There's a well established school of thought that high-tech startups should focus on a few vertical markets early in their development. The question is whether government should be one of them? The government seems to think so. They run a handful of programs to encourage startups to
Enterprise
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) space is full of seemingly simple metrics that can quickly slip through your fingers when you try to grasp them. For example, see Measuring SaaS Renewals Rates: Way More Than Meets the Eye for a two-thousand-word post examining the many possible answers
Databases
Two weeks ago MongoDB, formerly known as 10gen, announced a massive $150M funding round said to be the largest in the history of databases lead by Fidelity, Altimeter, and Salesforce.com with participation from existing investors Intel, NEA, Red Hat, and Sequoia. This brings the total capital raised by MongoDB
Cloud
**** Please note that this post has been superseded by A Fresh Look at How to Measure SaaS Churn Rates. I'm leaving it posted to protect in-bound links and because I think it's still worth reading, but if you want my latest thoughts on how to
FP&A
I'm always struck by how often good business ideas, conceived with the best of intentions, get flipped upside-down when applied by some managers. A favorite example is the 3x pipeline rule about which I've already blogged (see The Self-Fulfilling 3x Pipeline Coverage Fallacy). Another
Management
I was talking to a startup CEO the other day and he said: Sales is From Mars, Engineering is From Venus Sure. Two things typically go wrong in this relationship. One is that you have a strategic alignment problem. The other is that you're treating sales and engineering
Management
Question from a reader: How much does my general manager need to know about my department? Frankly, he/she doesn't seem that interested in what we're doing or spend that much time with us -- which I suppose is a good sign in some ways. On one
Grateful Dead
For a change of pace, I thought I'd do a quick post with some of my favorite quotes. * "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." -- Dwight Eisenhower * "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the
Management
A friend of mine who played football at Stanford, back when Bill Walsh was coach, told me a great story the other day. He said that, according to Walsh, there were three types of players. * Those who need a kick in the butt. * Those who need a hug. * Those who
Management
Dear Dave: I think the art of negotiation is dead. Over the past two years we have won over prospects on our product capabilities, but then lost out on price to inferior products. In all recent cases the prospect never once negotiated with us for a lower cost but clearly
SaaS
If you've ever wondered what drives the valuation of a SaaS vendor, then take a look at this chart that a banker showed me the other day. The answer, pretty clearly, is revenue growth. The correlation is stunning. Taking some points off the line: * 10% growth gets you
Boards
Last week a scathing post by Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos, entitled Dear Dumb VC, generated some stiff controversy in the blog- and Twitter-spheres. Serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Mark Suster, author of the superb Both Sides of the Table blog, weighed in with a long, fact-filled
