Showing posts with label Aneel Lakhani. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aneel Lakhani. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

VCs and Open Source and Funding

Aneel Lakhani (@aneel, Investor, @crane_vc Crane Venture Partners) talks about the challenges of VC funding and building profitable companies based on open-source software. 

SHOW: 791

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Topic 1 - Welcome back. You’re almost in the 5 timers club at this point, and a returning guest from our look-ahead shows in 2023. For our new listeners, tell everyone a little bit about yourself

Topic 2 - You recently gave a talk at Monktoberfest about the problem with money in software, specifically open-source software. The crux of it was that VCs require high returns on investments, and software has short windows to gain adoption. 

Topic 3 - Could that talk have been given any time over the last 5+ years, or was it triggered by recent “events” with open source companies (e.g. Hashicorp)?

Topic 4 - Has VC thinking changed about software, given that open source provided essentially early marketing and awareness for “free,” but that comes with user expectations of free (cost) as well? Are there any new ideas about how to build cost-effective software moats?

Topic 5 - There are various “conspiracies” floating around that VCs negotiate “the rug pull” with companies at each funding round. Especially in the early stages (where you focus), how much is the VC focused on getting the idea off the ground vs. the validity of the business model? When does the business model discussion typically start? 

Topic 6 - We’ve said before that there will never be another Enterprise Software company after VMware. Has the era of open-source enterprise startups ended, or does it just need to go through a phase of rediscovery?

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Wednesday, January 18, 2023

2023 Look Ahead to Venture Capital Funding

Aneel Lakhani (@aneel, Investor, @crane_vc Crane Venture Partners) talks about life as a VC, upcoming trends to look out for, and what to expect with rising interest rates in 2023.

SHOW: 686

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome back. You’re almost in the 5 timers club at this point and a returning guest from our look ahead shows in 2022. For our new listeners, tell everyone a little bit about yourself

Topic 2 - We covered a lot of VC basics in last year's show, link above for those that missed it. We still get a lot of questions around VC funding and VC’s in general. What’s the elevator pitch version of what you do day to day as a VC? Also, how is Crane different from say some of the traditional Sand Hill Road VC’s

Topic 3 - Since we spoke last year, what’s changed? What market patterns have you noticed? Have investment and “exit” strategies changed?

Topic 4 - Investment advisors always tell clients to take a long view of markets, because their horizon for things like retirement or college savings, are long term. Do VCs tend to take round–to-round viewpoints of customers, or longer-term (like 5-7yrs) of their investments?

Topic 5 -  Last year we talked about the cost of investments (expectations of valuations) being high (cheap money, lots of competition). Given the changes in the economy, do you expect that we’ll see big changes in investments, valuations, etc..? 

Topic 6 - At a macro level, what is interesting to you in 2023? What are you researching these days?

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Friday, January 10, 2020

A "SaaS" Look Ahead for 2020

SHOW: 432

DESCRIPTION: Aneel Lahkani (@aneel, Go To Market Consultant and Advisor) talks about how SaaS impacts today's cloud computing decisions, the challenges of running a profitable SaaS business, migrating to SaaS services, and how public clouds compete and partner with SaaS offerings. 

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. For anyone that doesn’t know you, tell us a little bit about your background, and some of the areas you focus on now.

Topic 2 - What is SaaS in 2020? (Delivery model, acquisition and usage model, experimentation model, etc.). Is it a finite thing, or has it been componentized? 

Topic 3 - Is it possible to build software and then make it SaaS, or do the business and software have to be built in parallel with the SaaS offering?

Topic 4 - Does anyone actually “migrate” (successfully) existing types of applications to SaaS, or should the focus of SaaS be on breaking free from old approaches? 

Topic 5 - We’re seeing many “tools” companies become “platform” companies and offer things that blur the lines between SaaS and something else (GitHub, Salesforce, etc.). Does this become the way that they compete against AWS or Azure?

Topic 6 - Why do you think AWS doesn’t have a broader set of SaaS offerings at this point? 

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Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Exploring the SaaS Business Model

SHOW: 390

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Aneel Lakhani (@aneel, Go To Market Consultant and Advisor) about the difference between traditional Enterprise software and B2B SaaS offerings, how the sales and marketing models work, and how development and operations is significantly changed with SaaS.

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Aneel’s Background: From engineering and product roles at IBM to marketing and go to market roles at Cisco and a number of SaaS startups, with a brief stint as a Research Director at Gartner. Has been a frequent speaker at events like Velocity and been on many podcasts, including this one, Andreessen Horowitz’s, and Microsoft’s Open Source Show.

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. We’ve known each other for quite a while, but tell our audience about your last 10 years in gaining a ton of experience around startups and SaaS-based businesses.  

Topic 2 - A few weeks ago, in the middle of a Twitter conversation, you said “SaaS changes everything”. Let’s start with the most basic things. How is a SaaS-delivered business different than a traditional software business? (development, go-to-market, marketing, profitability (or loss) models)

Topic 3 - Digging into the sales and marketing funnel, walk us through what typically happens from awareness to sign-up to early/free trial to actual customer engagement, and how a SaaS company is measuring along the way.

Topic 4 - Help us understand the economics of product development in a SaaS business. Not only do you have the normal costs/challenges of building the software, but you have the ongoing costs of running the SaaS operations. 

Topic 5 - What are some of the critical metrics and measurements that the SaaS company and their VCs are typically looking at? 

Topic 6 - What is the thought process of SaaS companies about their service eventually becoming an AWS service at the next re:Invent?  


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