Jason M. Lemkin discusses three SaaS companies—Squarespace, Procore, and UiPath—that took a decade or more to reach major scale and IPO. He contrasts their different go-to-market models (Squarespace: self-service SMB; Procore: vertical mid-market; UiPath: enterprise automation) and highlights slow early revenue followed by rapid later growth. Notable facts cited include founding years and ARR/valuation milestones.
So three of my personal favorite SaaS companies finally went public. Squarespace and Procore just went public and not long ago UiPath Squarespace is a personal favorite and one we run many of the saster sites on because it took a category of software that was a commodity, websites and often a free giveaway and they made it magical. Procore is a personal favorite and one you probably haven't heard of because it did vertical SaaS, SaaS for the construction industry the hard way with many mid market deals and they made it a tenacious success after a challenging first decade. And UiPath is a more recent favorite. My interest there is more technical than in what it does, how it was able to take a very quiet corner of software, really scripts, bots, and turn it eventually after a long 10 years into one of the fastest growing software companies of all time. Squarespace and Procore are now worth 8 to 10 billion dollars after IPOing and UiPath is worth 40 billion. And one thing these very, very different incredibly successful SaaS companies have in common. It took them like forever to get really big. So Procore, Procore was founded back in 2002, back in 2002 to automate construction project management. It took a full decade for mobile to get mature enough to make construction software really work because it had to work in the field. So Procore really didn't take off until 2012, 10 years after founding. Squarespace similarly was founded way back in 2003 in the CEO's dorm room and for years revenue was nominal. It took three years just to get to the first million in revenue and seven years to get to the first 10 million. But today it's at 700 million in ARR, growing 30% a year. UiPath was the most extreme at all. It was founded back in 2005 and it took 10 years to get to the first million in ARR. It took from 2005 to 2010 to get to 1 million in ARR. But then growth became insane, rocketing from 1 million in 2015 to 600 million in 2021. So maybe the real point here is just that these three different software companies are so different. Squarespace, it's self service and SMB focused. Procore is vertical SaaS and it's mid market. UiPath is hyper enterprise with many, many $1 million customers that grow very very large. And really it's on prem software for the cloud. They have almost nothing in common, these decacorns. But one thing, incredibly tenacious visionary founders that were willing to wait a decade until it really took off, they were okay. In fact, if it took 15 to 20 years to IPO and build something worth billions on the way to that 1 billion in ARR, could that be you?
