Uncategorized
[Updated 9/23 to include link to a Brian Chesky interview discussing Founder Mode.] Founder mode became all the rage last week, following a Brian Chesky speech (whose contents are seemingly not available online) and a Paul Graham blog post about that speech. Since everyone's weighing in on
Silicon Valley
“You’re fired,” said the general counsel (GC) of the public, multi-billion-dollar software company and I wasn't just happy, I was ecstatic. I’d known this company for a long time. I’d helped their VCs with diligence. I’d worked with them in the early days as
SaaS
Excluding VC funds, I've directly invested in a few dozen startups. While the jury's still out on my performance, I can share a few things that I've learned along the way: * This isn't easy. Though I'd never thought I'
GTM
Just a quick post to share the slides I used today in a nearly 90-minute discussion with founders participating in the most recent cohort of the Balderton Launched incubator program. Because this is focused on incubation-stage startups, we walked mostly about $0 to $1M (or $2M) issues, both how to
Competition
Yes. And, by the way, I'm not joking with that answer. I'm not saying you need 17 patents. I'm not saying you need any patents at all -- but you probably do. I am saying that despite the frenetic life of running a startup,
Metrics
As readers will hopefully know, I've been running a podcast with Ray Rike for about the past year called SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC. (Ray's growth and I'm CAC.) If that name rings familiar, it's because our naming
Growth
Back in 2018, Rory O'Driscoll, a VC at Scale and the inventor of the SaaS magic number, came up with another important SaaS concept: the Mendoza line for SaaS growth. Taking an idea from baseball, the Mendoza line is a measure of "offensive futility" named after
GTM
So, you’re missing plan and revenue growth is down. Well, welcome to the club. You’re certainly not alone in these times. In this post, I’ll discuss what you can do about it – specifically, how you can apply some of the ideas I’ve discussed in Kellblog to
Branding
I was thrilled to get together with Janessa Lantz (former CMO at dbt Labs) to join her and Amrita Gurney's podcast, Standout Startup Brands, to discuss a topic that most people don't even want to talk to me about -- branding! Yes, I'm known
Metrics
I was reading a SaaS benchmark report the other day and encountered this line: "Win rates declining [over the two-year period] from 23% to 19% might not seem all that significant. But in terms of required pipeline, it represents a dramatic shift from 4.3x to 5.3x coverage.
Private Equity
All strategy is a function of situation. Situation varies not only as a function of the individual company and market, but also of time. Remember that classic Silicon Valley strategy books were written in a different time and thus had some implicit assumptions built into them. For example, * That you’
Management
For no apparent underlying reason, a lot of the companies I have worked at over the years have been quite successful in Japan. Thus, while I don’t write about it much, I have a fair bit of experience working with Japanese subsidiaries and/or distributors in the enterprise software