During their fundraising processes, founders often tell me “I’d really like to get back to building the business.” I’m certain it’s true. Every founder surely would certainly rather be building their product and company than fundraising. Nevertheless, a founder skilled in fundraising can create enormous leverage for their business and develop unassailable competitive advantages. This is why it’s critical for early stage founders to invest time to perfect their pitches.

Much has been written about the consumerization of IT, the movement fueling many SaaS startup’s growth by targeting individuals in a target customer called B2C2B, rather than selling top down. But until yesterday, I hadn’t found anyone who had quantified the size of the movement. In mid-2014, CEB published Harnessing Business-Led IT to answer this question. While the entire report is worth reading, the chart above answers the particular question above.

The SaaS ecosystem has been evolving incredibly quickly. Most of the time, the changes in the ecosystem are embodied in one particular company which grows exceptionally quickly. Focusing on these fast-growers, the macro shifts can be hard to discern. Last week, Okta released a report Business at Work sweeps across SaaS to reveal these recent evolutions. These are the points that I found most interesting. First, most companies, irrespective of size from 1-4k+ employees, use 14 SaaS applications.

Over dinner, a veteran product manager argued most SaaS products’ onboarding practices miss a crucial step: create value for the user in the first session. After that conversation, I signed up for many brand-name SaaS products pretending it was for the first time, and I couldn’t help but agree with him. Most SaaS products guide a user through three steps. First, collect the requisite data to create an account, like email and password.