What are the key metrics for Enterprise SaaS companies to track over time?

In creating this, I received some great input from Mike Carden of Joyous, Danny Tomsett of Uneeq and Mark Clare of Clare Capital – thank you for sharing and enabling others to see this.

What key metrics?

Mike Carden manages to these 5 key metrics: 

1. LTV vs CAC

2. MRR & ARR

3. Growth Rate

4. Churn Rate

5. Cash Runway

Read Mike’s thoughts https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-key-saas-benchmarks-start-ups-michael-carden/

Mike also is a big fan of Return on Capital Invested. The theory is that for each $ you raise, it should result in a 5x increase in enterprise value for the next round. As Mike says, “let that one sink in”.

What do investors look for?

Danny Tomsett shared some perspectives around what an investor looks for: 

1. Revenue Growth

2. Customer acquisition growth rate

3. MRR net retention rate - high churn likely at early stage, however some clients growing is key

4. MRR growth rate

5. LTV or if too soon, average MRR per client.

6. Sales Efficiency (showing tracking improvement ideally)

7. CAC:Revenue ratio and/or gross margin.

8. Conversion rates across each stage Inbound/Outbound> MQL > SQL> Closed won

9. Sales cycle

10. Product / Market Fit

11. Market segmentation data / buyer persona validation

12. Annual renewals

13. Survey data - this method provides some key insights - https://coda.io/@rahulvohra/superhuman-product-market-fit-engine

14. Operating Health

15. Cash Burn rate

16. Days to zero 

Mike and Danny also both have adopted OKRs for their teams with a focus mostly around Team, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Product Health and Customer Advocacy.

What tools do people use for tracking?

So many different options, all use OKRs, to trail down the key metrics to everyone across the business, or One Metric (Rowan Simpson), others customise their CRM. I have also seen people work out the metrics and then just release them on a tool like Notion and let people iterate on the fly. 

• Junior Software Developer - This is for recent graduates and non-technical people who want to learn to code. You may experience with coding but not in our core tech stack or you may be completely new (you'll have to demonstrate that you can learn fast). Key for this role is a fanatical passion about startups, finance and investing. 
• Intermediate Software Developer - This role is for mid-career developers looking to step up and take responsibility for projects and deliverables. You will probably have some experience with Laravel or at least php and/or Vue.
• Senior Software Developer - This role is for team leads from a startup or corporate who want to work with Icehouse Ventures to get a better overview of the tech scene in NZ, contribute to our core product vision of making startup investing accessible to the masses and making VC investment available to every startup that needs it. 

You will be working closely with the rest of the team throughout the software development life cycle. You’ll have a chance to be involved right from the conception of the product through to design, development and deployment. 

We’re looking for people who have an interest in finance and investing. We have an exciting technology roadmap in place that will see you working on a wide range of projects from an interactive investor portal, portfolio visualisation tools, interesting API integrations and complex CRM systems. 

Because we spend our time investing in the greatest startups in NZ we need to live our own message apply best-practises from lean startup, design thinking and agile. We are performance-focused and numbers-driven team so you’ll be working with a lot of financial data sets. 

This is a full-stack role so you’ll be working all the way from front-end design through to back-end server architecture. Your main focus will be on the core application, so a focus on logic, models, controllers and data manipulation will be an advantage. You’ll be a team player with a keen eye for detail and problem-solving skills. 

Who we are

We invest in the best startups in New Zealand and we’re determined to provide a world class experience for founders and investors. We provide a growing range of angel investing, venture capital and private equity products for founders and investors. We currently have over $150 million in assets under management.

Icehouse Ventures is the team behind Ice Angels, Flux, Tuhua Ventures, Arc Angels, First Cut Ventures and Eden Ventures. Our portfolio includes some of the best startups to come out of NZ in recent years including Face Me, Parrot Analytics, Ask Nicely, Dexibit and Sharesies. You’ll be working closely as part of our core team to build technology that delivers great experiences for investors and founders. We are part of the Icehouse community and you’ll be working with the wider community on projects to help integrate our services with other business platforms. 

Responsibilities 

We're a full-stack team so you'll have the chance to be involved in lots of areas of product development depending on what you are passionate about and where you feel you can add the most value:

• Write clean, efficient code based on functional specifications
• Designing and developing software systems using scientific analysis and mathematical models to predict and measure outcomes 
• Analysing information to recommend and plan the installation of new systems or modifications of existing systems
• Structure, manage and manipulate large data sets
• Integrate software components and third-party programs
• Test, verify and deploy programs and systems
• Troubleshoot, debug and upgrade existing software
• Gathering and evaluating user feedback
• Create technical documentation for reference and reporting
• Preparing reports on programming project specifications, activities, or status

Requirements

• Experience with software design and development in a user-centered environment
• Studies in computer science, engineering or equivalent experience
• Knowledge of coding languages and frameworks/systems
• Knowledge of the software development life-cycle
• Experience with data modeling and database management 
• Ability to learn new languages and technologies
• Familiarity with agile development methodologies
• Excellent communication skills
• Resourcefulness and troubleshooting aptitude
• Attention to detail
• Desire to work in fast-paced environment
• Creativity is always a plus

Tools

You’ll be working hands-on with the latest versions of technologies like Laravel, php, MySQL, Vue JS, Tailwind and AWS. We’re a small enough team that you’ll also have the flexibility to decide your own IDE, text editor and to create a workflow that works best for you. We’re looking for someone with familiarity across the range of tools needed to build great software, including at least some of: 

• Core programming languages like php, rails, python, etc. And/or an interest in learning php.
• Front-end languages like Vue, React, Angular, etc.And/or an interest in learning Vue.
• Frameworks such as Laravel, Symphony, Django, Rails, etc.
• Database tools such as MySQL, Postgres etc.
• Infrastructure technologies like Heroku, Docker, and Vagrant.
• Building APIs and services using CURL, REST etc.
• Interface design including CSS, SASS and HTML5. 
• Server administration in Linux, Apache, NGINX and DNS.

Why join us

This role is a chance to be part of a fast-growing team and to make a name for yourself in the startup community in NZ. The tools you build will be used by some of the most influential investors in NZ and by the hottest startups.  

You’ll be surrounded by people who are the best at what they do and have the chance to do your best work. We’ll let you choose between a Mac and PC and set you up with all the tools you need (as many screens as you need). 

Icehouse Ventures is the leading investor in early-stage New Zealand companies and the team are all passionate about creating great businesses here in NZ. You’ll grow fast and benefit from mentoring, connections and resources from the whole Icehouse community. 

The vision is that this is a permanent role and you’ll be a key part of the long-term technology strategy for the Icehouse Ventures team. Depending on your circumstances we may look to structure your offer around a short-term project in the first instance and build towards a permanent role once we get to know each other.

If you are interested in applying for the role, join our talent network as a candidate: https://jobs.icehouseventures.co.nz/jobs

Biomatters was among the first startups to present to the Ice Angels investment network after it was formed by its five founding members in December 2003. The Ice Angels and a handful of others provided seed funding in 2004, and we’ve invested multiple times in the company as they evolved and grew over the years. One of the members has remained a Board member since day one. 

The founders of Biomatters set out with a vision of “uncorking bottlenecks in the disease-research and drug-discovery processes.” This absolutely aligned to our desire to back ambitious startups that could add significantly to the future of New Zealand.  

Their tenacity, commitment, and world-leading team has flown under the radar for more than a decade. The acquisition offers Biomatters the firepower they deserve to help them shine on the global stage. It is an exciting next step for the company and the team as they join forces to create a life sciences software platform with technology and data analysis at the core of scientific research around the world.

It is also good news for New Zealand’s fast-growing entrepreneurial sector. As we have seen with other investor returns of this magnitude, the capital, confidence, and expertise is often recycled into the startup ecosystem. Good ideas breed other good ideas; company founders breed founders; confidence breeds confidence, and capital breeds capital. It is very virtuous.

Ice Angels invests in startups knowing their journeys are risky and can be long. It’s fantastic to have the risk and patience rewarded in this case.

As we power up the new company next week, Icehouse Ventures (which includes Ice Angels), with our first official day being 1 May, we look forward to meeting more entrepreneurs with the potential to make their mark on the world stage like the Biomatters team.

Congratulations to Brett and the Biomatters team. Thanks for your hard work and contribution to the future of New Zealand.

- Robbie Paul

CEO of Icehouse Ventures

I joined The Icehouse ten years ago. The first thing that inspired me was the calibre of the people involved. 100s of entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders lined up to contribute to our mission of creating a high performing New Zealand economy where ideas and businesses thrive.

Our opportunity (& challenge) has always been to truly harness the expertise and resources of our network. We have leveraged many tools to do so. We incentivise them, inspire them, provide them an identity, and simply beg them.

As an investor in >80 startups, I have seen ample evidence that the most effective tool to harness the firepower and willpower of others is to align them with equity. That has not been an option for us. Until now.

Today we announce the establishment of Icehouse Ventures. As the investment arm of The Icehouse, the Icehouse Ventures group includes the Ice Angels and ArcAngels investor networks, Tuhua Ventures, Eden Ventures, First Cut Ventures, a variety of passive funds, and the Flux Accelerator. We have collectively invested >$100m into 165 Kiwi startups. 

Icehouse Ventures is launching with $3m in investment from Simplicity Kiwisaver, FNZC, and Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1. I cannot imagine a more iconic and aligned set of lead investors. We will raise an additional $1m from the amazing angel investors within our community.  

The investment is about enabling us to significantly increase the support we provide to startups. This capital will afford more resources and templates, a larger and more relevant global network, increasing investment for startups by growing our community of active investors and our managed funds, and more high pedigree team members and fund Partners to provide hands-on support.

However, this capital raise is not just about financial capital. It’s about intellectual capital. Financial capital keeps the lights on. Intellectual capital underpins bold missions. Financial capital seeks an ROI. Intellectual capital creates an ROI. Financial capital is finite. Intellectual capital is infinite.

I have always admired the virtuousness that founders benefit from when they raise capital: they start with a bold vision and through the process of convincing investors and team members to believe it they become more emboldened. As a result, they are better able to harness the intellectual capital of their investors and team members. This has absolutely been our experience launching Icehouse Ventures. We are better off having simply gone through the process.

This is an exciting new chapter for us.

It was inspired by watching founders establish and pursue massive visions. It was enabled because founders gave us the chance to support and invest in their journeys. It was funded because Simplicity, FNZC, and K1W1 recognise the amazing impact founders can make on New Zealand’s future. Thanks to you all.

Ten years into this journey with The Icehouse I can conclude this: patience and persistence is highly rewarded in the startup ecosystem. It takes a ridiculously long time to build anything of meaning.

The support of Simplicity, FNZC, and K1W1 provides us the ability to remain patient and persistent. It positions us to build an institution that thrives by investing in and adding value to New Zealand’s leading startups over the coming decades. I feel super privileged to be a part of this mission.

Robbie Paul

CEO of Icehouse Ventures

FAQs

What is Icehouse Ventures?

Icehouse Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm. The firm includes all of the previous startup related activities of The Icehouse including the Flux Accelerator, partnerships with angel networks Ice Angels & ArcAngels; and funds Tuhua Ventures, Eden Ventures and First Cut Ventures, which collectively manage $50 million in funds. Tuhua Ventures second fund, Tuhua II is more than 75% subscribed and will close shortly.

More than $106 million has been invested into 165 New Zealand companies since The Icehouse first began channelling capital to startups with the establishment of its incubator in 2001 and Ice Angels in 2003, with more than half this amount raised within the past four years. In 2018, the Icehouse community invested $22 million into 56 startups.

Icehouse Ventures will continue to be majority owned by The Icehouse Limited. New shareholders will include KiwiSaver funds manager Simplicity; Sir Stephen Tindall’s investment company K1W1; investment banking firm FNZC and a group of other investors and staff that will join with the partners.

How much are the new partners investing in Icehouse Ventures?  

The Icehouse is raising $4 million to power up Icehouse Ventures and grow its business. The investing partners have committed $3 million of investment into Icehouse Ventures between Simplicity, FNZC and K1W1, leaving $1 million of investment to be raised from interests associated with The Icehouse. The investing partnership has also indicated they will be investing in Icehouse Ventures’ funds and investing platforms in their own right. Simplicity will start by investing $2 million into Tuhua Ventures’ second fund, Tuhua II and it expects to invest up to $100 million over the next 5 years in other Ventures funds that are funding emerging high growth New Zealand companies. FNZC will also be investing across the platform and also releasing products that enable its clients to access the portfolio opportunities of Icehouse Ventures best companies.

What is the ownership structure of Icehouse Ventures? 

The new investing partners will own 23% of the company. The Icehouse owns the remaining shares and will be launching an employee share ownership programme.

Who is Robbie Paul? How did he become CEO?

Robbie joined The Icehouse in 2008 and trained under former US Angel Capital Association Director Dan Rosen and New Zealand Angel Association Arch Angel Bill Payne. He became CEO of Ice Angels in 2015. He is the Managing Partner of Tuhua Ventures and was a founding investor in 2016. He will take on the role of CEO of Icehouse Ventures from 1 May. You can find out more about Robbie here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjpaul/

How many people does Icehouse Ventures employ?

Icehouse Ventures will initially employ 8 full-time executives who were previously employed by The Icehouse which now falls under the umbrella of Icehouse Ventures. More staff will be hired as the company grows.

How does the Icehouse work with Icehouse Ventures?

The Icehouse retains majority control of Icehouse Ventures and in simple terms, it is sharing a load of investment with its new investment partners to create more impact and returns. Everything else says the same, the organisation will work from the same place, acting as one business focused on supporting New Zealand’s founders and SMEs to reach their potential. The Icehouse will have a shared services contract with Icehouse Ventures to deliver its back office and compliance together with the support of marketing and executives such as The Icehouse CEO, Andy Hamilton who will continue to be actively involved in the Icehouse Ventures business and operations. This shared services arrangement has an initial period of five years. See diagram below.

I wanted to write a post to cover off a few things:

Firstly, to bring to light the frequency of start up founding relationships not working out over the short / medium term.

Secondly, for founders to recognise the importance of having the conversation about what would happen in a break up early on.

Thirdly, to talk about how you should set up your vesting and shareholders agreement to prepare for the worst case scenario.

1. Partnership breakups: It happens for different reasons

2. Plan and talk about it early, even if it’s an awkward conversation

• What are the roles that each co-founder will have in the organisation, how are those expected to change over time?

• What are the deliverables or measures of accountability with each founders’ role?

• How big a company do we want to build?

• How much dilution are you prepared to have along the way?

• Are we both committing to this journey full time, when will that change?

• Is it our life’s work or does one founder consider it to be more of a project?

• How long would you be happy to be in the business for, what’s our time horizon?

• Is there a time at which, if X milestone hadn’t been reached a founder would give up, or are we both committed to the bitter/sweet end?

Once this conversation has been had it’s good to document this understanding in a formal way and clearly outline the steps that would be taken if a founder wants to leave. What is the mediation process, the meetings, the board discussion etc. How is this decision finally made? Having a simple understanding of how this will work can avoid a lot of distraction and dysfunction if the situation does arise.

3. What next? The pragmatic steps to take

So, the best practice in our experience is to document a vesting in a shareholder’s agreement that outlines the plan. Here is a great Simmonds Stewart Document Maker that can be used to set this out. Generally, we would advise a vesting period of 3–4 years. It takes a long time to create value in a company in most cases. If the vesting schedule is too short, or too much is vested on close of financing and a co-founder leaves the business, they could leave with 20–30% of the company. This is an awkward situation for the company and does not bode well for the next financing round if a large portion of the cap table is sitting with a now ex-employee that will no longer contribute to the future success of the company.

So to sum up; What can you do to avoid a founder break up?

1. Set up your vesting schedule with the worst in mind.

2. Focus on internal communication and getting comfortable with strategy among the team.

3. Let people know if you are feeling overwhelmed in the business and talk about it to avoid a total blow up!

In all cases — an exiting founder is a stressful and all-consuming process. But if you have the guard rails setup from which to operate within, it can make the process a lot easier.

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Vodafone Xone. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Ben Reynolds about how his company Spalk is making sports commentary more accessible. 

Have you ever turned on your favorite live sports game to be disappointed by the commentators? Maybe it is an Aussie butchering Māori or Pasifika names, maybe it is just that they are talking out of their hats.

Well, Ben Reynolds and Michael Prendergast did something about it. They used internet software to do their own commentaries, growing to thousands of fans who would tune in despite audio delays, lags from live action and all sorts of technical shortcomings – shortcomings in which they saw an opportunity.

So they built the perfect system to allow multiple commentaries on a single stream of video.

They prototyped, launched and have now built the tool into Spalk, a service that has let millions view video with their audio and is used by Māori TV, FIBA and soon lots of American sports outfits to allow choice for viewers and savings for broadcasters.

It’s an idea driving up viewership, engagement and getting backing from capital. It’s earned them a place at the Vodafone Xone accelerator that kick-started their growth. To talk the journey so far and the plans ahead, Ben Reynolds joined the podcast. 

You started out with the idea of providing alternate commentary for sports, pretty much for fun. Did you see pretty soon that there were actually people whose home team was playing and they weren’t getting their side of the story out?

Yeah, exactly, so what we did after we built this little hacky version of Spalk was we went out and said to a bunch of amateur sports organisations, hey, you’re not actually streaming anything, can we put some of your content online so us and our friends can commentate it?

So our first partner was Auckland Cricket, who streamed a bunch of their Plunket Shield matches and a bunch of their county level cricket games, and so we’d be sitting there with a camcorder following the action on the side of the field, streaming it to YouTube, it would go onto our system, and then people would be commentating it from all around New Zealand.

Soon we had a commentator in Australia, and then one in London. The commentators were growing and growing. We started doing a lot of work with other amateur sports organisations, the likes of New Zealand Swimming and New Zealand Squash and a lot of those other sports who weren’t quite at the broadcast stage but were really keen to get content online so their fans could commentate it.

We were getting good numbers of people tuning in and listening to all this good commentary. We had professional players coming on and commentating tournaments, and kids who’d just finished up at their high school champs coming on to commentate their friends and all sorts of things like that.

We started seeing a lot of grassroots people coming in and getting really really excited about what we were doing.

Did you have to build out the infrastructure to actually film everything and live stream it in order to get the Spalk idea off the ground? 

It was interesting, at that stage we didn’t really think that places like SkyTV or Māori Television who are one of our really good partners now would ever take us seriously. So we said to ourselves, what’s the easiest way that we can get access to some content? And the easiest way was to just do it ourselves. 

I borrowed a camcorder from Mum and Dad and figured out how to stream everything online and it was a pretty hacky setup with a camcorder on the side of the pitch and me sitting there texting scores through to the commentators so that they could give score updates because there was no score graphic or anything up on the screen.

We got the numbers and that really validated that we had a kernel of something interesting.

With that kernel you then went to Māori TV who were one of your first big broadcast partners. Was that driven by the horrendous mispronunciations of Māori and Pasifika names you hear?

Yeah that was part of it. It’s funny because they actually ended up coming to us. They got in touch and said hey, we’ve seen what you guys are doing and think it’s really interesting from the ability to have multiple different languages.

Obviously as a state broadcaster they’ve got to provide a certain level of coverage in te reo Māori so for them it was a really easy way to say here’s a really easy way to do English commentary, Māori commentary, and hey, if we want to throw in Fijian and Samoan and a variety of other Pasifika languages so we’ve got a really broad broadcast and a really appealing product to different demographics around New Zealand. 

Really for them it was where they saw the use case and so for us what it meant was we had to go back and rejig our entire infrastructure to be able to deal with being on a product like Māori Television.

Rather than dealing with a camcorder, suddenly we were on broadcast-level content coming out of the New Zealand High School Basketball champs, and we’ve got a certain level of service that we’ve got to provide, and so it was a really good opportunity for us to go and build a proper product and take the time to go and do a bit more research and development and really mature where the product was at.