Mattermark has a large base of seed investors, the FG Angels syndicate backers, and employee shareholders — not to mention advisors, customers, and Friends of the Company. With so many people helping us get to where we are today it is important that we keep them in the loop, and today I’m proud to share our progress with the broader Mattermark community and the public. Also, we’re hiring!
Dear Mattermark Investors,
Today marks 2 years since our re-launch as Mattermark! some of you have been investors from the very beginning (3+ years ago as Referly) and some from the FG Angels syndicate and Foundry Group are coming up on 1 year. Altogether, ourinvestor base is so large that this email now goes to more than 200 individuals! Raising money in the piecemeal way we did wasn’t a choice, it was survival, and I am so grateful to each and every one of you.
I remember every check, every handshake. Thank you.
These past 6 months I have experienced something incredible: running the company without any focus on fundraising. It’s difficult to even convey how powerful it is to finally be thinking long-term, and I’m looking forward to another quarter focused on building our teams, improving our processes, and serving our customers without worrying about running out of money.
Fred Wilson wrote “What A CEO Does” back in 2010, and I like to use his definition: “A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”
I’ve summarized the highlights (and lowlights) in each of these areas for 2015.
Vision/Strategy Setting & Communication
- 2015 planning and budget process including all managers
- set our company values and shared them internally
- Opportunity: Have not been sharing the company vision as regularly as I should (speaking, writing, etc.) and need a VP Marketing on the team (apply here!) to help systematically support these efforts
Recruit/Hires/Retain Talent
- Team grew from 27 to 39 (5 of them are pending their start dates!)
- Director of Sales role was filled from within with the promotion of Lisa Han
- VP of Finance starts in 3 weeks
- Opportunity: Slower hiring velocity in engineering is limiting what we can build. We are at 15% our overall target hiring pace for 2015, and need to fill our Dev Ops role to unblock other engineers.
Cash In the Bank
- $5.6M in the bank, forecasted cash-out month is May 2016
- $380K average monthly net cash burn: Collected $1.04M and Spent $2.94M for a Net Loss of $1.9M so far in 2015
- ARR is $2.2 Million ($185K MRR) with NEGATIVE 4% annual churn rate 2015 YTD
- 167% CAGR *PACE* in 2015 (56% YTD as of 5/31)
- Opportunity: Do not get distracted by the frothy market. We will revisit fundraising and capital needs of the company at the end of the summer, the tentative plan is to raise a Series B no later than Q1 2016 with a clear view to profitability (I reserve the right to change my mind on this, as the market opportunity for Mattermark is so large that delaying profitability even further might make sense.)
The business is on track to financial health and rapid growth, and while I am proud of this I think it is important to acknowledge there are opportunities for me to step up and lead when it comes to communicating our vision and attracting talent. In the coming months I will be sharing more about the way we use machine learning to manage our growing data set, the fascinating technical challenges our distributed crawlers provide, and insights that are emerging from all this information.
The History of Mattermark – in 12 Blog Posts
In celebration of reaching out 2 year anniversary since launch, here are some posts to catch you up on any of the parts of our story you might have missed:
- May ’12: Referly launches & announces we’re in YC + the 3 year journey to founding
- Feb ’13: Referly Acquires Launchgram (cofounder Andy Sparks joins us!)
- Mar ’13: in “Zombie Startups” we announce we are shutting down Referly
- Apr ’13: controversial “Zombie VCs” post uses data to find inactiveinvestors
- Jun ’13: Mattermark launches in TechCrunch following a prescient post by Leena Rao
- Feb ’14: “Mattermark Was Not a Pivot” documents the first 6 months of revenue
- Mar ’14: Introducing Mattermark as a “Deal Intelligence” company
- Jun ’14: Announcing our $3.4M “Second Seed” round
- Sep ’14: Exploring “Is My Startup’s Burn Rate Normal?”
- Dec ’14: Welcoming Brad Feld to the Mattermark Team (Series A)
- Feb ’15: Reflecting on our first board meeting
- Jun ’15: Launch of the Mattermark API
Thank you,
Danielle
Get in touch!
@DanielleMorrill on Twitter