For Founders

Enterprise Cloud Playbook: Lessons from the Front Lines

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Emergence: 12/15/15

At Emergence Capital, we work with some of the most talented SaaS entrepreneurs who are building market-moving enterprise technology. These visionary executives have a wealth of knowledge about what it takes to truly build a successful company in today’s market.

In an effort to share some of these rich insights with the greater entrepreneurial community, we sat down with the leaders from 14 of our portfolio companies:

Bill.com, CivitasLearning, Cotap, Donuts, Gusto, InsideView, Intacct, Janrain, Lithium, Navera, Replicon, Salesloft, SteelBrick, and Viglink

to hear more about their drivers for success. We talked about some of the most common entrepreneurial challenges, and looked at topics such as how to find the right talent, grow the team, and scale for maximum success.

What follows is excerpts from our enterprise cloud playbook, which includes a series of lessons from top SaaS entrepreneurs. For example, as you’ll see:

Godard Abel, CEO of Steel Brick talking about the importance of culture. “We are conscious of building and communicating a consistent culture throughout the company through monthly all hands, systematic sharing of plans and challenges, and recognizing team members going above and beyond to help us win.”

Rene Lacerte, CEO of Bill.com shared some tips on scaling: “Scaling should be in mind from day-one. With each organizational threshold comes new issues, roles, and responsibilities. Anticipating these changes beforehand and cultivating a culture to meet them in full stride is necessary to overcoming the challenges of propelling the company to the next stage.”

Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft shares thoughts on metrics. “My favorite and our most important metric is revenue churn. This metric tells you if you’re losing revenue from customers. Our second most important metric is probably month over month MRR growth.”

Keep reading our SlideShare here for insights from 14 of the Emergence Capital leaders on how to hire, scale and build today’s enterprise cloud winners.

Thank you to Julia Mailander and to all the portfolio executives who shared their thoughts.