal driving fund returns. Now, of course, there’s tons of caveats. You could pay less than $100M post, try to grow faster, do pro rata to avoid dilution, stay private longer etc, but the point remains. There might be exceptional growth stories like Databricks, Snowflake and Applied Intuition, but most deals look like what I described. In a previous time, SaaS multiples were higher in public (20x), entry valuations were lower ($30M) and the money you needed to hire talent was lower ($150k). You could get 100% IRR before. Now, it’s harder than ever to justify investing here, unless they are true outliers.