Metrics
Perhaps you’ve seen this movie: CEO: “Wow the quarterly pipeline dropped 20% this week. What’s going on sales VP?” Sales VP: “Well, that’s because we cleaned it up this week.” CEO: “That sounds great, but you said that last week.” VP of Sales: “Well, that’s because
CAC
Financial analysts speak a lot about “billings” in a public SaaS companies, but in private VC-backed SaaS companies, you rarely hear discussion of this metric. In this post, we’ll use a model of a private SaaS company (where we know all the internal metrics), to show how financial
CAC
My ears always perk up when I hear someone say "net new ARR" -- because I'm trying to figure out which, of typically two, ways they are using the term: * To mean ARR from net new customers, in which case, I don't know why they
BI
Last week I sat down with interviewers Doug Henschen, Vala Afshar, and a bit of Ray Wang (live from a 777 taxiing en route to Tokyo) to participate in Episode 100 of DisrupTV along with fellow guests DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth and big data / science recruiter Virginia Backaitis. We covered
Boards
Startup boards are complex. While all board members own stock in the company their interests are not necessarily aligned. * Founders may be motivated by a vision to change the world, to hit a certain net worth target, to see their name in an S-1, to make the Forbes 500,
Management
I'm a big believer in written quarterly goals. The old way to do this was to adopt "management by objective" (MBO) and to write down a set of MBOs for each quarter for each team member. Most folks would do this either in Word, or if
Boards
Dave Kellogg's presentation at SaaStr 2018 on the ten non-obvious things about scaling a SaaS startup.
Marketing
Like it or not, once in a while it's appropriate for a vendor to walk away from a prospective deal. Why might you want to do that? * You think your product is a poor fit with the customer's needs. * You believe there is insufficient budget to
Leadership
In an effort to promote my upcoming presentation at SaaStr 2018, which is currently on the agenda for Wednesday, February 7th at 9:00 AM in Studio C, I thought I'd do a quick post sharing what I'll be covering in the presentation, officially titled, "
Culture
Here's a great slide from the CFO Summit at Zuora's 2017 annual flagship Subscribed event. Since they talk about this as under-assignment, since people aren't great at flipping fractions in their head, and since I think of this more intuitively as over-assignment,
Communications
One of the interesting new challenges I faced when I joined Host Analytics about 5 years ago was working with an offshore development team in India. Host was originally co-founded in both the US and India, so literally from inception we had employees in both places. While this has
Career
As executives there are certain things we are expected to know -- in our heads -- about our jobs and our functions. Sometimes I call this "the 3:00 AM test" because someone should be able to wake you up at 3:00 AM in the middle of a sound