CEO
The cleverest answer I've heard to the question "When would you sell your startup?" is, "When somebody offers me more than I think it's worth." It's clever alright, but it's not that helpful. It's a meta-answer
Grateful Dead
While I'd been using the Internet since the early 1980s in my student job at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, the first time I remember using the worldwide web was in the mid 1990s. Well, August 9th, 1995, to be more specific. I'd recently moved to Paris and
AI
Just a quick post to highlight that the good people of Benchmarkit, host of SaaS Metrics Palooza 24, have posted the video of my presentation, The Impact of AI on SaaS metrics. The slides are here. https://vimeo.com/1020584064
Entrepreneurship
Organization design seems a popular topic these days. Maybe it's the downturn. Maybe it's just planning season. But either way, many people are asking me questions about how to design their organizations for 2025 and beyond. Questions like: * Should marketing report into sales? * Should engineering and
AI
Just a quick post to share my slides from today's presentation at SaaS Metrics Palooza 2024, entitled The Impact of AI on SaaS Metrics. The short summary is: * The concept of ARR is already challenged by monthly-varying pricing, e.g., usage-based pricing. * AI will exacerbate that problem, bringing
Grateful Dead
Since It Costs A Lot to Win, and Even More to Lose [1] It's hard for a DNA-level marketer and inveterate deadhead [2] to review a book that fuses both. While I first read Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead not long after its publication in 2010, I&
Culture
This is a huge distinction and sadly I think many people miss it. You go a mid-quarter ops meeting. The CMO shows quarter-to-date MQLs. Someone asks how we define MQL. A 15-minute conversation ensues. The SVP of Alliances talks about influenced ARR. Someone asks how that's defined, but
AI
While I was unable to make SaaStr Annual this year, I am pleased to announce that I will back at SaaS Metrics Palooza, an entirely virtual conference (where I don't need to walk on my recovering knee) focused entirely on SaaS metrics, and hosted by my SaaS Talk
Leadership
"Phew, we sure have a lot of challenges right now," the frustrated CEO mused after completing a day at the annual planning offsite. "While my executive team is pretty solid day to day, they're too in-the-box. They're not creative. They never have any
AI
You can't run a financial planning company for six years and not develop a certain affection for working with the office of the CFO. It doesn't hurt when, despite your exterior marketing shell, there's an inner finance person down there underneath. Since selling Host
Demandgen
"How's it going at StartCo?" I asked. "Great," the CMO replied. "We hit 105% of our pipeline generation (pipegen) goals last quarter, and with a healthy pipe/spend ratio of above 10." "Nice," I said. "How is sales doing?
Career
Lack of savoir faire, like hypertension, is a silent killer. There are few symptoms, other than the odd cringe that often goes unnoticed. But the outcomes are clear if the reasons are not: you're omitted from meetings, passed over for promotions, underperform in nine-box reviews, find advisors suddenly