Essay · long read plus benchmark charts
Scaling to $100 Million
Mary D'Onofrio, Bessemer Venture Partners · Bessemer Venture Partners (Atlas) Free Intermediate
Bessemer built this from years of their own portfolio data, and it is the piece that answers the real question hiding inside "do these matter at my stage": what an efficient company looks like at $1 to 10M ARR is very different from $50M plus. It lays out stage-by-stage targets for growth rate, CAC payback, and efficiency (their magic-number cousin), so you can see whether an investor's benchmark even applies to where you are. Treat it as a reference map, not a scorecard: early on, high growth with heavier burn is normal, and the efficiency bar tightens as you scale.
- Efficiency expectations are stage-dependent: growth rates near 200 percent early fall toward 60 percent by $100M ARR, and the burn and payback bars tighten as you go, so a single "good" number does not exist across stages.
- Bessemer targets roughly a 70 percent efficiency score around $25 to 50M ARR and about 50 percent past $100M, useful context when an investor quotes you a ratio.
- At the earliest stage these ratios are noisy and less predictive, so use them to sanity-check unit economics, not to run the company by.
