Changing SaaS startup benchmarks in the COVID-19 era

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Last week we dug into a set of benchmarks that Bessemer Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in software companies among other categories, drew up to grade software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups. The performance metrics were designed to bucket SaaS startups into quality cohorts based on their performance, giving founders and other investors a measuring stick for startup results.

But the metrics were designed pre-COVID-19 and the ensuing economic shakeup of the domestic and global economies. To get a handle on what might have changed in the metrics, and their underlying expectations, since economic growth has slowed and companies large and small have laid off staff, pushing unemployment to historic heights, I spoke with Bessemer’s Mary D’Onofrio, a growth-stage investor at the firm and one of the authors of the report the metrics were originally taken from. (TechCrunch also spoke with her recently about valuing startups in a downturn.)

This morning, let’s talk about SaaS growth, retention, and burn metrics in the new era. After all, with growth concerns rising and churn itself picking up, surely the venture friendly triple-triple-double-double-double is out the window, right?

New measures of SaaS success

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