Bottom Up by David Sacks

About the Bottom Up Blog

When starting out, founders often ask whether it’s better to pursue a consumer or enterprise idea. Actually, the perfect software business is a hybrid. It monetizes like an enterprise product but spreads like a consumer product.

I call this Bottom-Up SaaS. This is a category I helped pioneer in 2008 by taking the consumer growth tactics I had learned as founding COO of PayPal and applying them to enterprise software. That company, Yammer, grew so quickly that it was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in just 4 years.

Today, Bottom-Up SaaS is a vibrant category that includes hundreds of companies. The recent IPOs of companies like Zoom and Slack have shown how much value can be created when ARR is combined with viral growth.

In this blog, I convey lessons learned about Bottom-Up SaaS through my experience as a founder/CEO and as an investor in many SaaS companies. I write about topics relevant to founders who are starting or scaling software companies.

Everyone has to start somewhere. You might as well work your way from the Bottom Up. That is where change comes from. That is where revolutions come from.