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The Weekly Mattermark Daily Weekend Edition

Hello and welcome back to the weekend edition of the Daily. This is Alex. I'll be steering the Daily over the next week until Nick is back at the keys.

Apologies in advance.

Today we're rewinding to make sure you are fully caught up from the week behind us. To start, a look at the numbers. Following, we'll highlight the most important recent posts from the tech community.

The Changing Value Of ARR, Part III (read more)

What is your startup worth? The answer may surprise you. To help us both understand where the market is, Mattermark took a third look at the current value of recurring revenue in our continuing series on the topic. 

You can find the first two installments here and here. 

Venture Capitalists Heart Late-Stage Startups

Perhaps unsurprisingly, venture capital isn't distributed equally among all potentially worthy startups. Instead, venture participants tend to skew their investment dollars towards larger, more mature companies.

How much VC investment goes to the biggest deals? A very, very large percentage. Mattermark investigates.

Stop worrying, there is still plenty for you.

Weekly Digest: Top 10 Featured Posts

Elizabeth Yin of 500 Startups highlights how to balance growth and fundraising at the same time in “The Hardest Thing About Fundraising That No One Talks About…”

Peter Kazanjy of Modern Sales Salon releases a spreadsheet model to calculate the costs, timelines, and outputs of hiring sales staff, whether SDRs or AEs, and how that eventually can turn into a growing business in “Staffing and Scaling a SaaS Sales Org? I’ve Got a Model for You.”

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures details why you have to either choose to be an active and concentrated or passive and diversified investor in “Active vs Passive Investing”

Brian Weisberg of Anchore produces a model for anyone to better understand their acquisition costs and set targets for their sales and marketing teams in “Ensuring Accountability for Sales & Marketing Investments”

Sara Mauskopf of Winnie reveals a way she grew mobile user traction, in-app content, and user geographies, at the same time in “Go Big or Go Home”

Naval Ravikant of AngelList joins angel investor Dave Lerner to discuss the origins of AngelList, the changing landscape of startup investing and all things Syndicates in “Venture Studio Episode 30” (podcast)

Grant Canary of DroneSeed gives an overview of the top SaaS products they believe startups should adopt in “The Core SaaS Products New Techstars Companies Should Consider”

Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures examines the slowing pace of new SaaS startup creation in “The Decline Of New SaaS Company Formation.” Tunguz postulates that increased competition and having “the key systems of record in SaaS” in place are partially to blame.

Tunguz’s post comes after it became known that seed funding velocity is falling.

Elon Musk of Tesla published his company’s second manifesto in “Master Plan, Part Deux.” It’s a photo app! It’s a new social network! No, it’s a plan to “accelerate a sustainable future.” 

US Venture Capital’s Tougher Q2 In Historical Context (read more)

The second quarter venture capital market wasn't as good as the first in terms of deals, and, according to some sources, dollars.

Averaging several data sets shows that VC deal cadence has been declining for several quarters, while monies invested have recovered slightly from recent lows. 

The numbers are hard to knock by historical standards, however. So, to summarize the situation:

The 3 False Positives Hiding In Your Sales Process (learn now)

Up on the site from the marketing team this week is a post discussing how to deal with uncertainty in calculating SaaS metrics. According to Charlotte Dillon, "if you want to know how your sales process is working for your business, there’s little room for toying with your metrics."