Management
I think great learning can come from studying what cost your predecessor his/her job (on the assumption they weren't promoted out of it onto greener pastures). While such matters are invariably complex ("oh, there were a lot of factors, boss relationship, objectives attainment, sales confidence, ..."
Marketing
I'll borrow the title of one of my favorite books (Thinking, Fast and Slow) to make a few important points about lead nurturing in this post. While there is a strong argument that buyers should be nurtured before, during, and after the initial sale, I'm going
Leadership
I always cringe when I hear a young parent say something like, “Hey Buddy, don’t forget your toy shovel.” I feel the same way when I hear managers call subordinates “buddy” or when I see managers who are, in general, too preoccupied with being liked. One day I wish
HR
The first time I heard the VC adage "you can never fire someone too early," it rubbed me the wrong way. It sounded harsh and unfeeling. It seemed flippant. It felt trite. It seemed, frankly, like one of those things people say in the press box, but never
Leadership
Say you're an experienced executive joining a new company. When you start, you inherit a team of people. The first thing you must realize is that over time, "the team" will silently transform into "your team." Warts and all, you're going to
Bubbles
The following tweet is the umpteenth time I've seen the media size a company by valuation, not revenue, in the past few years: Call me old school, but I was taught to size companies by revenue, not market capitalization (aka, valuation). Calling Palantir a $20B company suggests they
CEO
In the past year or so, two of our competitors have abruptly transitioned their CEOs and both have perpetuated a lot of mythology about what happens and/or will happen in such transitions. As someone who's run two startups as CEO for more than a combined ten years,
Management
I remember years and years ago attending a training class for job candidates on how to improve their interviewing skills. The crux of the course was this: * Most people are bad interviewers. * Since they don't know what to ask, you need to tell them what they need to
Management
It was HP co-founder, David Packard, of all people, who came up with one of my favorite quotes on marketing, specifically that "marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department." This quote is often mentioned in the same breath as these famous Peter Drucker
BI
I said in yesterday's post, entitled Too Much Money Makes You Stupid, that while I don't have much of a beef with Domo, that I did want to observe in today's fund-to-excess environment that any idea -- including making a series of Alec
BI
There are two sayings I like when it comes to the unicorn bubble: * "Too much money makes you stupid" * "Any idea's a good one when you've got $100M burning a hole in your pocket." Startups are supposed to be focused. Startups are
Enterprise
The single most misunderstood software-as-a-service (SaaS) metric I’ve encountered is the CAC Payback Period (CPP), a compound metric that is generally defined as the months of contribution margin to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer. Bessemer defines the CPP as: I quibble with some