Probably far too early for this conversation, but there’s no point MYOB trying to pick off the 15 million shares that are available on the NZX. When they decide that Xero is too big to ignore a hostile takeover is impossible – so it’ll be straight on the phone to Mr Drury.

As for the potential suitors thing – Xero is a publicly listed company, it’s shareholders can sell to whomever they wish (well other than those who were shareholder pre-IPO, they’re embargoed from selling their shares until 12 months have elapsed from the listing date)

Just keep planting doubt in the punters minds I’ve no doubt Rod’s already had nibbles from potential suiters now that Xero has proven itself as more than credible. Julian’s comment earlier about public scrutiny was dead on. Everyones a critic.

Fact of the matter is that Xero have gone from 0 to 1400+ in twelve months, most of that happening since Jan 08. Has anyone thought to extrapolate the sales curve to see what the picture will look like in a few years time? I doubt lack of funds will ever be an issue.

Well done to all at Xero for getting this far – full steam ahead.

SaaS businesses in the early years always looks ‘on the surface’ like they’re finding sales hard as the revenue always appears less than people expect. This is because the very nature of SaaS is many, small payments, monthly. It takes time to build the revenue, and for quite a while it seems like not a lot is happening – but then the revenue picks up. And SaaS revenue is like gold!

When you have thousands of committed customers paying monthly, it takes a major event to dent the revenue stream. SaaS becomes a solid revenue model, compared to traditional software service companies that may have only a few high paying customers. ie: When they lose a customer – there goes 250k and some jobs.

I do wish XERO all the best, and New Zealands tech community is watching with great interest, but what we all want to see is XERO get to the positive cashflow – covering overheads, before the cash in bank runs out. A XERO success is good for everyone…

So yes, looks like they need to ramp up fast, and they’ll know that and be working towards it… But my comment for the day (We’re in SaaS too) is don’t judge a SaaS businesses potential by it’s first years results. it’s the nature of this type of revenue stream to be low initialy, then (if they have a winner product/model) it grow exponentially.

What we don’t want to see is linear growth. These business models should grow exponentially.

As a side note. It takes some balls to run a company with public financials. I wonder what comments we’d all make if we could publicly scrutinize each others business accounts?