Ownership, Control, and Timing

How Latka cornered B2B Saas data

Nathan Latka was one of those college dropout prodgidies. He raised capital for his company, Heyo, at the height of Facebook’s rise. He started the company by charging $700 to create Facebook pages for businesses that he cold called.

That grew into a webinar company that never completely took off and was eventually sold for a song.

It wasn’t life changing money, but the experience changed Latka's life. He walked away with three crucial lessons.

He needed to study because he wasn’t a good enough entrepreneur, yet.

Maintain control of the company so you can grow at your pace.

Corner a resource that deep pockets want to access.

He studied people like Michael Bloomberg, who had already done it. Instead of Wall Street and financial data, Latka decided to focus on the B2B software industry. He proceeded to interview more than 1,000 private B2B Saas founders about their numbers.

He began to eat, sleep, and breathe his industry’s metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost, Lifetime Value, and Net Revenue Retention.

Like Bloomberg, Latka created a data source that investors and founders valued and couldn’t find anywhere else. Investors paid thousands of dollars for access, and more to limit access to their competition.

Now, some of those investors are supporting his latest project, FounderPath, which allows B2B software entrepreneurs to fund growth without selling equity. His investments are informed by the data he spent the last seven years collecting.

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