Customer Success
Just a quick post to invite people to join a chat that I'm having with my old friend Nick Mehta from GainSight in just a few days -- on Thursday, February 22nd at 1:00 PM Pacific time -- entitled How to Prevent Your Customer Success Team from
Uncategorized
Today is the US launch of Startup Century, a new (and debut) book by Balderton partner James Wise. The book's subtitle provides a great clue to its content: why we're all becoming entrepreneurs -- and how to make it work for everyone. This is neither a
Predictions
Just a quick episode to highlight my recent appearance on Dan Turchin's AI and the Future Work podcast. In the episode, we discuss my 2024 predictions both in general and with an unsurprising spin towards AI and the future of work. I think this is our third year
Communications
Once in a rare while, I address political issues in my blog. Why? Well, because when it comes to messaging and positioning, it's the big leagues. Politics is Major League Baseball, consumer packaged goods (CPG) is AAA, and here in Silicon Valley we're only AA. It&
Metrics
The growth-adjusted enterprise value to revenue multiple is a personal favorite metric because it’s a quick way to determine if a SaaS stock is in the bargain basement, where I sometimes like to shop. Quick reminders before proceeding: * I don’t give investment advice, see my terms & conditions
Customer Success
Thanks to Frank Slootman, blowing up customer success (CS) teams is quite in vogue. "We don’t believe companies should have a separate customer success function. The first thing we did when Frank joined Snowflake was we blew up the customer success function. You are either going to do
AI
Well, it’s that time of year again, time for my annual predictions post, now in its tenth incarnation. As per my custom, let’s review my 2023 predictions before presenting those for 2024. Please remember that I do these for fun and fun alone. See my FAQ for my
Marketing
The other day an old friend, a highly accomplished marketing executive, asked me a simple question: if you only had five metrics to summarize marketing performance for a quarterly business review (QBR) or board meeting, what would you pick? In this post, I'll share my answer to that
Metrics
Quota attainment can get confusing quickly. It's simple concept, but: * Do you mean percent of reps at 100% of their quota or above some lower bar? Board members bark rules like, "we should shoot for 80% of our reps at 100% of quota," almost hearing the
Marketing
This post is going to get a little weird because it's going to do two things at once. * Discuss an interesting, if dated, survey [1] I found on the sometimes tense relationship between CEOs and PE operating partners (and other senior advisors like executives in residence) [2]. * Demonstrate
Marketing
Be the second kind. The other day I was meeting with an advisory client [1], talking with the CMO and a handful of go-to-market team members. We started to discuss marketing, topics like product positioning and the website. So I asked for some feedback. I displayed the company's
Management
Last week in London, fellow Balderton EIR David Vismans and I held a joint meeting to discuss the working relationship (or moreover, the lack thereof) between product and marketing organizations. David is a career product leader, who worked for over 8 years leading product at Booking.com. I am a