We see the opportunity for growth around every corner. Whether it's scaling our portfolio companies or our investment in continuous learning as a team, we're always looking to move up and to the right.

Growth

Camber Partners works with SaaS businesses where we see promising potential for growth that can be unlocked through exceptional operational collaboration. At this milestone, it is critical to use or expand on a management framework that helps to focus everyone on the same opportunities. We’ve worked with dozens of fast-growing companies and a common framework for setting goals across the company is crucial to help the company scale.

The best-performing companies we know (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Slack) use OKRs. 

 and is a framework for goal setting. OKRs were first used at 

 written by Venture Capitalist John Doerr.

The OKR framework focuses on aligning the company to higher level outcomes, not procedures, while also allowing teams to see how their work impacts the business. Doerr attributes the framework's success to five key 

 that can be realized by companies large and small: (FACTS) Focus, Alignment, Commitment, Tracking, and Stretching.

: At any given point in time, there are many things a company and individuals at that company can invest time and resources into. The OKR framework forces focus on the key outcomes that will move the company forward. Not everything that the team is working on will be represented.

 In order to narrow in on the few items the company needs to focus on, there must be alignment across teams. OKRs require support from multiple functions as well as each individual. Every team and individual should know what they need to achieve and how their work impacts the outcome the business is trying to reach.

: To achieve cross-functional alignment, teams need to agree on what the OKRs are. That means writing them down, being explicit about what success looks like, and agreeing to collaborate together to achieve them. This adds a level of transparency that helps everyone know if they are heading in the right direction. 

: A key component of OKRs is tracking progress against them after they are set. This requires agreement on the measurement of success or the impact, and what completion of items looks like. Often teams need to make assumptions to set OKRs and the work involves experimentation. As OKRs are tracked, teams can not only see how they are performing against goals but should also have open conversations about what assumptions need to be adjusted or what initiatives no longer make sense.

: OKRs are meant to focus on outcomes that drive company growth. The operational successes of the business that are known and expected are typically not set as an OKR. Similarly, a goal that could be set as an OKR one quarter might eventually become business as usual once the company has learned how to repeatedly scale that result. When a company starts using OKRs, they often don’t immediately set stretch goals. As the process of implementing OKRs evolves, the company decides where and how to stretch.

These are some of the key reasons companies have flocked to using OKRs and why Camber likes to introduce them to companies in its portfolio. Next we’ll talk a bit about what an OKR is. As mentioned before, 

 which means there are at least two documented components to setting these goals.

 are the goals the company is aligned to achieve. These are often described as the outcome we are trying to achieve or where we are going. The 

 are measurable metrics that show progress against the Objective. These are often described as milestones or ways to see if you are getting to the Objective. The 

 that OKRs were originally conceived in is: 

I will (Objective) as measured by (this set of Key Results). 

For the time period that an OKR is set, it should be clear whether or not those outcomes were met [

. And again, not all the tasks that are being completed will be represented in the OKRs.

In thinking about Key Results, the concept of KPIs often comes up. 

and help to track metrics over time. There are many things that can be tracked as a KPI to help the business understand the progress it is making. A KPI can also be a way to set Key Results as the measurable metric. However, focus is critical for setting KRs, whereas KPIs allow for broader tracking. And it is important to keep in mind that Key Results are not something that you do; they are the successful outcome of what you did that shows measurable progress toward the larger Objective.

At Camber, we like the OKR framework as it helps teams focus on the key things that can drive growth. Not only does it provide alignment for the company, it also provides alignment across investors, the CEO, and the leadership team. Clarity and transparency of what matters and how we’ve determined if we’ve achieved our goals help teams set expectations appropriately and execute toward the right objectives.

The conversations around what the team learns as they execute against OKRs is just as important as the setting and tracking of the OKRs themselves. Each company will identify a cadence to set OKRs as well as track and review initiatives at various levels. We like to use a quarterly OKR process to set goals because it strikes a good balance between adding processes while maintaining the nimbleness and adaptability that gives small companies an advantage over larger incumbents. We then have a twice-monthly OKR meeting to track progress, where each owner of a Key Result can report on progress made so far as well as what they have learned from those initiatives. Sharing learnings with the cross-functional leadership team helps accelerate the team towards completing their sharing objectives.

When working with portfolio companies, we like to take an evolutionary approach. In the initial quarters we like to keep it simple while the team learns and adapts to the new operating framework. As companies learn the process and get better at setting and measuring goals, we’ll begin to add additional considerations, such as the timing of estimated impact, to help build predictability into the business. It is not uncommon to iterate on the OKR process for 6-12 months as it takes a few quarters of setting OKRs and learning from the outcomes before a company settles into a long-term cadence.

Some companies that talk about their experiences with OKRs are:

Overview of our use of OKRs with Portfolio companies.

How Camber Leverages OKRs

As a B2B SaaS entrepreneur, your funding choices today are to go the venture capital route or bootstrap your business.

On the VC path, if you lose momentum towards unicorn status you can lose investor support and your capitalization structure may become a hindrance to achieving your goals.

As a bootstrapped founder, you may not have access to the capital, talent, and expertise needed to maximize the opportunity in front of you.

Empower entrepreneurs to achieve the potential of their SaaS business by providing flexible capital and exceptional operational collaboration to drive long-term sustainable growth.

In support of our mission, we’ve outlined the four Core Values that drive how we engage with founders, portfolio companies, and each other.

We believe in sitting on the same side of the table as our portfolio companies -- we win and lose together.

We believe in measuring ourselves by the results we achieve.

We believe in making decisions based on fact, not opinion.

We believe in measuring and validating the impact of our activities.

We believe data levels the playing field and helps the best ideas rise to the top.

We believe in the power of investing -- in ourselves, in our teams, and in our practice.

We believe in the cumulative power of small improvements to create dramatic changes.

We believe that everyone brings something valuable to the conversation.

We believe in giving honest and constructive feedback.

We believe small egos drive successful partnerships.

Mission & Core Values

VC or Bootstrap: What Other Options Are There?

During 20 years as a VC investor in SaaS startups, I saw the good and bad of the VC model. I came to believe another option was needed for entrepreneurs to successfully achieve the potential of their SaaS business.

As a B2B SaaS entrepreneur, your primary options are to raise venture capital or to bootstrap the growth of your company.

Venture Capital is a Law of Small Numbers

Raising a successful Series A feels like a big win which will set your company up for subsequent larger raises and to make a big impact. The belief is venture capital is reserved for only the “very best” companies so it feels like a no-brainer to accept. However, the follow-on implications are significant.The reality is you are expected to triple, triple, double, double, double (“T2D3”) your revenue from that point forward. Unicorns are the goal, and this is the path to building a unicorn in SaaS. That’s 7,100% growth. Truthfully, very few companies have the potential to achieve this. There are limitations outside their control like market sizing, the timing of adoption, or business model (notice I didn’t say talent or capital. That’s a given).  It’s a law of small numbers.

32,000 software startups raised their first institutional financing in the last eight years.  How many of these will become unicorns?  300?  500?

Once you fall off the T2D3 growth curve, your fundraising options become increasingly limited.  For most companies, this eventually results in cutting headcount to reach break-even. At the same time, your VC investors stop spending time focused on your business. His partners and LPs require him or her to make this decision, leaving you without a lot of help and few options.

You can try to sell the business but most won’t be able to.  It’s hard to sell a sub-$5m ARR SaaS company at a price that’s worth accepting.  Even though you are no longer on the fast path to unicorn status, you’ve built a solid growing business.  In fact, exceeding $3m+ in ARR puts you in the top 10% of all startups, so why doesn’t it feel like a win?

The alternative to VC is to self-fund your growth. Sometimes taken by choice, other times out of necessity but regardless, it’s very hard work. Your growth rate is typically closer to the growth of the overall market, which for SaaS is often around 20-30% in the long run. At the high end of this growth range, it will take 17 years to achieve the 7,100% growth your VC-backed competitors are shooting for.  This sounds about right when you look at MailChimp (20 years) and SurveyMonkey (20 years) as examples of successful boot-strapped unicorns.

That’s a long, hard road, marked by a continual shortage of capital and talent. The truth is most bootstrapping founders are building for an exit below $1b, which often comes in the form of a PE buyout.  This typically requires $15m ARR and positive EBITDA at a minimum. So your base case plan is to bootstrap for 8-10 years and then cash out fully or partially with a PE investment.

For most bootstrappers, the PE exit means being rolled up into a larger platform company owned by the PE firm.  This can be a good outcome but by definition, it’s no longer the company you started.  It’s part of a different larger company.  You have stock in the larger company, not your own.

Software markets are not winner-take-all or even winner-take-most markets. They typically produce multiple winners. Sometimes a dozen or more. The majority of these are acquisitions in the $100m-350m range, well below unicorn level, but certainly still an amazing accomplishment, and far more frequent. It’s no longer a law of small numbers.

The key is capital efficiency. If you raise a smaller amount of capital, you preserve the option to sell for $100m. By definition, raising a VC round takes this option off the table. To achieve scale with capital efficiency, you need lots of time (for example, Mailchimp) and excellent execution (for Atlassian).

We started Camber Partners to provide excellent execution to SaaS entrepreneurs who have built great companies that are no longer on the VC fundraising path or who have chosen to bootstrap. Our goal is to shorten the time to a compelling exit and dramatically increase the odds of getting there.

Our operating team has seen Silicon Valley-level scale and knows firsthand what operating excellence looks like.  We partner with founders to fill leadership and technology gaps in their businesses for a period of time until the company is able to attract and can afford to hire its own management team. In our experience, this de-risks the path to scale, avoids mistakes common amongst first-time founders, and increases capital efficiency.

Capital efficiency underlies everything we do at Camber. In fact, we focus on Product Led Growth (PLG) SaaS companies because of their exceptional capital efficiency.  For example, Pipedrive burned only $12m on a growth path from $1m to $100m ARR during just seven years.  The PLG aspects of that business plus excellent execution produced a unicorn. Massive amounts of capital weren’t required.We focus on providing execution excellence within data science and the go-to-market functions of marketing, sales and success. Gemini, our proprietary data platform, is deployed into the companies we invest in and used for channel-based attribution, product engagement analytics, and predictive customer health scoring. This powers data-driven decision making and drives focus.  Both of which are friendly to capital efficiency.  Our Team is comprised of leaders and individual contributors across GTM functions who bring best practices and proven playbooks into your company alongside your current team.

Importantly, we are investing to scale your company, not to consolidate your company into a mashup of several other related (or not) companies. We are seeking the same outcome you are, to see your company achieve its potential. This could be measured in terms of market awareness or exit value.

Lastly, we recognize the path from startup to scale can be long and challenging.  We meet founders who, for a wide range of reasons, want to step out of day-to-day leadership roles. We see this as natural and will never seek to punish a founder for stepping down or even walking away.  We don’t ask founders to re-vest. Unlike a strategic acquirer, we don’t link valuation to complicated earn-outs and we don’t tie your hands for years into the future. Our investments are almost always a combination of secondary to current shareholders and primary for future growth.

We created Camber Partners to provide an alternative path forward with the mission of helping entrepreneurs to achieve the potential of their SaaS business. If you think another option is a fit for you, we look forward to learning about your business.

The investment process can take on many forms.  Some founders we’ve known for years prior to writing a check and others we meet within weeks of making a decision.  We share the letter below with all founders early in the process so they can better understand us and how we approach our partnership with portfolio companies.

In an ideal world, we’d have months to spend getting to know the teams at the companies in which we are looking to invest.  Getting to know them as people, understanding strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and aspirations.  The inverse is true as well, founders want to know what it’s like to sell a major stake of their company to Camber.  And if they are continuing on with the company, what’s it like to work side by side with us. Finally, and usually most importantly, what will it be like for the teams they have hired, trained and built their company’s culture alongside.  Since the M&A process is rarely ideal, we’ve written this memo to give you a sense of who we are and how we operate to help determine whether there is a cultural fit in which we can work collaboratively to achieve outsized results.  In our experience, the best results come from teams with clear alignment and a strong culture, and therefore we ask that if after reading this, you don’t genuinely believe that we’re a mutual fit, you let us know so we can all avoid the pain of a suboptimal partnership.

At Camber, we’ve all worked in the early-stage technology world our entire careers.  As investors, founders, employees, and executives, we’ve seen the start-up journey from just about every angle.  Over 20+ years and dozens of companies, we’ve had some great success and some great failures and learned from them all along the way.  We’ve learned what we’re good at, what we’re bad at and, most importantly, what we’re passionate about: 

We’re not experts in finding product-market fit.  We’re not suited to build products in nascent markets.  We’re not built to endure everything it takes to take a business from $100K to $3MM in ARR.  We admire you for already accomplishing those feats.

We get excited about go-to-market strategy and execution for product-led growth companies and the journey from $5MM to $20MM.  We take a hands-on approach building demand generation engines, creating and executing on SEO strategies, systematically experimenting with new channels, ongoing CRO and onboarding optimization, layering in and optimizing inbound sales motions, building outbound sales organizations, implementing account health scoring, turning monthly customers into annual and building customer success teams.  At the heart of all of this is our data pipeline and rev ops engine, Gemini, which provides the foundation for unlocking the data within your funnel, product and customer base and allow us to optimize and scale the business.

None of this works without a well-loved product as the foundation.  We won’t invest if the core product DNA doesn’t intend to move forward with the company, for at least a meaningful time period.  Sometimes this is a product-centric founder who is eager to shed the management burden and go back to the part of the job they truly love.  Sometimes this is a CTO with deep product and domain expertise.  Sometimes this is an up-and-coming product manager ready to take the next step.

Our goal with each company we work with is to invest in a Culture of Learning

While we all have different experiences and expertise, we recognize that none of us have the right answer every time. Each market and product is unique.  What worked in company X will not always work for company Y.  What worked for company X in year 2 will not necessarily work in Year 4.  We strive to center our operating philosophy around Data & Experimentation.

We don’t claim to always have the right answer, but we’ve assembled the tools and processes to reliably find it. If we’ve done our job correctly, this methodology empowers teams to be creative, pushes decision-making to the edges of the company and enables high-potential employees to flourish.  Teams and individuals can try anything they want, limited only by time, budget, and the requirement to test and measure the results.  At earlier stages and lower volumes this testing isn’t perfect, but it begins to build muscle memory and lays the foundation for the compounding effects as the company and customer volumes ramp.

We take a bespoke approach to building leadership teams at each company.  While we’ll look to immediately fill GTM skill gaps with Camber partners and resources, we’ll take a thoughtful approach on how to build out the broader leadership team with internal and external resources over time to ensure the company’s ability to achieve its potential.   We’ll count on your input in this process and be transparent in our thinking.

At the end of the day, our goal is to maximize the value of each company we invest in and deliver outstanding returns to our investors and to the other company shareholders.  Our hope is that you’ll maintain an equity stake in the business moving forward and that we can collaboratively drive an equal return from your remaining shares as you received in the initial transaction.  We’ve found that the most effective path to creating this value is to enhance your company’s culture and team with our capabilities and process.

If our approach resonates with you, we look forward to continuing the conversation.  If not, we wish you the best of luck in finding a financial and operational partner that aligns with your vision.

What's it like working with Camber Partners?

Partnering with Us

It’s hard to call the data transformation over the last fifteen years within companies of all shapes and sizes anything but meteoric. Data Scientists and Data Engineers have gone from job titles most had never heard of to one of the most in-demand jobs in the market because companies have recognized the importance data can play in improving the bottom line for their businesses. In fact, in 2017, the Economist ran a cover titled “

” in which they described “Data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change.” In 2020, the Economist went even further by rebuking their previous position by stating that oil isn’t a sufficient analogy for data. Instead, they suggest that 

 because “it will be everywhere and underlie everything” and that harnessing its potential for businesses will require having the necessary infrastructure in place to collect, transform and ultimately deliver it to where it can be best utilized.

Not surprisingly then, technology companies have invested in data at extremely high rates. However, while data has become ubiquitous to the point where it might seem easy, the supermajority of companies utilizing data have done so in a surprisingly immature fashion. This has led to a consistently high rate of data initiatives failing to deliver ROI according to multiple studies conducted by Gartner research between 2016 and 2020.

The reasons for these failures are too numerous to fully enumerate here, but the two most prevalent ones are worth discussing. These are a lack of data expertise - particularly at the leadership level within companies but also with cross-functional collaborators that don’t know how to operate effectively in a data-driven environment - and an insufficient or underdeveloped data environment - this across the entire data stack, infrastructure and lifecycle as so many tend to adopt overly simplified solutions with surprisingly large fundamental value gaps. Without these two key ingredients, the likelihood of data being successfully operationalized within an organization is low. And despite there being a number of highly-successful data-driven companies to serve as case studies, the majority of companies ignore those learnings because the truth is that data may be easy, but good data is hard and the investment can be daunting. Like the sunshine analogy mentioned above, data is everywhere these days, and so it can be easy to conflate its presence with the effective harnessing of it for value creation in a business.

The Camber team has been involved in numerous companies over the last decade that have successfully operationalized data to improve the execution and ultimately the outcomes of those companies. We have seen firsthand just how powerful data can be, when done well, for the accelerated growth and improved retention of B2B technology/SaaS companies. We want to bring that competitive advantage to the companies in our portfolio. To that end, Camber is making an ongoing investment into building out and maintaining a data platform for our portfolio companies, called Gemini. Many growing B2B technology companies with >$20MM ARR are already starting to implement these kinds of platforms themselves. In doing so they see accelerated growth and greater likelihood of achieving successful outcomes from the insights they are able to derive from their data. Smaller companies are often unable to compete and can suffer lost ground against larger competition as a result. With Gemini, Camber is able to enable data-driven, cross-functional execution at smaller companies in our portfolio, ultimately helping them grow faster and more predictably in ways they would not be able to by themselves until they were significantly larger to resource the efforts themselves.

Gemini is, however, just the beginning of the data journey for companies in Camber’s portfolio. It serves as the foundational platform on which to build data-driven organizations. In our collaboration with our companies, we also bring our learnings on how to operationalize data effectively to realize its potential. We work closely with leaders in our companies to ensure that data is driving decision making and execution. When this is successful, the data is not just reporting the news, it’s helping the company make it. Too many companies conflate data with reporting. You don’t drive your car with a historical report of your speeds on previous trips extrapolated out into a forecast for your next trip, you use the real-time speedometer readout. And yet, this is exactly how most data is operationalized inside a company. With the Gemini platform and the data resources and expertise that Camber brings to its collaboration, we help our portfolio companies go beyond the basics and build data-driven organizations that can harness data as a competitive growth advantage without the resourcing and investment limitations that all small companies face.

Unlocking competitive advantage with Gemini.

Gemini & the Opportunities of Data

Camber Partners Closes $100 Million Fund I Focused on Product-led Growth Software Companies

 (“Camber”) announced today the closing of Camber Partners Fund I, LP with $100 million of committed capital from a broad group of institutional investors. The oversubscribed fund closed at its hard cap and has closed investments in Scout and SE Ranking.

Camber provides growing SaaS companies with flexible capital and deep operational expertise in the fields of marketing, sales, success, and data science.  Camber’s investing and operating team have prior experience with notable product-led growth (PLG) software companies including Dropbox, Pipedrive, When I Work, Datadog, and SolarWinds. Camber makes control investments and significant minority investments in companies with $3 million to $10 million in annual recurring revenue.

“We are pleased to have raised our first institutional fund in a short period of time, especially given the uncertainty caused by the pandemic,” said Scott Irwin, Founder of Camber.  “The support of well-respected investors is testament to the quality of the team we have assembled.”

Fund I includes a diversified investor base of leading endowments and foundations, fund of funds, asset management firms, and family offices. Goodwin Proctor LLP provided legal counsel for Camber.

Camber Partners is a San Francisco-based growth equity firm focused on product-led growth (PLG) software companies. Camber Partners provides software companies with flexible capital and dedicated go-to-market and data science resources to drive long-term sustainable growth. For more information, please visit 

We see the opportunity for growth around every corner. Whether it's scaling our portfolio companies or our investment in continuous learning as a team, we're always looking to move up and to the right.

How Camber Leverages OKRs

Mission & Core Values

VC or Bootstrap: What Other Options Are There?

Partnering with Us

Gemini & the Opportunities of Data

Announcing Fund I

Team

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