HR
Just a quick post to highlight a recent podcast appearance with Leah Tharin on ProducTea, a European podcast focused on bringing together product, revenue, and growth. In addition to her podcasts and blog content, Leah produces a number of guides that are quite useful for startups as well. In this,
Boards
A critical part of the CEO's job is realizing when it's time to sell the company. I'm not talking about the easy cases, like when you're in year five of running a PE-backed company, and the numbers suggest an exit that produces
Career
It's always fun to go back and look at my stats, and my best-of page (which amazingly came in at #11) is getting sufficiently long that I need to find additional summarization mechanisms. So this year, I thought I'd share the top-ten Kellblog posts of 2024
Competition
Of all the dime-store clichés that pass for business strategy, the one I hate the most is, "run your own race." Why? * As a quote from the winner, it's almost always survivor bias. "How'd I win? Well, I ran my own race."
Boards
Since many of you are in the midst of presenting your annual marketing budgets to your CEO, CFO, and board, I thought I'd write a quick post to remind people what board members actually care about when it comes to the marketing budget. I understand that, in the
AI
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the board of Techwolf, a Belgian HR tech company backed by a slew of top venture capital investors including Harry Stebbings' 20VC, Future of Work boutique Acadian Ventures, vertically-focused SemperVirens, and European-focused Felix Capital, Notion, and Stride.vc. They also
Finance
If you're VC-backed, you might well have taken some venture debt to top up your last financing round. If you're PE-backed, it's probable that your PE sponsor took a material amount of debt -- e.g., 1-2x ARR -- to help finance the acquisition.
Entrepreneurship
Back in October, I did a live workshop with my second cohort in the Balderton Launched program in London. I sat down intending to use the slides from my first session, but -- always one to go with the flow -- ended up improvising most of the session in response
Uncategorized
I've often quipped that board observers should be like Victorian children: seen and not heard. While that might sound obnoxious, it's not if you understand how hard board seats are to come by and the process through which you get one. There are three ways to
Communications
While I don't do politics on Kellblog, I do analyze messaging, including political messaging. My point is not to change your mind on a given issue, but to study what works in the major leagues [1]. Towards that end, I wrote a post back in January entitled Analyzing
Communications
Sometimes. But make sure it's not out of laziness or ignorance. Increasingly, you’ll hear the term “business outcomes” popping up in software marketing. While I initially loathed the phrase for its vagueness, over time I’ve come to believe that, much like the frequently-abused word “solutions,” there
AI
Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of sitting down for a 50-minute chat with SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin as part of their Workshop Wednesdays program. Our ostensible topic was What Really Matters in SaaS in 2025, but we ended up having a wide ranging and fast-paced conversation about many things,