Todd Saunders
@toddsaunders
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CEO of @Broadlume, vertical SaaS for 4,000+ flooring retailers. Acquired 8 companies before selling to @Cynclyco. Previously @google. Long @townofwestfield.
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Joined August 2011
After nearly a decade of building @Broadlume, I’m excited to announce that we've been acquired by @CynclyCo 🎉🎉 It's been an incredible 10-year journey, but to be honest, one that I can't take credit for. If you're a founder reading this, please trust me: The team and people
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tell me you’ve never had to make payroll with 4 days cash and a term sheet that’s ‘just in legal review’ without telling me
when did simply having a job get rebranded as being an operator? like you had a job bro.
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Chegg does not equal saas. At least I know that much to be true.
$CHGG is the template. AI showed up. Business evaporated. A lot of SaaS charts are going to look like this.
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At some point you realize your job as CEO/founder is to only do 3 things. 1/ set the culture and live it everyday 2/ build the vision and get the entire team continuously bought in 3/ never run out of money
As a founder, you set the pace every day. And it restarts the next day.
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The only answer. Deep relationships and memories with my family.
What are you building this weekend?
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Here’s what I’m starting to realize. When cash is a commodity like it is now. The best deal flow comes from being the only person a founder trusts who’s actually done the thing they’re trying to do. LPs are slowly figuring this out.
went to a bunch of events recently & it was super interesting to see how many ppl have an investment fund who: a) have ~zero differentiated deal flow b) had prior employment at a big vc which i guess was their edge c) & lastly didn’t really have any cohesive vector for deploying
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The best founders I know followed their obsession. Sounds creepy but it’s true. Here are a few other traits I’ve found: 1/ almost all of them are financially motivated but not money obsessed. 2/ for them, there’s a difference between wanting to win and wanting to build
I'm 15 years into my career in tech. I've realized that the people I started with who are doing the best are: - They're actually pretty boring. They genuinely love technology and wake up every day with an optimistic view on what's happening around them. - They've mastered one
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Every B2B software company has the same problem. Customers come in with different use cases for the software that are slightly different. The documentation is generic, and the sales team spends half their time answering the same questions. What if the documentation rewrote
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There may not be a ton of buyers at $100M but there are still so many looking to buy at $3-$20M ARR. Happy to make intros
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This is the quiet part out loud Scary to think about tbh
It remains completely incoherent to believe that AI native software companies deserve big multiples but scaled public SaaS companies have no terminal value. One way or another it will resolve itself over time.
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Ok I’ll take the bait. That’s the investors view. Here’s the founders view. 300% YoY: You’ll also have 47 VCs in your inbox who’ve never operated anything telling you about the one unicorn they invested in. Enjoy the leverage while it lasts, it inverts fast. 200% YoY: You’re
What you should expect if you are ($5M-$15M ARR) with these growth rates. 300% YoY: Swell, you will have your pick. 200% YoY: Will be good. Likely Tier 2's. Quality of revenue is important in whether Tier 1 or Tier 2. 100% YoY: This will be hard. Unless insanely high
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Most early stage founders are bad at board meetings. I was one of them! Not because they lack effort, but because they think the job is to impress instead of to operate. After 38 board meetings as a CEO, I learned the opposite lesson: the best board meetings feel boring,
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Every vertical SaaS platform is built on a relational database. This made sense when data was expensive and structure was necessary for retrieval. It doesn't make sense anymore. The next generation of SMB software won't organize data into tables. It will remember interactions.
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Scaling isn’t just about growing fast, it’s about reinventing before you break. Every time your team 3Xs, what worked before stops working. I learned this the hard way. Here’s how winning founders can stay ahead by learning from my mistakes: 1 to 10 people - At 1, you do
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If you do this you will lose all credibility. I promise you. Do not do this. This isn't a "growth hack." It's reputation suicide with extra steps. You're literally training your prospect's brain to associate your name with deception before you've ever spoken. Think about the
the latest sales "growth hack" being passed around GTM circles is the "google docs notification”: instead of sending cold emails with bad deliverability, some reps are creating a "value doc" (website audit for example) and sharing it with prospects via the "notify people"
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The fastest way to build a $100M company is to buy a great agency. Productize it. And turn it into a vertical SaaS business. There is a real opportunity here. Agencies look uninteresting to venture investors. That is exactly the point. They trade at low EBITDA multiples,
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This blew up way more than I thought. Going to ask them for their list of full questions and how they prioritize/act on them. Will report back.
A founder I really lookup to does "stay interviews" instead of exit interviews. Once a quarter, they sit down with every person on the team and ask 3 questions: 1/ What would make you leave in the next 6 months? 2/ What's the gap between what you expected this job to be and
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I love this. “change management that actually drives the change in workflow.” Every founder building AI tools is obsessed with the tech. And trust me I get it it’s super cool. But almost nobody is thinking about how to actually get a 47-year-old office manager to change how
The capability overhang right now in AI is pretty massive. Most of the world still thinks of AI as chatbots that will answer a question on demand but not yet do real work for them. Beyond coding, almost no knowledge work has had any real agentic automation applied to it yet. The
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A founder I really lookup to does "stay interviews" instead of exit interviews. Once a quarter, they sit down with every person on the team and ask 3 questions: 1/ What would make you leave in the next 6 months? 2/ What's the gap between what you expected this job to be and
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I think about this a lot. Not running a company (at the moment) but I would much rather take that money and bet on myself. Not because I think I’m the smartest person in the room but because I want to control the outcome. If you’re going to angel invest, why not just buy
I asked a CEO the other day: "Do you angel invest?" They responded: "Are you kidding me. To have the cash to angel invest I would have to sell stock in my own company to fund it. Do you really think I believe in any other business is a better investment than the dollars in
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