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Last year, we put together a list of 17 startup newsletters that people here on the Visible team read and love. In one way or another, each of those newsletters helps to inform our decision-making around strategy and product or features content that we find generally entertaining and insightful. Related Resources: Our 15 Favorite Newsletters for Startup Founders The 16 Best Startup Newsletters In the months since, we have come across a few more newsletters that have quickly become can’t miss material for us each week. Snippets from Social Capital As a firm, Social Capital focuses on backing companies solving big problems. Snippets, their weekly newsletter surfaces content to help readers learn more about those big areas – like healthcare, education, and technology’s impact on society. The Ringer While the newsletter from Bill Simmons’ new venture, The Ringer, doesn’t even remotely focus on product or business – like his old site, Grantland, it focuses on the intersection of sports and pop culture – it does allow the reader to follow along with how one of the media world’s more interesting thinkers is going about building something from the ground up (albeit with an existing audience of millions). UX Design Weekly Kenny Chen’s newsletter is pretty simple — which any good UX designer knows is important. The best UX focused content from around the web sent out weekly. The list includes articles, tools, resources, and even portfolios to help readers advance their understanding of how to build usable products. L2 News – The Daily & The Week, Winners & Losers If you follow our blog, you know we love the stuff produced by L2 Digital and include videos and images from their reports in a lot of our posts. The firm focuses on benchmarking the performance of firms in the digital space — for example, how effective are Nike’s Ecommerce efforts vs. competitors — and their newsletters deliver all of that great content right to your inbox. Farnam Street Brain Food The Farnam Street Blog is difficult to describe succinctly. Basically, founder Shane Parrish has tried to build a site that pulls together great resources to make readers smarter and better. Decision-making, mental models, leadership, innovation…these are all topics that the blog touches on. The newsletter distills the best stuff from the site each week. Paul Singh’s Weekly Newsletter Over the years, Singh has worked on both sides of the table – founding multiple companies and working as a partner at 500 Startups. Since selling his most recent company, Disruption Corp., to 1776, Singh has built a community around his newsletter, where he shares 10 or so links that he and his community loved in the last week. And since you made it all the way to the end…we’d love to have you check out our little newsletter, The Visible Foreword. We generally send stuff twice per week. On Wednesdays, we share a new investor letter and over the weekend we provide some commentary on what we launched, learned, wrote, and thought about during the week.

Like Warren Buffett, Howard Marks is a master craftsman of memos on the state of the market, investment psychology, and investment philosophy. In January of 2016 as capital seemed to be pouring out of public and private equity markets – at the time of his post, the S&P was down almost 9% from where it ended 2015 – and liquidity was on the minds of many investors and operators. For people building companies (as opposed to investment firms), his notes on liquidity provide ample learning opportunities to help effectively navigate periods of exuberance and tightening that inevitably occur. Marks framed his thoughts on liquidity well at the beginning of this Bloomberg interview where he states: “The best defense against liquidity is not needing it. It is buying things you can hold for a long period of time.” We have pulled out our favorite sections and added our thoughts below. The full investor letter (pdf) can be found at the bottom of this post. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. If you like what you see and want to share Visible Investor Letters with friends or colleagues, send them here to sign up. Oaktree’s Howard Marks on Liquidity Liquidity Defined Sometimes people think of liquidity as the quality of something being readily saleable or marketable. For this, the key question is whether it’s registered, publicly listed and legal for sale to the public. “Marketable securities” are liquid in this sense; you can buy or sell them in the public markets. “Nonmarketable” securities include things like private placements and interests in private partnerships, whose salability is restricted and can require the qualification of buyers, documentation, and perhaps a time delay. But the more important definition of liquidity is this one from Investopedia: “The degree to which an asset or security can be bought or sold in the market without affecting the asset’s price.” Thus the key criterion isn’t “can you sell it?” It’s “can you sell it at a price equal or close to the last price?” Most liquid assets are registered and/or listed; that can be a necessary but not sufficient condition. For them to be truly liquid in this latter sense, one has to be able to move them promptly and without the imposition of a material discount. Much ink has been spilled in recent periods about the lack of liquidity – using the definition Marks’ favors – in the private markets. Companies of all stages are struggling to raise fresh capital without taking a haircut (selling an asset below the last price) and the IPO window is firmly closed. Liquidity Characterized I often say many of the important things in investing are counter-intuitive. Liquidity is one of them. In particular, it’s probably more wrong than right to say without qualification that something is or isn’t “liquid.” If when people ask whether a given asset is liquid they mean “marketable” (in the sense of “listed” or “registered”), then that’s an entirely appropriate question, and answering it is straightforward. Either something can be sold freely to the public or it can’t. But if what they want to know is how hard it will be to get rid of it if they change their mind or want to take a profit or avoid a possible loss – how long it will take to sell it, or how much of a markdown they’ll have to take from the last price – that’s probably not an entirely legitimate question. It’s often a mistake to say a particular asset is either liquid or illiquid. Usually an asset isn’t “liquid” or “illiquid” by its nature. Liquidity is ephemeral: it can come and go. An asset’s liquidity can increase or decrease with what’s going on in the market. One day it can be easy to sell, and the next day hard. Or one day it can be easy to sell but hard to buy, and the next day easy to buy but hard to sell. In other words, the liquidity of an asset often depends on which way you want to go . . . and which way everyone else wants to go. If you want to sell when everyone else wants to buy, you’re likely to find your position is highly liquid: you can sell it quickly, and at a price equal to or above the last transaction. But if you want to sell when everyone else wants to sell, you may find your position is totally illiquid: selling may take a long time, or require accepting a big discount, or both. If that’s the case – and I’m sure it is – then the asset can’t be described as being either liquid or illiquid. It’s entirely situational. There’s usually plenty of liquidity for those who want to sell things that are rising in price or buy things that are falling. That’s great news, since much of the time those are the right actions to take. But why is the liquidity plentiful? For the simple reason that most investors want to do just the opposite. The crowd takes great pleasure from buying things whose prices are rising, and they often become highly motivated to sell things that are falling . . . notwithstanding that those may be exactly the wrong things to do. Select Passages Specific investor actions can have a dramatic impact in illiquid markets For example, the price of an illiquid asset can rise simply because one buyer is buying, in which case selling the asset becomes very easy. When that buyer stops buying, however, the market can quickly reset to much lower levels in terms of both price and the liquidity enjoyed by sellers (and it can overshoot in the other direction if the buyer decides to sell what he bought. People have pointed out that the slowdown in VC funding (to whatever extent it has or will happen) has been largely a VC conspiracy and it is tough to write this off entirely — although I am sure that in this imagined world of VC “conspiracies” a yoga studio or vest-shopping excursion replaces the dark, smoke-filled rooms of old-timey conspiracy theories. The reality is that the venture market is small and quite illiquid, so when a few major firms decide to focus more on their existing portfolios or non-traditional players like mutual funds decide to slow down, liquidity begins to trickle out of the market. And in an already illiquid market, change can happen fast. In describing current market conditions, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures noted the following: If you want to see what was on my mind – I started foreshadowing change publicly in October 2015 with a forecast of what I expected in 2016 VC funding markets at a presentation I gave at the annual Cendana VC/LP conference hosted by Michael Kim. Word travels at light speed amongst this small network of people who all know each other and even though they’re rivals they also sit on boards together and many probably went to business school together. So when something in changing those at ground zero, in my word, “get the memo.” Of course it’s not literally a memo but that’s a metaphor for knowing that things have dramatically changed. If you’re not in this closed group of VCs you will eventually figure out the new game but the memo arrives more slowly. Many of the industry’s top thinkers were at Cendana’s annual meeting and panel after panel privately debated what they were seeing. On the other hand, at the right time, investors can make tremendous amounts of money simply by being willing to supply liquidity (are accept illiquidity). When everyone else is selling in panic or sitting frozen on the sideline, refusing to buy, cash can be king. Often when a crash follows a bubble driven run-up, most people are short of cash (and/or the willingness to spend it). A few paragraphs before this passage, Marks touches on the need to think about liquidity levels carrying over from one asset or market to another. This was the case in 2008 and 2009, when it seemed people in all markets were content to sit on the sidelines and reserve cash. During that time, investors who were unwilling to spend their cash (supplying liquidity) in the early stage private markets would have missed out on investing in generation-defining companies like Uber, Slack, and Airbnb. The bottom line is unambiguous. Liquidity can be transient and paradoxical. It’s plentiful when you don’t care about it and scarce when you need it most. Given the way it waxes and wanes, it’s dangerous to assume the liquidity that’s available in good times will be there when the tide goes out. What can an investor do about this unreliability? The best preparation for bouts of illiquidity is: Buying assets, hopefully at prices below durable intrinsic values, that can be held for a long time – in the case of debt, to its maturity – even if prices fall or price discovery ceases to take place, and Making sure that investment vehicle structures, leverage arrangements (if any), manager/client relationships and performance expectations will permit a long-term approach to investing. These are the things we try to do. In the section above, Marks is talking about the Oaktree approach to building their firm and later notes two benefits to their approach: We aren’t highly reliant on liquidity for success, and Rather than be weakened in times of illiquidity, we can profit from crises by investing more – at lower prices – when liquidity is scarce. Rephrased for someone building a company and not an investment firm, the benefits to this type of strategy would be: 1. We aren’t highly reliant on another round of funding for success 2. Rather than be weakened when the funding market pendulum swings, we can profit from downturns by investing more – at lower prices – in things like talent and customer acquisition This mirrors the approach of Slack’s Stewart Butterfield who has tried to take advantage of a period of high liquidity to protect his company (financially and psychologically) from a market downturn. “And really the thing we get out of having the cash in the bank at this point is options. We’re in a really good position where when opportunities arise that we want to take advantage of, we can just do them. Whether that’s acquisitions, international expansion, advertising — whatever it is that comes up that feels like the best move for the business, we will take advantage of. Having the freedom to pursue opportunities without the constraint of capital enables all kinds of things which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.” – Stewart Butterfield, Business Insider Interview

Every company going out to try to raise capital from angel investors or VCs seems to have some derivative of the same question – “What should we include in our pitch deck?” While the outsize clout people give a simple slide deck may seem silly, it speaks the importance of being able to weave a compelling narrative about your business. Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital is one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time. He sits on the board of companies like Square and Jawbone and led investments in Youtube and Meebo before they were acquired by Google. Recently, he checked in at #18 on CB Insights list of the top 100 venture capitalists. Basically, he knows what it takes to build great companies and how those companies should think about raising capital. Thanks to court records from the 2010 Viacom-YouTube lawsuit, we can take a first hand look at how the Youtube founders pitched Botha (exhibit 1) and how Botha pitched Youtube internally to his Sequoia partners (exhibit 2). From there, we can better understand how companies should think about structuring their own pitches to investors as well as the major hurdles companies need to get over to turn a potential investor into an advocate who makes sure to push their deal forward. Exhibit 1 – Youtube’s Pitch Here is the rundown of the order in which the Youtube founders presented their business opportunity and our interpretation of the reasoning. As you will see, the way this is presented does a great job of continually answering questions and pushback that would be brought up in the preceding section. Purpose – Why should I care? Problem – What point of friction are you attacking? Money is made at points of friction. Solution – How are you removing (extracting value from) that friction point? Market Size – How much value can you conceivably capture from this new offering? Competition – If the market is so big there must be others after it, right? While some argue that competition is not a good thing, a Blue Ocean approach to entering the market shows you have thoughtfully evaluated where others have failed and understand how to attack those areas. Product Development – What is the actual product that will serve as the conduit for this better customer experience? Sales & Distribution – How will you make the market care about this cool product? Metrics – Have any of your previous predictions been tested and evaluated by your target market? How has it gone? Team – Are you the people that are going to connect all of these dots? Exhibit 2 – Botha’s Pitch to His Sequoia Partners Raising a seed round is like making a sale to a SMB customer — smaller amount of money in play, usually one decision-maker, and a relatively short sales cycle. Raising institutional money is more like conducting an Enterprise sale. The check size is bigger, the timeline is longer, and you need to find an advocate on the inside that is going to continually work to push the deal forward and get buy-in from other decisionmakers. This latter process is the one we see at play here in Exhibit 2, where Botha takes us the Youtube cause internally at Sequoia and present the case for investment to his partners. Here, we get a rare glimpse into how an investment decision is made at a VC firm. As a founder, reading through this section is instructive in that it can help you anticipate some of the questions an investor will face from partners so you can be sure to address those in your own presentation. Intro – What is the thesis and (like in the previous section) why should we care? Deal – How do the terms and structure of the deal (valuation, our ownership, etc.) fit in overall with the portfolio we are building? Competition – How does this company fit into the marketplace of both large and small competitors? An outline of the competition quickly helps investors build a framework for what your go-to-market strategy may look like. Hiring Plan – Does this company have a plan and the ability to attract talented executives and key employees to bring the business from where it sits today to where the founders have said it will be in the future? Key Risks – What factors will cause the statements that have been made around market, product, distribution, and team to not come true? What is the likelihood and scale of those risks? Recommendation – As Thrive’s Miles Grimshaw put it in his blog post on the document, how does management, market, and monetization all tie together?

Overstock has long been a bit player in the world of Ecommerce. Founded in Utah in 1999 (at the height of the Dot-Com boom), the company grew rapidly and IPO’d in 2002 (a week after Netflix and almost right at the bottom of the Dot-Com bust) on annual revenue of $40mm and at a market cap of just under $350MM dollars. Despite being one of the few companies to come out of the Dot-Com crash alive, its long term growth has disappointed and the value of the company today sits just a few million dollars north of where they IPO’d 14 years ago. Still, the company and its CEO, Patrick Byrne have a way of keeping themselves in the news. There was the battle with naked shortsellers, its rebrand to O.co, and its early adoption of cryptocurrency. There has also been his ongoing embrace of transparency, which started with the following letter to shareholders recapping the company’s 2003 performance. The general tone and openness of this letter is uncommon for a public company and calls to mind the way Warren Buffett approaches his shareholder communication. So while the performance of the company hasn’t quite kept up with its peers, Byrne’s approach to stakeholder management is as relevant as ever. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. If you like what you see and want to share Visible Investor Letters with friends or colleagues, send them here to sign up. Overstock’s “Super-de-duper” Sales Numbers The rhythm of the Dao is like the drawing of a bow. – Lao-zi Dear Owners: My colleagues executed well this quarter. Were 2003’s four quarters a boxing match, I’d say we were dropped to our knees in the first, cleared our head in the second, got on our toes again in the third, and won the fourth on a decision. In this letter I will describe how my colleagues accomplished this, and detail some mistakes your chairman made that prevented victory by a knockout. First, I will explain why I am appending this letter to our earnings release. Simply put, I want owners to understand their business: they entrust capital to me and I owe them no less. I am warned that a letter such as this has risks. A lawyer told me that my use of this more colloquial style may be misconstrued, saying: everything you write will be Exhibit A in a lawsuit against you, (but lawyers say that about most things). Bill Mann of The Motley Fool says that we live in a time when, if things go passably well, CEOs say, Everything is super-de-duper, and when they go poorly they say, Everything is just super-duper. In such a climate, if I write, X went pretty well, but I could do better on Y and Z, the former is read as an admission of mediocrity, and the latter, calamity. This fits in with what many founders in the early stage world worry about. Everyone else is “killing it”, why aren’t we? Stakeholders – as Byrne touches on above – deserve to hear from management in an honest and open fashion that lays out what has worked, what hasn’t, and what is coming next. Lastly, cynics claim that my candor is but an attempt to pump my stock by drawing investors looking for someone who does not pump his stock: I am flattered to have attributed to me such Machiavellian subtlety! (And I suggest they look up Popper’s Falsification Principle.) Saved you a click… For six quarters I have struggled to reconcile my desire to report in this fashion to Overstocks owners with the more traditional approach used by most companies. Trying to mold a murky reality into a few lines of happy quotes has always been difficult. I have thus decided (when able and time permitting) to write lengthier and more informative letters to owners, filtering out points that concern individuals, details, or strategies that might bore readers or advantage competitors. Note, then, shareholder, that when I write, X is going pretty well, just because I did not say, X is super-de-duper it does not mean, X is a disaster. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. The journalists, lawyers, and cynics will find their own way. Ed Note – The entirety of the 2003 letter from Overstock is about 10 pages long…we’ve pulled out a few of our favorite passages here. You can read the entire letter here. Sales To begin with, sales were super-de-duper. They truly were. We returned almost to the hyper-growth curve (94% year-on-year growth). Just to give you a sense of the size of the business at the time of this writing, Overstock brought in just under $300mm in revenue during the preceding year and was, as Byrne notes, growing rapidly. As you would expect, this growth has since slowed significantly due to a number of factors – increased competition and the buyer behavior shift to mobile being a couple. Still, the company has returned to double digit revenue growth in the last three years. Expense Discipline I believe I can do much better here. At the risk of giving an excuse I’d note that it is difficult to get expenses precisely right when one starts a quarter with a range of expected GMS from $80 million to $120 million: optionality costs money. Still, in retrospect, I believe I could have saved $1-2 million if I had addressed some issues earlier. Something that teams at any high growth company can likely relate to. Capital Needs Funds call me regularly offering to do PIPE’s (private investment in public equity) at X% discounts with Y% warrant coverage struck up Z%, etc. etc. I am a bear of little brain, and my reaction to such invitations is roughly the same as being asked to join a game of Three Card Monte in Times Square. Yet their enquiries do keep me thinking about the issue of capital. Build a model of our business at break-even and growing 100%. Do we need capital? If we were a brick factory the answer would be, “yes”, but for the float reason given above the answer is, hard as it may be to imagine, maybe not. Yet my answer would continue, That is, if we are comfortable skimming along at times with a weeks worth of cash in the bank, as we did at one point this Q4 when we bulked up for Christmas. Are we at break-even? Not yet: our GAAP loss in Q4 2003 was 2.6% of revenue. Should we strive to be at break-even? What if, by continuing to lose two-and-a-half pennies on every dollar of sales, we could grow at our current rate for three more years (and thus turn into a >$2 billion GAAP revenue business): should we? What if we could lose four pennies but grow at 200%: should we? It depends, I suppose, on what our net margin would be when we throttled back growth. In sum, then: it is not clear that Overstock needs more capital; if we do, it is not clear we need it now; if we do need it now we are not going to raise it through a warrant-warted PIPE. That said, we will continue to look at our capital needs and try to position ourselves so that we will be able to raise capital conveniently if the right time arrives. For example, we are in the process of obtaining an inventory line of credit. Please know that I have the benefit of an excellent board, well-versed in capital and which views advising me on this issue as one of its main duties. In the early stage market, it is common to see founders plan or go through fundraising processes at a certain pace and targeting a certain amount of money just because they think it is what they are supposed to do or because it is available. While there is almost never anything wrong with opportunistically raising capital to increase optionality, the decision to raise capital of any type should always be well thought out else you risk wasting your time chasing opportunities that are not a good fit. Operations We had a few sleepless nights here. At this point I suppose I should mention that, as Team Overstock’s player/coach, it is my occasional and regrettable duty to reposition, bench, trade, and sometimes cut teammates, alas. “Benching” takes the form of sending people home on paid leave to recoup and to allow us to rearrange. For example, two summers ago I benched someone by sending him and his family to Hawaii while I took his job myself: when he returned I gave him a different job (in fact, things like this happen often enough that “getting sent to Hawaii” is synonymous around here with “getting a last chance.”) This Christmas season an executive moved to the bench: I did not put out a press release about it, partially out of respect for him, but also because his future role in the game was unclear. As I have noted recently, he is no longer with the company. While I acknowledge that losing one’s COO during the Christmas rush is discomforting (as I know better than anyone), I hope that this clarifies my thinking satisfactorily. Rare insight into how the CEO of a public company thinks about what is likely the most important responsibility he has, attracting and retaining good people. Image below via First Round’s “State of Startups”. Conclusion A man crosses a desert by shooting an arrow from his bow and retrieving it as he walks. He must cross the desert with the fewest shots possible. At times he strains the bow with all his strength and lets his arrow fly, but sacrifices accuracy, at times shooting the arrow wildly off course. Other times he aims carefully and draws timidly, attempting little but guaranteeing himself small, solid progress. In time he finds the balance of draw and aim that covers the most ground in the fewest shots. I have not yet found such balance. Yet in 2003 Q4 we drew the bow deeply, and our shot went far and fairly straight. On such a deep draw I could have blundered the shot (as I have before), and only the excellent work of my colleagues prevented mishap. I do not enjoy chancing so much on each shot. Yet I saw an opportunity to let one fly, and we still have much ground to cover. Your humble servant, Patrick M. Byrne President P.S. As much as I like hearing from owners and potential owners, I am now deluged by the volume of contacts from those saying they want to invest but must get to know me better before they do. I am flattered; I am humbled (believe me, you’d be disappointed if we met); I am torn between wanting to help answer their questions and Reg FD; but mostly, I am out of time. Though I enjoy hearing and learning from owners I must, regrettably, propose two alternatives. First, in the investor relations section of our site I intend to include material that will elucidate our business philosophy. Second, for any who actually visit us in Utah I will always make time to meet with you. Sounds like Patrick needs a “one-to-many” tool to manage the communication with his investors a bit more efficiently…we know where he can find one 😉

“ As a founder, there is no variable more important to manage adeptly than momentum” – Glenn Solomon, GGV Settling on a single definition for “momentum” in an early stage business is difficult. There is product momentum — delivering on the value proposition you promise to existing and potential customers time and time again. There is team and hiring momentum — fostering a culture that effectively attracts and retains great people. There is revenue momentum – building a predictable growth engine that targets the right segment of the market and packages your solution effectively over time. There is fundraising momentum – regularly engaging with current and potential investors to gauge the market and lay the groundwork for future fundraising events. All of these different momentum subsets contribute to the overall momentum (and long-term success) of a business. But how should a Founder prioritize these (and other types of) momentum? After all, if any of these processes lag for too long, the company is likely to fail. The 1 Weird Momentum Trick! Notice the words we used above to explain different types of momentum a CEO needs to manage: “Time and time again…” “Predictable growth engine…” “Regularly engaging…” All of these hint at the single best way to make sure you are successful managing your company’s momentum: Consistency. Stakeholders – your team, your customers, your investors – need to know that you, as CEO, are doing something every single day to push the ball forward in each of those areas. Leveraging Your Time to Build Momentum Understanding that you should be trying to move the needle in each of these areas each day is the easy part. Now, where will the time to actually deliver on that commitment come from? Trying to micromanage every process in your company is a recipe for disaster – you lose the trust of the your team (which you were trying to gain by touching every project) and the context switching saps you of energy and limits your effectiveness. To most effectively leverage your time, think of the momentum management process like a flywheel: We often talk on this blog about the two types of resources a business has – talent and capital. By focusing first and primarily on the attraction and retention of those two areas each day, you leverage the impact you can make on the momentum of your company. Great people build great products and bring them to market. Those results compound over time and become visible to new talent and capital. That new capital enables new growth strategies and more hiring and those new people step in to execute on the expanded mission. It is the virtuous cycle of startup momentum.

Starbucks was founded in 1971, was purchased in 1987 Howard Schultz (the man globally associated with the brand), went public in 1992, and opened its first international location in Japan in 1996. By the late 1990’s when the dot-com boom was in full swing, Starbucks was onboard, investing in eventual blow-ups like Kozmo, Talk City, and Living.com. In 2000 – just as the company was taking writedowns on the investments listed above – Howard Schultz and Orin Smith penned the following letter to shareholders which laid out core focus areas and set the table for the massively important technology company Starbucks has become today. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. If you like what you see and want to share Visible Investor Letters with friends or colleagues, send them here to sign up. Starbucks’ 2000 Letter to Shareholders To our Shareholders, We entered the new Millennium with a great sense of accomplishment and excitement, knowing that we were poised to share the Starbucks Experience with even more people around the world. Today, the anticipation we experienced as we began fiscal year 2000 has been more than fulfilled, thanks to the passion and dedication of our partners (employees), our unwavering commitment to the highest quality coffee, and the connection that we are fortunate to enjoy with our customers. We believe that the possibilities for our future achievements are virtually limitless, and we are even more inspired to climb to greater heights. These are still the early days of building our company and the Starbucks brand. Starbucks experienced tremendous success and growth in fiscal year 2000. We had record revenues of $2.2 billion for the year. Our stellar performance included three consecutive quarters of double-digit comparable store sales increases – an amazing achievement for any retail company of our size and maturity, culminating in a 9 percent comparable stores sales growth for the full year, the highest it has been since 1995. While 9% comparable store sales growth represented an “amazing achievement” in 2000 – when the company had around 3,000 locations – the fact that they have maintained that growth over the last decade and a half and still see strong comparable growth at 20,000+ locations is…whatever you call something more amazing than an “amazing achievement”. We far exceeded our projected target of 600 new store openings for the year, with 1,035 new company owned and licensed locations worldwide, including 778 stores in North America alone. We surpassed our goal to open 150 international stores, opening 257 international locations by the end of fiscal year 2000. In the United Kingdom, we opened 63 new locations, well ahead of our target of 50 stores. We also entered a number of international markets including Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Australia, bringing our total number of international locations to 525 at the end of the fiscal year. During the year we acquired a majority interest in our Thailand operations. We were also thrilled to announce our plans to enter Switzerland, our first market in continental Europe. Our remarkable success in virtually every international market we have entered to date has inspired us to set ambitious targets for the future. We plan to have 650 Starbucks locations throughout Europe by the end of fiscal year 2003, and we believe that customers in the European market will embrace the Starbucks Experience. Over the years, Starbucks has struggled with growth in its European markets as it has had to combat an embedded coffee and cafe culture that shuns the impersonal, big box experience Starbucks was reputed to have. That has since turned around a bit as both comparable store sales in the EMEA region and anecdotal evidence – lines to or out out the door in Lyon, France and Geneva, Switzerland seen during Visible’s recent trip to Europe. Our outstanding growth is testimony to the strength of the Starbucks brand worldwide. When we opened our first store in Tokyo, consultants told us that Japanese customers would never use to-go cups or drink coffee while walking on the street. If you visit Japan today, you will see people proudly holding Starbucks cups with the logo facing out. As the result of our customers’ warm acceptance, Starbucks Coffee Japan became profitable in fiscal year 2000 – more than two years ahead of plan. Additionally, we were extremely pleased that Nikkei Restaurant Magazine, one of Japan’s most respected food service industry publications, recognized Starbucks as the most preferred restaurant chain in Tokyo, just four years after our entry into the market. In addition, Interbrand Corporation, the world’s leading brand consultancy, recently ranked Starbucks as one of the top 75 global brands. These accomplishments confirm our belief that we have incredible opportunities ahead. By the end of fiscal year 2000, Starbucks had more than 3,500 locations worldwide, serving more than 12 million customers per week in 17 countries. We believe that in the past we dramatically underestimated the size of the global market and the power of the Starbucks brand. We now believe that we have the potential to have at least 20,000 locations worldwide, with as many as 10,000 locations in international markets. Amazingly, they have surpassed this number at the beginning of Q1 2014 and haven’t looked back! Our core retail business in North America continues to thrive. We introduced the sumptuous White Chocolate Mocha and Caramel Apple Cider drinks early in the year, followed by two decadent new blended beverages for summer – Chocolate Brownie Frappuccino ® and Orange Mocha Chip Frappuccino ®. These popular additions to our menu provided our customers with delightful indulgences for every season. We also introduced the Starbucks Barista AromaA ™ coffeemaker and thermal carafe – an instant hit with customers. And our positioning for Holiday 2000, “Home for the Holidays,” offered simple, traditional messaging designed to capture our customers’ hearts. In addition to festive favorites such as the Eggnog Latte and our unique Christmas Blend coffee, we introduced the delectable Gingerbread Latte to bring alive the flavor of the season. We also created and unveiled the revolutionary Starbucks Barista Utopia™ vacuum coffee brewing system. This stylish, innovative machine brews the perfect cup of Starbucks ® coffee for our customers to savor at home. Customers gave the Utopia a very enthusiastic reception, and we were delighted by its success. This was a pivotal year for two Starbucks brands that complement the coffeehouse experience – Tazo® tea and Hear Music™. In fiscal year 2000, Tazo Tea crafted and introduced a new line of filter bag and full-leaf teas to tempt customers’ palates. Our customers also enjoyed an enhanced music program through Hear Music’s displays and branded compilation discs. These two emerging brands are positioned for strong growth, and they add to the richness and texture of the Starbucks Experience. One mark of a great company is its ability to choose business partners who reflect its core values and guiding principles. Our Business Alliances group, part of our specialty operations, created and nurtured relationships that reach more than 20 million customers per month by providing increased access and visibility to the Starbucks brand. During the year, we signed licensing agreements with several key accounts, including Albertson’s, Inc., Safeway Inc., Dayton Hudson Corporation (Super Target stores) and Marriott International, Inc. Our achievements to date have extended the Starbucks brand and created significant momentum for our future growth. We are confident that we have the potential to open many more licensed locations in grocery stores, airports and other convenient venues. We also announced an exciting alliance with The New York Times, which recently became the exclusive nationwide newspaper sold in all of our company-owned locations in the United States. As part of this strategic three-year agreement, The Times will use its advertising resources to promote the Starbucks brand. We are proud to team up with The Times to provide our customers with one of the world’s most widely read and respected newspapers. A newer Starbucks partnership worth noting is their tie-up with Lyft, which again positions the coffee maker as one of the most employee-friendly and forward thinking companies on earth (more on those two things below!). Even in the best years, we face challenges. In the fourth quarter, we took a non-cash write-down of our entire investment in living.com Inc. and the majority of our equity positions in Kozmo.com, Inc., Cooking.com, Inc. and Talk City, Inc. to reflect fair value. We have learned from this experience and we believe this knowledge will benefit our business going forward. Starbucks is an entrepreneurial company, and we have achieved extraordinary benefits from courageous and innovative business practices. That spirit and practice of innovation will continue. However, we remain focused on our core business, and we realize that the growth potential within that core business is far greater than even we previously imagined. Going forward, we will pursue only those opportunities that we feel will complement our core operations. After these specific setbacks and the meltdown of the market as a whole, many businesses would have (and did) shy away from investing in (either internally or externally) technology. Starbucks did not do this, instead opting to commit to the Internet (and later, mobile) and an important part of their long-term business. Starbucks is a technology company and they have been since well before the popularization of the “every company is a technology company” idea. L2 Digital is one of our go-to resources for understanding what drives the growth (and decline) of individual companies as well as broad sectors. They have done a number of studies and reports on Starbucks and their tech success over the years. Here are a couple of our favorites Our people are crucial to ensuring that we deliver the Starbucks Experience every day. The passion they bring to our customers is one of our greatest assets. To ensure that our partners share in Starbucks success, we provided stock option grants to eligible partners under the Bean Stock Plan for the 10th consecutive year. Our ongoing commitment to providing a great work environment has also had many positive impacts on our partners and customers. One indication of our collective passion is the dedication and team spirit displayed by partners at our LaBrea & San Vicente store (opened through our alliance with Earvin “Magic” Johnson). The morning after these outstanding partners won the fourth largest lottery jackpot in California history, they chose to come to work and cheerfully opened the store at 5:30 a.m. to serve their customers. It may be buried down towards the end of this letter but a commitment to building a culture that attracts and fosters the growth of talented people – at all levels of the company – is one area where Starbucks truly stands out. Through a partnership with Arizona State University, Starbucks covers tuition for its team members across the United States. In total, the company spends more per year on employee benefits than it does on coffee beans! Starbucks long-term success as a company will be measured in part by our ability to be a responsible global citizen. As part of our ongoing efforts to address social and environmental issues in coffee origin countries, we committed to a year-round offering of shade grown, organic or Fair Trade certified coffees. We launched this Commitment to Origins™ category with Shade Grown Mexico coffee in collaboration with Conservation International, and we were proud to introduce Fair Trade Certified coffee to our customers through a new alliance with TransFair USA. In addition, we significantly increased our commitment to provide financial support for Conservation International’s work to protect global biodiversity. Starbucks also continues to be one of the largest North American contributors to CARE, the international aid and development organization, and we are honored to support their work to improve the lives of people in coffee origin countries. We are also deeply committed to bringing the joy of reading to people around the world. The Starbucks Foundation assisted more than 100 organizations in fiscal year 2000 by providing more than $1 million in literacy grants in North America. We also extended the program to include initiatives in New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines. In addition, we held our fourth annual All Books for Children drive, through which we collected more than 335,000 books for schools and literacy programs. Our joint venture with Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Johnson Development Corporation to open Starbucks Coffee stores in under-served urban neighborhoods continues to enrich lives and contribute positively to the communities in which the stores operate. During fiscal year 2000 we opened 11 new stores in six states in the United States through this unique joint venture. We each assumed new leadership roles in fiscal year 2000 that were designed to leverage our respective skills and experience in our growing and dynamic company. We feel that our transition has been seamless, and we are more confident than ever that the Starbucks brand has tremendous opportunities ahead. We are humbled by Starbucks success. The achievements of the past inspire us to continue this amazing journey together as we strive towards our goal of becoming a great, enduring global brand. For all of you who bring Starbucks to life, thank you for your ongoing support. Warm regards,

Driven primarily by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to keep his company nimble, Facebook waited a long time to go public. This brought intense scrutiny from a lot of onlookers who were quick to pile on when the company’s IPO got off to a rocky start. Weeks prior to the actual IPO as part of the company’s S-1, Zuck outlined his vision for the future in a letter to Facebook’s shareholders and made it clear that he was playing the long game. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter. At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television – by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones – the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on. And there is still a long ways to go! We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other. Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small – with the relationship between two people. Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness. At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships. People sharing more – even if just with their close friends or families – creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives. By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph – a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. An Example of a Facebook Social Graph We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate. And accelerate, they have both on the Facebook platform and through acquisitions of user-base behemoths WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook (The Big Blue App) Monthly Active Users We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy. We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services. As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives. One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products – ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction. Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design. In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well. We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions. We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time. By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few. Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them. Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress. Our Mission and Our Business As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works. I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team. Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team – and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base – I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems. Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits. By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term – and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company. This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it. Over the years, Facebook has made a lot of investors very happy both…during their private days and – apart from a post-IPO blip since their IPO The Hacker Way As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way. The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world. In the years since this letter, “Hacker” seems to still have it negative connotation attached to it in light of security breaches at large corporations and tensions between governments about spying. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it – often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping. Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.” Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people. To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler. To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers – even managers whose primary job will not be to write code – to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp. The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook: 1. Focus on Impact If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on. 2. Move Fast Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough. 3. Be Bold Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time. 4. Be Open We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact. 5. Build Social Value Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do. Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together. Mark Zuckerberg

VC financing markets have, recently, felt like a monopoly game where your best friend is the banker and you let them pick their token first. It has never been easier to raise capital and at the entrepreneurs terms. What many founders and entrepreneurs forget is the responsibility they hold after they have a term sheet signed and fresh cash in the bank. Venture Capital and Investment Firms have a duty to provide returns to their Limited Partners (aka their investors); they are not just a bunch of rich people and organizations who give their ‘fun money’ to chance. I had a chat with close friend and Analyst at Real Ventures, Alex Shee about ‘why do VCs need data on their portfolio companies?’ and what they do with that information. My hope to is to help founders understand the importance of accurate and consistent reporting so that we can stop all these fucking stupid blog posts on the nipping frostbite of ‘some tech winter.’ Why do VCs Need Your Data [and Updates] Their Own Analysis AS: We look over a company’s metrics and add in our own analysis: doing advanced modeling to ensure projections and growth looks good now and for the future. We also establish benchmarks; it’s not just about comparing, its about establishing what success looks like. The idea of benchmarking is to be predictive using data; its also a manner of analyzing macro trends in the market and helping companies fully capitalize on opportunities. NM: VCs also take a look at each company to provide comparison and see if there are any patterns (good and bad) that others have already gone through. Using their experience, and market knowledge, to find and identify opportunities or triggers that the company may not foresee. To Make Sure You’re Doing OK NM: Yes, your VCs do care about you. They probably reviewed 100+ other company proposals, went through the due diligence and opened up their time, office hours, resources, and bank account, to YOU. Your success is their success, and their success helps build toward yours. AS: Our success is directly linked to our portfolio. The more data we have the better informed we are. The better informed we are the more chances we can help. The more we can help, highly correlates to companies succeeding. Investors look for 3 things: Vision, Traction and Good Management. The only way to demonstrate traction is through metrics. The only way to show good management is through transparent reporting. VCs Have Their Own Investors to Report to NM: Investors have to report to their LPs (Limited Partners); for those of you who don’t know how the Venture Capital food chain works. People forget that a Venture Fund is meant to provide a return back to its investors at a multiple much higher than public markets. Limited Partners of a Venture Fund come from all different places, from wealthy individuals, to financial institutions, to school endowments and pension funds; even governments make investments into venture funds. Also, for those curious minds, VCs almost always contribute their own capital to the funds they raise. AS: When you raise your maiden fund, you talk about your experience, knowledge, network, and any success as an Angel to raise capital. After your first fund, all those details barely mean anything. Investors (Limited Partners) want to know the success of the fund; from the financial details, pedigree of portfolio companies, to impact metrics that are important to them. Limited Partners require transparency to succeed against the public markets. “LPs need to have accurate, timely information to continue to invest in the private market, otherwise they’ll look towards other markets that provide better communication of their investment.” Internal and External Auditing NM: VCs need to know how a company is progressing so they know how to properly report their value and returns to their LPs and firm. VCs want to get as much of the money from successful (and unsuccessful) investments so the sooner they know what to expect for a return, the easier they can maximize their profits, and continue to invest in more startups. AS: VCs also get audited for more reasons than just tax. The financials have to show a true and fair view of the state of the investment funds, so that the LPs can have comfort they own what they think they own. We also have our corporate taxes to manage, which normally requires an audit. To See How They Can Help AS: The reason why we do it [Venture Capital] is to help. Everyone in the VC world wants the companies in their portfolio to succeed. The more information we have the better we can determine how we can help. Being in the dark is no different for an investor with a company than a significant other in a relationship; we just sit there, wondering why they’re not answering and what could possibly be wrong with no direction. NM: A person goes into Venture Capital to several reasons, but the best (and true) VCs do it to help companies grow and be part of something great; this success then translates to maximizing investment returns which then makes everyone happy. VCs know that there are 3 big needs of young companies: Capital, Talent, and Resources. With early-stage capital becoming a very competitive space, investors are offering more than just capital to entice a company to sign their term sheet. To Learn From Your Success [and Failures] NM: When VCs provide their time, experience, and knowledge, you’re receiving the value of all the compounded learnings and experiences they have from all companies they have worked with. By providing updates, feedback, data, and context of your own progress, they can not only help you, but other companies as well. AS: Our experience goes a long way to help grow a company in the best way possible, but this also helps when a company is looking to raise future financing. Knowing all the metrics and details helps us advise on what type of pitch deck to build, what metrics to show off, and what other investors they can introduce us to for follow-on financing. Last Words The more informed your investors are, the more time, talent, and resources they can provide to you. There needs to be more fiduciary responsibility maturity in the Startup<>VC world. While many of us look at VCs as sugar daddies because of the rampant access to capital and valuations in the recent years; we should view this like getting a loan from a business partner. I want to thank Alex for taking the time to chat and write this with me. I know that ‘humanizing Venture Capitalists’ isn’t the most popular thing to do, but if we don’t, they’ll eventually disappear. Enjoy Your Day, Go Create Something, and Make Someone Smile

Investor Letters leverages the Visible platform to surface insightful stakeholder updates sent from leaders of public and private companies as well as top asset managers, venture capitalists, and product and business thinkers. Subscribe and receive a new investor letter, supplemented with Visible charts and actionable insight every Wednesday. Amazon Before it Was Amazon It might be the most well-known (and prescient) investor letter in the history of the technology industry so we will keep this week’s intro short. Jeff Bezos’ 1997 letter to Amazon shareholders is truly a master class in building a business – in 1997, 2016 or undoubtedly any date before or after. We have added a bunch of notes below (anything you see in bold, in quotes, or presented as visualizations was added by us) to help showcase how Amazon has delivered on the promises made in this letter. The Investor Letter To our shareholders: Amazon.com passed many milestones in 1997: by year-end, we had served more than 1.5 million customers, yielding 838% revenue growth to $147.8 million, and extended our market leadership despite aggressive competitive entry. But this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets. “Day 1” – Amazon has grown of age alongside the global Internet, as a vast majority of new Internet users have come online during Amazon’s lifetime. We have a window of opportunity as larger players marshal the resources to pursue the online opportunity and as customers, new to purchasing online, are receptive to forming new relationships. The competitive landscape has continued to evolve at a fast pace. Many large players have moved online with credible offerings and have devoted substantial energy and resources to building awareness, traffic, and sales. Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position while we begin to pursue the online commerce opportunities in other areas. We see substantial opportunity in the large markets we are targeting. This strategy is not without risk: it requires serious investment and crisp execution against established franchise leaders. One of the most amazing things Amazon has done in the almost 20 years since this letter is turn investments they were making to improve their core business – heavy spending on infrastructure – into a multi-billion dollar business of its own, AWS. There were (and still are) major players in the cloud infrastructure space that Amazon was going straight up against but that hasn’t stopped the rapid growth of AWS. According to Deutsche Bank, AWS as a standalone entity would be one of the fastest growing enterprise tech companies ever. It’s All About the Long Term We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital. This idea – the Amazon flywheel – brilliantly illustrates the way that Jeff Bezos and his team see all of these factors building on and feeding into one another. Note, as Benedict Evans did here, that there is no outward arrow titled “take profits”. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise. That customer base expansion focus? It is going pretty well. Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy: We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures. While they are not as well known as Google for launching and then quickly shuttering projects, Amazon has certainly lived by the philosophy they espouse above. The Amazon Fire Phone is just the latest in along line of projects like this. We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. Amazon’s dominance goes a step beyond simply market leadership. In 2015, Amazon accounted for $0.51 of every incremental $1.00 spent online and are now responsible for almost a quarter of all retail growth in the United States. We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner. We aren’t so bold as to claim that the above is the “right” investment philosophy, but it’s ours, and we would be remiss if we weren’t clear in the approach we have taken and will continue to take. With this foundation, we would like to turn to a review of our business focus, our progress in 1997, and our outlook for the future. Obsess Over Customers From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-Click(SM) shopping, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling. By many measures, Amazon.com came a long way in 1997: Sales grew from $15.7 million in 1996 to $147.8 million — an 838% increase When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows. We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. The focus on growth remains, as evidenced by the chart just below. And the second image, highlighting the growth of Apple and Amazon relative to other massive multinational businesses drives home the point of just how successful that focus remains today. Cumulative customer accounts grew from 180,000 to 1,510,000 — a 738% increase. The percentage of orders from repeat customers grew from over 46% in the fourth quarter of 1996 to over 58% in the same period in 1997. In terms of audience reach, per Media Metrix, our Web site went from a rank of 90th to within the top 20. We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy (Ed note: Look at those names!) Infrastructure During 1997, we worked hard to expand our business infrastructure to support these greatly increased traffic, sales, and service levels: Amazon.com’s employee base grew from 158 to 614, and we significantly strengthened our management team. (Ed Note: Now over 230,000 employees) Distribution center capacity grew from 50,000 to 285,000 square feet, including a 70% expansion of our Seattle facilities and the launch of our second distribution center in Delaware in November. Inventories rose to over 200,000 titles at year-end, enabling us to improve availability for our customers. Our cash and investment balances at year-end were $125 million, thanks to our initial public offering in May 1997 and our $75 million loan, affording us substantial strategic flexibility. Our Employees The past year’s success is the product of a talented, smart, hard-working group, and I take great pride in being a part of this team. Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success. It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you are probably well aware of the PR issues the company faces in the wake of a major New York times investigation into its corporate culture. Here a a few select quotes. Goals for 1998 We are still in the early stages of learning how to bring new value to our customers through Internet commerce and merchandising. Our goal remains to continue to solidify and extend our brand and customer base. This requires sustained investment in systems and infrastructure to support outstanding customer convenience, selection, and service while we grow. We are planning to add music to our product offering, and over time we believe that other products may be prudent investments. We also believe there are significant opportunities to better serve our customers overseas, such as reducing delivery times and better tailoring the customer experience. To be certain, a big part of the challenge for us will lie not in finding new ways to expand our business, but in prioritizing our investments. We now know vastly more about online commerce than when Amazon.com was founded, but we still have so much to learn. Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency. The challenges and hurdles we will face to make our long-term vision for Amazon.com a reality are several: aggressive, capable, well-funded competition; considerable growth challenges and execution risk; the risks of product and geographic expansion; and the need for large continuing investments to meet an expanding market opportunity. However, as we’ve long said, online bookselling, and online commerce in general, should prove to be a very large market, and it’s likely that a number of companies will see significant benefit. We feel good about what we’ve done, and even more excited about what we want to do. 1997 was indeed an incredible year. We at Amazon.com are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement. /s/ JEFFREY P. BEZOS Jeffrey P. Bezos Founder and Chief Executive Officer Amazon.com, Inc. Further Reading on the Rise of Amazon This video from NYU professor Scott Galloway gives an awesome look at the dominance of Amazon and its fellow behemoths Google, Apple, and Facebook. We used a couple of graphics from his presentation above. The AWS IPO by Ben Thompson. In fact, go read anything Ben writes — about Amazon or anyone. Why Amazon Has No Profits (and Why it Works) by A16Z’s Benedict Evans

Subscribe to Investor Letters Investor Letters leverages the Visible platform to surface insighful stakeholder updates sent from leaders of public and private companies as well as top asset managers, venture capitalists, and product and business thinkers. Subscribe and receive a new investor letter, supplemented with Visible charts and actionable insight every Wednesday. When Nike CEO Mark Parker sat down to pen his 2008 letter to shareholders, the company was in relatively good shape considering the world economy was in the midst of an economic meltdown. He had been in the job for about 2 and a half years and had just added $2.3 billion of incremental revenue – up 14 percent year over year – during fiscal 2008. In January 2009, a dollar that had been invested in Nike just before Parker took over was worth significantly more than a dollar invested at the same time in top competitor Adidas or in the S&P 500. Unlike most companies during that same period, Nike’s stock had actually appreciated in value during those 2 and a half years. $1 Invested in Nike, Adidas, & the S&P 500 All wasn’t perfect in the land of the Swoosh, however. In January 2009 the stock price dipped below the psychologically important $10 level and competition was increasing significantly. Nike Stock Price: 2001 – Present In the U.S. footwear market, for example, #2 Adidas had been gaining market share for years, growing significantly faster than Nike. Add to that the under the radar growth of Under Armour and the entry of new players into the footwear and apparel markets and it was clear the company would be in for a long drawn out fight on multiple fronts. The Investor Letter Note: Emphasis, quotes, and charts in the letter below are mine. With historical letters like this, we try to point out how predictions and strategies played out in the market and what you can learn from what transpired. To Our Shareholders, When I stepped into the CEO role 2½ years ago, the leadership team reaffirmed a simple concept that I knew was true from my nearly 30 years of experience here – NIKE is a growth company. That fact shaped the long-term financial goals we outlined more than seven years ago. It also inspired our goal of reaching $23 billion in revenue by the end of fiscal 2011. Fiscal 2008 illustrated the power of that financial model, the strength of our team, and the ability of NIKE to bring innovative products and excitement to the marketplace. While long term, Parker was right about the growth oriented nature of the business, the short-term patience his board was certainly tested. Following the letter, Nike struggled to expand, shedding revenue for the next two years before jumping on its current trajectory. The idea of Nike as a growth company is one that Parker and his team have rallied around to this day, as the headline on their investor relations website still features the tagline. Nike Annual Revenue Growth (%) Our unique role as the innovator and leader in our industry enables us to drive consistent, long-term profitable growth. In 2008 we added $2.3 billion of incremental revenue to reach $18.6 billion – up 14 percent year over year with growth in every region and every business unit. Gross margins improved more than a percentage point to a new record high of 45%, and earnings per share grew 28 percent. We increased our return on invested capital by 250 basis points1, increased dividends by 23%, and bought back $1.2 billion in stock. 2008 was a very good year. For a company to be able to say that while the world economy, and consumer confidence were melting down is impressive. As we enter fiscal 2009 we are well-positioned for the future. The NIKE brand continues to grow in relevance and influence. We’re focused on six key categories – running, basketball, football, men’s training, women’s training and sportswear. Each category team is immersed in its sport’s culture, connecting with consumers and building deep relationships. These connections are the source of insights we use to create the innovative products that fill our pipeline. NIKE is a premium brand, and we earn that reputation by delivering experiences that surpass the expectations of our consumers. Our portfolio of brands also continues to grow. Converse is mid-way through its 100th anniversary celebration. This brand delivered its best year ever in fiscal 2008 and continues to grow in the U.S. and in the key emerging markets of China, Russia and Brazil. Hurley and Cole Haan also had record years for revenue and pre-tax income. And NIKE Golf increased revenue and pre-tax income as we continue to deliver innovation and widen our lead as the largest apparel brand in the golf industry. The popularity of golf, and of its biggest icon, Tiger Woods have fallen significantly in the years since Parker’s letter but Nike has managed to stave off some of the decline with revenue for the segment dropping only slightly over the last three years. Growth in our portfolio of brands is only half the story. The other half is change. Our portfolio is based on three things – pursuing the greatest growth opportunities; leveraging NIKE resources and capabilities; and serving consumers with premium products and experiences. In applying these three principles we saw opportunities to take action in 2008. We sold the Starter and Bauer businesses, and we acquired Umbro, one of the world’s great football brands and a source of tremendous growth potential for NIKE, Inc. as we continue to expand our position as the biggest football presence on the planet. Like its China strategy, the investment in football (soccer to us Americans) has paid off. Nike is quickly catching up with #1 Adidas and is poised to capitalize on the growth of the game in its biggest market, the United States. After all the work we have done this year, I’m very pleased with how we have enhanced the position, performance, and potential of all the brands and categories in the NIKE, Inc. family. They illustrate the commitment we have to athletes and the unique role we play in sports and the cultures that surround our consumers. As I write this we’re heading into the Beijing Olympics – a moment that NIKE has been working toward for 30 years. NIKE is the number-one sports brand in China, which is also our largest sourcing country and our biggest market outside the U.S. This insight is one of the keys to Nike’s recent and future growth. While still only accounting for 10% of overall revenue, sales in Greater China – which grew 30% to about $886MM in the quarter ended August 31, 2015 – is by far the company’s fastest growing market. During the past four years we have worked with thousands of athletes from more than 100 countries. We’ve gained valuable insights nobody else has and used them to design and deliver some of the best performance innovations NIKE has ever developed. From the Hyperdunk basketball shoe, Zoom Victory Spike, and LunaRacer to Swift apparel and the Pre Cool Vest – NIKE product innovation is setting new standards in all 28 Olympic sports. And we’ll continue to connect with Chinese consumers long after the Olympic torch goes out, bringing innovative products, retail experiences, and communications to this exciting marketplace. We’ll give the world a chance to catch its breath from Beijing, but only for a minute. On August 31 we launch The Human Race, the world’s biggest single running event in history – runners around the world competing and connecting simultaneously through the power of NIKE+ technology – raising funds for global causes with every mile. This is what NIKE is all about – innovating on multiple fronts and creating a bigger more vibrant marketplace. That’s what we do best and we’re doing it all over the world. And our world is changing. The digital age is fueling change at its fastest rate in history.Power is in the hands of consumers. They have near infinite choices and unlimited access to those choices. The cost of entry into their world has risen dramatically. To be relevant, to be accepted, a company must bring its authentic self to market. For NIKE this means vast new opportunities to reach and reward consumers – with product innovation and compelling experiences at retail and online. We’re leveraging those opportunities by sharing our passion for sports and design and communications – our own never-ending story. Again, this insight has proved prescient, as the company remains well positioned to capitalize on the growth of digital and targets $7B in e-commerce revenue by 2020. More than ever our story involves the commitment to innovate for a better world. We’re very focused on creating products that reduce their environmental impact and showcase sustainable innovation. We’re committed to helping improve working conditions across the industry’s supply chain. And we continue to invest in our communities through programs like Let Me Play and our partnership with the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Every day we see how social and environmental change can promote innovation and growth in our business and in the world. This year we were named one of the world’s most ethical companies (Ethisphere Magazine), one of the world’s top sustainable stocks (Sustainable Business and KLD), #3 in 100 Best Corporate Citizens (CRO Magazine), one of the 100 Best Places to Work (Fortune magazine), and the World Wildlife Fund and others have recognized NIKE for our work on climate change. I’m grateful that we’re being noticed for our contributions, but our work in this area is a journey. There is always more to do. I’ll point to a $100 million partnership between the NIKE Foundation and Peter and Jennifer Buffett’s NoVo Foundation. Together we are creating an exciting new initiative called the Girl Effect. The premise of the Girl Effect is as simple as it is profound – when we invest in the health, safety and education of an adolescent girl, we create a ripple effect that improves her quality of life and that of everyone around her – her family, her village, her nation and, ultimately, all of us. Global research and experience show that investing in girls and creating the Girl Effect may be the most powerful missing piece to the puzzle of alleviating poverty. For all we have accomplished this year, we remain humbled by the amazing things we witnessed in the world of sports – Tiger Woods playing through pain to win the U.S. Open, Paul Pierce leading the Boston Celtics to their first NBA title in more than 20 years, the passion of a historic European Championships, and Rafael Nadal outlasting Roger Federer in the longest and most dramatic final in Wimbledon history. It is epic moments like these – and the millions of everyday moments created by athletes around the world – that inspire us. Their dreams motivate us to create the most innovative product in sport, and to serve more fully every consumer who shares our passion for performance and excellence. That is our responsibility and our privilege. As we move through fiscal 2009, now is not the time to be timid. We know that doing business as usual – doing what we’ve done in the past just a little bit better – is not enough. As we’ve mentioned, Nike hit a rough patch shortly after this letter but has rebounded strongly and, despite its size, remains a growth company with a masterful handle on branding and digital marketing. We are committed to the principals that got us here – innovation, consistency, and competitive fire. We’re focused on managing for growth. Where others retract, we reach out. Where some react, we create. We are on the offense, always. I wouldn’t trade what we have with anybody in any industry. Mark Parker President and Chief Executive Officer NIKE, Inc. Further Reading There is, of course, no shortage of information to read about Nike and the massive success they have seen recently. Here are a couple quick places where you can go to get a better idea of what helped them get from where they were when Parker put together his report to shareholders to where they are today. Can Nike become “the Fifth Horseman“? from L2 Inc. Fortune’s 2015 Businessperson of the Year – Nike’s Master Craftsman What were Nike’s digital growth enablers in 2015? Want to share Visible Investor Updates with colleagues? Send them here!

The way that a company manages relationships with its investors says a lot about the professionalism of its management team and its likelihood of sustainable success. A recent (unscientific) survey we conducted among dozens of early stage VCs showed that investors are 2 times more likely to make follow on investments in companies who have provided regular investor updates. While some of that is explained by our desire as humans to only share information that paints us in a positive light – meaning that only companies doing well would want to tell their investors – it is clear that the highest performing companies care about building mutually beneficial relationships with their key stakeholders. Regular investor updates are key in keeping your backers involved in your business so that they can provide input and assistance in their respective areas of expertise. They are also a sign of an active and engaged entrepreneur who values what her stakeholders bring to the table. Perhaps most importantly, consistent investor updates help stop inbound and asynchronous requests and give you time back (135 hours per year according to another survey we conducted) to focus on building your company. So when is it most important to be sending investor updates? 1. You are having trouble hiring the best people for your company You are not alone, hiring is hard! In a recent First Round survey – called The State of Startups – the #1 concern among founders was the ability to hire good people. For early stage companies, where trust is a crucial component in the hiring process, leveraging personal networks is often one of the best ways to bring on the best people. Because of their involvement with so many companies, investors often play the role of super connecters in the early stage tech market and can have a major impact on your ability to find the right fit for your open roles. This connectedness helps partially explain the rise of the “Venture Community” or “Venture as a Platform” model made popular by firms like a16z and First Round. When successfully applied, this model tends to create a virtuous cycle and turns out to be very good for business…both yours and your investors’. Investors help people in their network find good jobs which bolsters their reputation. Their companies (that’s you!) fill the roles they need and can accelerate their product and business progress. Those companies have more success and generate better returns for the investor. Investors are willing and often able to help your company find the right people to support your growth. All you need to do is ask! 2. Your circle of feedback is getting smaller and smaller One of the most important things that you can do as a founder, product person, or business leader is stress-test your ideas with the smartest people you can find. To pull an example from outside the tech world, Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio – the most successful hedge fund manager of all time – seeks to find the right answers by seeing whether his ideas stand up to scrutiny from the brightest people in his network. “I stress-tested my opinions by having the smartest people I could find challenge them so I could find out where I was wrong. I never cared much about others’ conclusions—only for the reasoning that led to these conclusions. That reasoning had to make sense to me. Through this process, I improved my chances of being right, and I learned a lot from a lot of great people.” – Ray Dalio, Principles It can be easy to fall into a pattern of running things by the same people every time you need to make a decision and in some ways, it is important to have people you can consistently call on for input. But exposing your ideas to a wider range of people – something your investors can help provide, either through their own feedback or intros to people in their network – can help unlock insights that wouldn’t have been possible with the same small circle you always rely on. 3. Things have been quiet on the press and promotion front When investors don’t hear anything about your business for extended periods of time, they tend to check out. With startups, no news = bad news: Why investor updates are really, really important http://t.co/bywRt6mf85 @jason via @nuzzel — Andy Smith (@kabbenbock) February 10, 2015 For the most part, early stage investors have their priorities pulled in a number of different directions. Maybe they are angels who also have their own company to run or they are at a VC firm with a dozen other investments and another fund that they themselves need to go out and raise. Don’t make it any harder than it already is to stay on their radar. When you and your team are heads down building your product and don’t have the resources to trumpet your progress to the press, you may go months without any major announcements or releases. Filling these information gaps with quality investor updates are the only way you can make sure your backers stay engaged. 4. You need to raise more money As the proverb goes, the best time to send an investor update (or plant a tree) was when they first wired the cash. The next best time is today. However, when you are down to a month of runway and haven’t checked in with your investors in a while, it might be too late… If u haven’t sent an investor update in > 3 months … no need to reach out now. I’ve already checked out. — Jason M. Lemkin (@jasonlk) December 16, 2015 So make sure you get started before you hit the point of desperation. Good companies have insight into when and how they will need to finance the business in the future. If you have a good handle on how much runway you have left, you can be proactive in setting yourself up – by asking your investors for intros to later stage VCs, for example – to raise your next round successfully. 5. You just raised a round Your relationship with investors is very similar to the type of courtship you go thorough with potential customers. You target the right people, nurture your relationship over time with timely updates your progress, and eventually bring them onto your cap table and into your business. It doesn’t stop there, however. Once you’ve brought investors on board, your goal should be to convert them from “customer” to “evangelist”. A customer pays your business money. An evangelist pays your business money and helps you make even more money by speaking and acting positively on your behalf. Similarly, investors take an ownership stake in your company while evangelist investors have a sense of ownership that stretches beyond what shows up on the cap table. Building evangelism helps take care of the four previous points in this article. When you are able to convert someone from investor to evangelist, that person will be willing to anything they can – from hiring and finding customers, to providing feedback and facilitating introductions to future investors – to support the long-term success of your business.

From working with hundreds of customers and users, we get a lot of questions around ‘what kind of information should I be including updates to my investors?’ We break this down to 4 different sections. Financial Key Growth Metric Industry/Market Standards Investor/Advisor/Board suggested 1. Financial – Money money money. Finances are the lifeblood of a company, you can tell how well a company is growing, how smart they are spending, how healthy they are, or how many more months they have left before they disappear. -Look at any standard Cash Balance Sheet and Income Statement, you should have the major line items of this for your investors. -Depending on what kind of product you sell, there could be some important ones to highlight like gross margin or wages or marketing expenses. Always highlight the items that affect the company the most. 2. Key Growth Metric – There are lots of things that accrue a company’s growth, but there is normally just one or two numbers that you look at for showing your growth and success. We talk about how to find your ‘Most-Valuable-Metric’ and the best way to tell your company’s story in The Ultimate Guide to Startup Data Distribution -This can be a numeric or monetary amount, and it changes for each company/business plan/industry. For SaaS, this could be MRR, for a messaging app, it could be number of users, average messages per user. Main Point: This metric(s) is(are) they key segment(s) that needs to grow to continue your success to Unicorn Ranch. 3. Industry/Market Standards – Don’t reinvent the wheel. When you’re growing a company in a specific industry or market, there are always benchmark numbers and stats people talk about. Use these for your own reporting so you can have your stakeholders look at the market, their experiences or expertise, and your company (aka – make them work for that equity they bought/earned). For SaaS (I’m in SaaS so I talk SaaS), this would be items like Churn Rate, Average MRR Value, Total ARR, Cost per Acquisition, Lifetime Value, etc. 4. Investor/Advisor/Board Suggested – Your key stakeholders (investors, advisors, board members), if you picked them right, will have experience, knowledge, connections, and more to help you become even more successful. From speaking with them, they’ll probably find a few metrics not already covered that they want you to focus on or track. This only helps leverage them in the future and allow them to be proactive towards that ten-figure exit. Checkout Visible’s list of Most-Valuable-Metric and see if there is something you have been missing. Enjoy Your Day, Go Create Something, and Make Someone Smile Nate Morris

What is Total Addressable Market (TAM)? According to the Corporate Finance Institute, “The Total Addressable Market (TAM), also referred to as total available market, is the overall revenue opportunity that is available to a product or service if 100% market share was achieved. It helps determine the level of effort and funding that a person or company should put into a new business line.” Related resource: What Is TAM and How Can You Expand It To Grow Your Business? “TAM” is one of those buzzy acronyms that VCs love to throw around. For those following along at home, TAM = Total Addressable Market. It helps paint the picture of how big the opportunity is and if the business deserves to be venture-backed. TAM is a funny thing. Early on, many investors passed on Uber, wrongly seeing it as little more than a black car service for affluent San Franciscans. The type of analysis that led many to overlook Uber (when it was still called UberCab) mirrors the approach that Benchmark’s Bill Gurley criticized NYU professor Aswath Damodaran for a couple of years later in a piece called “How to Miss By A Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size” “Let’s first dive into the TAM assumption. In choosing to use the historical size of the taxi and limousine market, Damodaran is making an implicit assumption that the future will look quite like the past.” – Bill Gurley The most forward-thinking investors were able to see past the limited size of the initial niche targeted by the company and see something closer to what the company has become — a $50 Billion valuation with operations in 67 countries and offerings ranging from food delivery to carpooling. TAM vs. SAM vs. SOM: What’s the Difference? Total addressable market (TAM) is often associated with SAM and SOM. First, let’s understand SAM and SOM: TAM: Total Addressable Market SAM: Serviceable Available Market SOM: Serviceable Obtainable Market TAM looks at the overall market but you can dial this number in with a more realistic approaching using both SAM and SOM. SAM (Serviceable Available Market) As defined by Steve Blank, “The serviceable available market or served addressable market is more clearly defined as that market opportunity that exists within a firm’s existing core competencies and/or past performance. The biggest consideration when calculating SAM is that a firm most likely can only service markets that are core or directly adjacent to its current customer base.” This means that SAM is how many customers (in revenue) actually fits your company and product line your are building. This differs from TAM as your TAM is a look at your entire market, not factoring in what percentage is actually achievable to close. Related Resource: Total Addressable Market vs Serviceable Addressable Market SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) SOM or serviceable obtainable market dials in your target market one step further. SOM is the percentage of the market that you can actually reach with your product, sales, and marketing channels. This should be a realistic view at the customer base your company can pursue. Related resource: Service Obtainable Market: What It Is and Why It Matters for Your Startup How to Calculate TAM When it comes to financial modeling and building a TAM for your business, there are a few different approaches. The most common being top-down and bottom-up approaches. Top-Down While a top-down approach to modeling is oftentimes the easiest, it is generally less accurate than a bottom-up approach (more on this below). According to inc.com, “A top-down analysis is calculated by determining the total market, then estimating your share of that market. A typical top-down analysis might go something like this: ‘Hmm… I will sell a widget everyone can use, and since there are 300,000 people in my area, even if I only manage to land 5 percent of that market I’ll make 15,000 sales.’” For example, if you were to find a market to be $10 billion and you believe that you can capture 1% of the market that is $100 million in revenue. This number might get circulated when fundraising, only to find out that there are many more factors that go into penetrating a new market. Bottom-up On the flip side is a bottom-up approach. Oftentimes more accurate but also requires more work and more data. As the team at inc.com describes a bottom-up approach, “A bottom-up analysis is calculated by estimating potential sales in order to determine a total sales figure. A bottom-up analysis evaluates where products can be sold, the sales of comparable products, and the slice of current sales you can carve out. While it takes a lot more effort, the result is usually much more accurate.” For example, let’s say we have software that sells for $10/mo. This means that the average consumer would spend $120/year. From here, we need to figure out how many consumers or customers we could add. Using past marketing website data, we believe that we can add 100 customers a month or $12,000 in recurring revenue (learn more about metrics here). Next, we can begin to model the growth of marketing site users and conversions to forecast what revenue might look like in 12 months. Related resource: Bottom-Up Market Sizing: What It Is and How to Do It Value Theory Approach As put by the team at HubSpot, “The value-theory approach is based on how much value consumers receive from your product/service and how much they’re willing to pay in the future for that product/service.” This requires certain data and assumptions that might take some added research. For example, let’s say that we sell snowboards and the ones we are creating are lighter, faster, and better for the environment than the normal snowboard. We could calculate our value theory by taking the price shops are selling a traditional board for, let’s say $300, and figure out how much more they’d be willing to sell your state-of-the-art product for — maybe $350 or $400. External Research One of the quickest ways to calculate your total addressable market is by using professional data from outside sources. There are countless companies (like Gartner and Forrester) that produce rich data reports on specific markets and verticals that can be a great launching point. Note: these often come at a hefty price. This is generally not the best approach as it is difficult to understand where the data came from and how it is being calculated. Questions to Ask Before You Calculate TAM There are many different approaches when it comes to calculating your TAM. At the end of the day, you’ll want to make sure you are setting realistic expectations and are painting a picture of reality. A couple of questions to consider asking before calculating your TAM: What are the characteristics of our current and potential customer profiles? What industries should we target to maximize sales? Where are the companies in those industries located? Who buys our solutions? How big are these companies? What are the market conditions like? Is the market growing? Are there new entrants? How does our budget compare to our competitors’ budgets? Where is growth expected? The Free Visible Total Addressable Market Template and Evaluation Model In order to help founders model their TAM and sensitivity analysis, we created a free Google Sheet template. You can find the Google Doc here: Visible.vc – Market Sizing, TAM & Sensitivity Analysis. Simply open it up and click the arrow on the bottom left sheet and copy it to your own Google Sheet workbook. Below, I’ll explain the process and instructions. You’ll see step-by-step directions for using the template below. Where Does Your Total Addressable Market Start (and End)? Before calculating the actual size of the market you are looking to capture, you first need to try to build an understanding of where that market begins and ends. Many companies, like Uber, start out in a specific niche with plans to scale into adjacent markets that allow them to apply their product and operational expertise to a different set of customers or a different geographic location. However, taking a company that is excelling in one niche and extrapolating their growth across multiple markets is a difficult task for both companies and the investors evaluating them. “Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.” – Peter Thiel, Zero to One One year ago, Uber’s Gross Revenue in San Francisco was $500 Million. Assuming a 20% cut, we get to just $100 Million a year. 5 years ago, connecting the dots forward to see how they could move from that to what they have since become took a combination of masterful storytelling from Travis Kalanick and his team as well as a large leap of faith by the investors evaluating them. This is a potential pitfall of using a TAM based on historical market sizes for truly game-changing businesses (as Gurley’s quote from above illustrates). Another oft-committed mistake surfaces with many Ecommerce companies, who claim to be chasing the $1.6 Trillion Global Ecommerce Market. Sure, it is a huge number. But it is one that investors will see right through, much like highly inflated financial projections or overly ambitious product roadmaps. In reality, most ecommerce businesses are addressing the X $ spent each year on Y problem(s). Why Should Startups and Growing Companies FOcus on TAM? Going through a marketing sizing and pricing exercise can help shape your business and the decisions you make when it comes to your go-to-market strategy. How many customers are there in our market? What is their propensity to pay? How many customers can we realistically support? What % of the market can we get in 10 years? Can we be the market leader? Forecasts Using TAM is a good base for creating future forecasts and projections. Using a bottom-up approach is a great way to help forecast where you believe your business can be in the future. This is particularly important when thinking about fundraising, hiring, and budgeting for the next X months. Related Reading: Building A Startup Financial Model That Works Fundraising Different investors might have different preferences when it comes to presenting TAM during a pitch. If an investor does want to see your TAM estimates, it is generally suggested to use a bottom-up approach. As the team at DreamIt Ventures puts it, “The biggest mistake we see with regard to TAM is when founders present a “top-down” estimate of market size. A top-down estimate is when a founder uses outside data to find the market size and then, usually somewhat arbitrarily, predicts that the startup will achieve a piece of that invariably massive pie.” Related Reading: How to Write a Problem Statement [Startup Edition] Related Reading: 6 Types of Investors Startup Founders Need to Know About Building Your Total Addressable Market Model You can find the Google Doc here: Visible.vc – Market Sizing, TAM & Sensitivity Analysis. Simply open it up and click the arrow on the bottom left sheet and copy it to your own Google Sheet workbook. Below, I’ll explain the process and instructions. First, you’ll want to start either with a top-down or bottom-up approach (more on the differences here). For this model and exercise, we recommend bottom-up. If you are a SaaS company you may want to break down between SMB, Middle Market, and Enterprise and the yearly contract sizes for each type. Ecommerce companies may want to break down by yearly revenue per customer type. The model should work for any type of business. For marketplaces, we would recommend your transaction cut and not “Gross Merchandise Value.” Feel free to replace the “Customer Type” headers with your own descriptions. The green cells are the inputs for a number of customers and pricing for each respective type. The 100% market penetration is a quick gut check to say “If we captured 100% of the stated market how big would our business be?” After the inputs have been entered you’ll see a Sensitivity Analysis that provides Yearly Revenue based on your % of Market Penetration and Pricing. We use the Total Number of Customers from your inputs and various Yearly Revenue numbers to provide the results. In the first column, I just added a simple calculation for the Number of Customers. This simply takes % of Market & Total Customers. It also provides a quick gut check…e.g. “Is it reasonable to acquire and service X customers?”. The analysis is color-coordinated. Red means your business is below $10 Million a year, yellow is $10 Million to $100 Million and green is >$100 Million a year in revenue. Most investors will want to see a clear path to $10 Million per year and the vision to get you to $100M. Anything short and they will likely tell you that “your business is not venture backable and you won’t be able to return our fund.” We hope you enjoy this template. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions send them our way! If you found this to be valuable we’d love for you to share it. Just click this link and it will craft a pre-populated Tweet (that you are welcome to edit). Streamline and Deliver Investor Updates with Visible Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days.

You’ve heard the stories about companies getting funded based on a sketch on the back of a napkin. If your name is Ev Williams or if that napkin sketch is as compelling as Amazon’s, you may have a shot. If you aren’t a founder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium or spend your free time saving journalism and launching rockets, people evaluating your business are far less likely to take your proclamations about the future at face value. In this blog, we write a lot about the importance of storytelling for a company. No matter who you are talking to – team members, investors, potential investors – company storytelling doesn’t stop, it simply changes contexts and mediums. A financial model is one of those mediums through which your company can tell its story, even without the operational history one might assume would be necessary to persuade investors or make smart decisions about the direction of the business. Related Resource: How to Create a Startup Funding Proposal: 8 Samples and Templates to Guide You At Visible, we work with VC backed companies on a daily basis. To get a better understanding of what it takes to build a compelling and useful financial model, we turned to our experience and conversations with customers and laid out our findings below. Why Startup Financial Models are so Important When Warren Buffett invests in a company, he makes holistic decisions about the quality of the business as if he is buying the whole thing and not simply a decision about the direction the stock might move. When building a financial model, a similar philosophy applies. Before breaking the business into discrete pieces and asking yourself which direction each will go, first look at the business as a whole and understand both what you as an organization are trying to accomplish as well as what the intended use of the model and startup financial projections you are building will be. What do we need to accomplish over the next x months… …in order to put ourselves into a position to successfully raise a Series A round? …for this partnership with Big Co. to make an impact on our bottom line? …so that we can hit profitability and maintain optionality over how we finance our future growth (customers vs. investment)? …for this product or distribution decision (which puts a significant amount of capital at risk) to pay off? The goal of a financial model is not to be exactly right with every projection. The more important focus is to show that you, as a founding or executive team, have a handle on the things that will directly impact the success or failure of your business and a cogent plan for executing successfully. There are a few key reasons why it is an important exercise for startup founders to model and project their future growth: Fundraising Different investors will have different opinions on financial projections. Some like to see them to see how a founder is thinking about their business. Others won’t ask for them as most startups likely will miss one way or another. Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures puts it similarly: “See I don’t care if your projections prove wrong over time. I care about your assumptions going in. I care about the thought that you’ve given to the customer problem. I care about how much you’ve thought about market share, competitors, adoption rates, etc.” However, projections and financials will become more important later in your lifecycle stage. Where a seed round investor might not necessarily care about forecasts in the early days a Series C investor might want to see more concrete data to model growth. Related Reading: 6 Types of Investors Startup Founders Need to Know About Related Reading: A Quick Overview on VC Fund Structure Related Reading: How to Secure Financing With a Bulletproof Startup Fundraising Strategy Hiring Plans Building a financial model is a great way to understand how your overall business performance can impact hiring plans (and vice versa). By modeling different scenarios you can see how adding headcount can impact your bottom line. Go to Market Strategy In the earliest days of your business, a financial model and marketing sizing exercise will help you wrap your head around go-to-market strategy. This could be finding a more efficient way to acquire customers or maybe a new playbook for handling churn. With that being said, financial models and projections can take many shapes and sizes… Types of Startup Financial Model Structures that Work Financial projections are essential for any business, even if it’s not yet generating revenue. A variety of specific methods exist for performing this task, but they can generally be classified into top-down and bottom-up approaches. Financial analysts often use both methods as checks upon each other. Among technology companies – especially ones located in a certain geographic region – the very mention of a financial model evokes thoughts of calculator toting, tie-wearing, number crunchers sitting somewhere in a suburban cubicle. With the direction sentiment is shifting in the early-stage market, this mindset couldn’t be further from reality. A well-constructed financial model displays a professional approach to running your business and shows that you “take seriously the fact that you are deploying other people’s capital.” A good financial model consists to two things: Well thought out projections about the future of the business A properly structured, understandable, and dynamic spreadsheet Bottoms Up Startup Financial Projections A bottoms-up financial model – where you start with 5 – 15 core assumptions about the business – is most useful for a company contemplating a specific product direction, distribution strategy (i.e. invest in paid advertising), or a certain partnership that could potentially have a major impact on the business. Top Down Startup Financial Projections A top-down financial model may be most useful for a company that, for example, knows that it will need to go out and raise $X million in a Series A round 15 months from now and has spent time gathering data on what types of revenue, margins, and growth numbers they need to hit to have a successful fundraise. (Note: If you are a SaaS company, the Pacific Crest SaaS Survey is a great starting point to benchmark yourself) Maybe in this case, those numbers are $1.5MM in MRR with at least 100% YoY growth. With those in mind, you can work backward to understand how much you need to grow and which distribution channels may provide the best bridge from where you are now to where you need to be. 3 Deliverables Included in Every Financial Model There is not a one size fits all template for financial modeling. The structure of a model for seed-stage SaaS and a Series C eCommerce company will greatly differ. However, there are a few things that should be included in any solid financial statement, regardless of type: Financials Statements Every financial model should weigh your different financial statements. While projected financial statements may not be as vital/accurate in the seed stage/early days of a business, they will become more important and accurate in later stages. Related Resource: Important Startup Financials to Win Investors Cash Flow Overview Cash flow overviews are a vital part of a financial model because it will help you understand the true financial health and cash flow of your business. In the seed stage/early days, cash flow is incredibly important to monitor as you are in search of your first customers. KPI Overview Using actual metrics and data from your sales & marketing process is important to any financial model. You want to be able to understand how different go-to-market strategies impact your business and give you an idea of where and how you can grow your funnel (and revenue). 5 Metrics Needed for Every Financial Model As we mentioned above, not every financial model is the same. However, there are a few key metrics that can be translated across most financial models. Revenue At the end of the day, revenue is the lifeline of any business. Bringing new revenue in the door is the basis of every model. In a good financial model, you can use other inputs to help you model how your revenue is impacted in different scenarios. Cost of Goods Sold (COGs) No matter if it is the cost of goods sold or your expenses at a software company, COGs are a necessary part of any model. You need to understand what it costs to acquire new customers or build a new product. Operating Expenses The expenses that go into operating your business are also a necessary part of a financial model. You need to understand how and where your company is spending. Ideally, you’ll be able to model different scenarios with headcount and hiring plans to model how OpEx can impact your overall revenue. Burn Rate and Cash on Hand Going hand-in-hand with OpEx are your burn rate and cash metrics. You can use different hiring and OpEx inputs to help model your cash flow. This will be important when weighing different financing options. Acquisition Metrics While the name of acquisition metrics will change names from market to market, the idea behind them is consistent. You should include acquisition metrics so you can model how different GTM strategies and plans will impact your overall financial health. How to Build Your Startup Financial Model Bottoms Up Startup Financial Projections The bottom-up approach uses specific parameters to develop a general forecast of a business’s performance. This method might start the number of people you expect to pass by your business each day, also known as footfall. You would then estimate the percentage of footfall that will enter your store and make a purchase. The next step is to estimate the average value of each purchase to project your annual sales. Bottom up projections are based on a set of individual assumptions, allowing you to determine the impact of changing a particular parameter with relative ease. You may use a bottom-up approach to select a location for a new business. You can obtain an accurate estimate of the footfall by direct observation. You can also observe similar stores in that area to estimate the percentage of footfall that are likely to enter your store. The prices that your competitors charge will give you a good idea of the price you can expect to charge. Projections Some investors tend to prefer a bottoms up projection. As we previously wrote, “The reason being that a top-down approach relies on self-reported data from private companies, which can often be misleading, inaccurate or interpreted incorrectly. A bottom-up approach, however, uses firsthand data and knowledge of your own company and reduces the risk of the data being wrong or taken out of context.” Spreadsheet For example, assume for this example that an average of 10,000 people pass by a particular location each day. About one percent of this traffic in this area enters a store and makes a purchase, and the average total of each sale is about $5. The expected annual sales revenue in this example is therefore 10,000 x 0.01 x 5 x 365 = $182,500. You can then refine this estimate by considering additional factors such as price changes, closing on weekends and seasonal fluctuations. Template(s) At the end of the day, investors view TAM as a picture of how big your business can be. Correctly modeling the market is vital to proving that your business should be venture-backed. If you need a little help painting a picture of the market your solution could address, try using our TAM template! It has everything you need to start modeling the market your business can capture. Top Down Startup Financial Projections A top-down method of estimating future financial performance uses general parameters to develop specific projection numbers. You’ll often use a top-down approach to determine the market share that your new business can expect to receive. You might start with the market value of your product, narrowing it down to a particular location as much as possible. You would then assume that your business will receive a specific portion of that market and use that estimate to generate a sales forecast. A top-down approach is comparatively easy since the only parameters it really requires is the total market value for your area and the market share you expect to receive. This method is most useful for checking the reasonableness of the projections resulting from a bottom-up approach. However, top down projections aren’t recommended for preparing detailed forecasts. Projections Some investors will be weary when pitched using top down projections. However, this does not mean that there is no value in a top down approach. A top down approach is best used for a new endeavor where you may not have proper data yet. For example, if you are a pre-seed company with little to no revenue, it may be best to share your top down projections using outside and general market data. Spreadsheet For example, assume for this example you plan to open a business in an area where the total annual sale value of your product is $2 billion. You believe that your business might get 0.01 percent of that market, resulting in annual sales of $200,000. Note that your financial projection is entirely dependent upon the accuracy of your estimate on the product’s market value and your market share. Furthermore, the top-down approach doesn’t ask you “what if” type questions. Template(s) At the end of the day, investors view TAM as a picture of how big your business can be. Correctly modeling the market is vital to proving that your business should be venture-backed. If you need a little help painting a picture of the market your solution could address, try using our TAM template! It has everything you need to start modeling the market your business can capture. Common Financial Modeling Mistakes Failing to hit both of the requirements we mentioned in the last section – well-thought-out projections and a well-constructed spreadsheet – will quickly render your model unusable and will reflect poorly on you as a founder and on your company. Projections Assuming that revenue will come with scale. While this has long been a criticism of social networks and consumer apps hoping to monetize a critical mass of eyeballs through advertising, many companies who have revenue models built into their businesses from the start (think SaaS or Marketplaces models) still falsely assume that revenue, to the extent they need to be sustainable, will happen once they reach x number of users or “decide to turn on the spigot”. Focusing too much on point estimates and not range estimates – As Taylor Davidson puts it in a post on his own blog, “instead of agonizing over whether your conversion rate will be 2% or 5%, focus on the possible range or conversion rates and evaluate the results based upon the range of estimates, not the point estimate of 2% or 5%.” Underestimating Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) – Just go read this post. Not doing your homework – There is a tremendous amount of information available, for free, that can help you gauge your performance and benchmark your growth. We mentioned the Pacific Crest Survey above. Other great resources include AngelList, Mattermark, and the blogs of companies embracing the Radical Transparency movement. Spreadsheet Spending too much time on non-material data points – The Pareto Principle applies here, just as it does to many other undertakings in a startup. While it might seem like spending time optimizing everything in your model will yield the best results, the reality is that going deep on your 5 – 15 core assumptions will yield a much more effective result. Failure to design your model for usability – To make your model most effective, you need to pay close attention to how usable the output is for viewers. That means clear explanations, a simple structure, and making sure to follow convention so there are no surprises. We linked to it above but David Teten of ff Venture Capital has a great post on the topic of standardizing the way you build your startup spreadsheets. Neglecting to include a sensitivity analysis – This goes back to the idea of understanding what your model outputs look like for a range of estimates. You should also keep in mind that your model should be treated as a flexible, living document. That means that your assumptions shouldn’t be hard-coded. Instead, as Taylor recommends, “create your assumptions so that you can easily change an assumption in one place and all formulas and outputs will recalculate automatically.” Displaying only financial statements and neglecting key metrics – Financial statements go a long way in showcasing the overall health of a business. Unfortunately, many models stop at the financial statements. What investors want to see is a synthesized look at those financials that make it easier to evaluate your business. As an example, a good model won’t just showcase projected revenue growth, it will look at how things like customer growth (and churn) and contract size work together to contribute to that top line number. Best startup financial model resources Unless you spent the first couple years of your career cutting your teeth inside an investment bank, your best bet is to lean on existing resources for the structural composition (i.e. the spreadsheet) of your financial model. The Standard Startup Financial Model that Taylor Davidson has put together on Foresight.is has been used by over 15,000 people across the world – from one-person operations just getting started to companies raising large VC rounds or considering acquisitions. And while we don’t recommend building your model from scratch, it is useful to understand how one can construct a professional financial model. Here are a couple quick resources, recommended by Davidson and us here at Visible: Best Practices in Spreadsheet Design by David Teten of ff Venture Capital 3 Traits of a Great Financial Model from Mark MacLeod Finally, if you are looking for a less sophisticated model or something to fit a specific modeling use case (user acquisition, revenue growth, or operations) here is a quick list of resources recommended by Davidson: Revelry Labs resourcing spreadsheet for operations modeling OpEx Budgeting from IA Ventures Viral Marketing modeling from Andrew Chen Modeling SaaS Customer Churn, MRR, and Cohorts from Christoph Janz Related Resource: A User-Friendly Guide to Startup Accounting Putting Your Financial Model to Work Mark Suster offers great advice for taking the financial model you have built and using it to help grow your business: “Financial models are the Lingua Franca of investors. But they should also be the map and the Lingua Franca of your management discussions.” Financial models play a key role in all of the major discussions you have about your business with all of your key stakeholders. A comprehensive financial model will have within it a number of different pieces that are relevant to different conversations within your company. The interplay between your revenue growth, your current burn rate, and the amount of money you have in the bank are all useful when putting together a hiring plan. Your assumptions for revenue can be isolated and used as a jumping off point when discussing a change to your distribution strategy. And as mentioned above, the projections you build around your key performance metrics are a crucial part of a successful fundraising process. In some cases – whether internally with management or externally with investors – the conversation will be high level and in other instances you will need to be more granular. If you have taken the time to thoughtfully prepare your assumptions around the future of your business, your most critical conversations will be more productive and you give yourself a strong advantage in the daily battle for capital and talent.

Andreessen Horowitz Startup Metrics Template Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is one of the most prolific VC investors in the market today. With investments across a number of different stages, sectors, and business models, they have seen first hand the lack of (and the need for) standardization in the way private technology companies track metrics and present those metrics to current and potential stakeholders. While their well known post, called “16 Startup Metrics“, dives deep into a number of great metrics for different business models – Marketplaces and Ecommerce in particular – we focused this video on SaaS metrics and how companies can use Visible templates along with other sources to benchmark themselves against others in the market and set themselves up for fundraising success. For benchmarking purposes, we leaned on this year’s Pacific Crest SaaS Survey. With over 300 respondents representing different geographies and sizes, the survey provides very actionable insight into how your company is performing relative to others in the market. Pacific Crest Respondents SaaS Revenue and Profitability Metrics In our example, we are looking at a SaaS company with Total Annual Revenue of just under $2 million (we’ll call them ExCo.). At this size, it it likely they would be going out to raise a Series A round of funding. MRR vs. Service Revenue There are generally two types of revenue for a SaaS company – the first is Subscription Revenue (called MRR or ARR). This is product focused revenue that is recurring and predictable — especially if you are able to sign customers to longer term agreements. Investors prefer this type of revenue because it signals a high quality product with a path to long-term profitability. The second type of revenue is Services Revenue which often comes in the form on one-off (read: not predictable) consulting engagements or implementation fees. Because of the human-capital intensive nature of providing these services, they are far less profitable and scalable than Subscription Revenue. According to the Pacific Crest SaaS Survey, the median gross margin on subscription revenue is almost 80% while the margin on professional services in under 20% Average Contract Value (ACV) As defined in the a16z post, ACV is “the value of the contract over a 12-month period.” If you are seeing an uptrend in ACV over time (which is generally the goal), then your company is likely doing one or many of the following things: Shifting to customers with a larger budget – more seats, usage, etc. Employing a more effective sales strategy to convince customers to invest more heavily in your product Building a product that continues to improve and provide increasing value Effectively upselling existing customers SaaS Gross Profit Margin Growing the top line is necessary to build a scalable business but in order to build a sustainable company – or raise capital that helps get you to that point – your profitability (in this case, we are looking at Gross Margin) must be trending in the right direction. Here, we see Gross Margin increase initially and then fall off in recent periods. This could result from a number of factors: Churn from high margin customers Pricing pressure from new entrants or large players Lower percentage of revenue coming from MRR (subscription revenue) An increase in the infrastructure required to deliver the product (server costs, support costs, etc.) In the case of ExCo. we know that ACV is moving up and that the revenue stream is becoming more and more weighted towards subscription revenue so we can rule out a couple of potential causes. What is likely occurring is an increase in the infrastructure required to deliver the product (server costs, support costs, etc.). When the numbers change, it is crucial to know why and to be able to present context and a path forward when discussing those changes with investors. In spite of the dip, ExCo.’s gross margin still remains in the same ballpark relative to others in the market and is higher than it was the previous year. As your company moves further and further through the Venture fundraising lifecycle – from Seed to A to Growth rounds – the numbers gain importance in the overall story for the fundraise. The metrics above provide a quick glimpse of high level figures that can be very useful in getting in a foot in the door with some investors — strong MRR growth, a robust Sales Pipeline, growth in the commitment of future revenue (known as Bookings), and low Churn Rate (among many other factors) can also play a significant role in the success of your fundraise and in the long term viability of the business.