Independent consultant, EIR at Balderton Capital, author of Kellblog, and co-host of The Metrics Brothers podcast. CEO of two startups for over a decade, CMO of three for over a decade, and on the board of ten.
Strategy
Most segment-strategy discussions involve seas of numbers scattered across slides, spreadsheets, and dashboards. Here’s a simple chart that puts the relevant data in one place so you can spend less time reconciling numbers and more time deciding where to invest, what to fix, and when to get out.
Startups
Everyone on the executive team is busy making plan and improving efficiency. But who is making sure you’re actually winning the market? Why CEOs need to track market share — even when the data is imperfect.
Category Creation
Imagine you’re walking down a beach and find a watch. You pick it up, inspect its intricate mechanism, admire how precisely all the pieces fit together, and conclude that something so complex and precisely engineered couldn’t possibly have arisen by chance: there must have been a designer. Wait.
(Edited 8/5 with expectations for more changes coming.) I often tell founders to "test by doing," so in this post I'll be practicing what I preach. After nearly 20 years of publishing Kellblog for free, I'm introducing subscriptions. I'll start by
AI
In an era where it seems that every conversation is being recorded, there should be a sign outside every board meeting that reads: “Your notetaker is not welcome here.” By “your notetaker,” I mean any AI notetaker. A personal one that follows you from meeting to meeting – whether a meeting
Metrics
Investors have lots of good habits when it comes to metrics. Operators can copy many of them. One habit they shouldn't copy, however, is smoothing. Smoothing has a legitimate purpose. Investors are trying to understand businesses. They're looking for long-term trends and patterns, so they
Today I'm pleased to introduce the Kellblog Companion, a new way to explore Kellblog created by Saurav Chowdhury. It reorganizes decades of posts into a structured knowledge base that's easier to browse by topic, easier to search, and easier to use when you're trying
Marketing
Founders, chief product officers (CPOs), and chief marketing officers (CMOs) spend a lot of time talking with and listening to customers. As they should. And, by and large, they do it well. But there's one common mistake that many smart, strong-willed, and vision-driven leaders make. Surprisingly,
AI
We're in the middle of an AI boom. Capital is abundant, expectations are high, and nearly every company is trying to position itself as a winner in the coming transformation. Amid all the excitement, a basic challenge remains: separating what exists today from what might exist tomorrow. Customers,
Attribution
I spend a lot of time thinking about go-to-market efficiency — how companies decide where to invest their marketing dollars, how they measure what's working, and how they improve over time. For years, much of marketing measurement has revolved around attribution — trying to determine which programs, campaigns,
Podcasts
We’ve decided, after 122 episodes, to put The Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus. Let me explain how I think about that decision. On October 20, 1974, the Grateful Dead played what was then billed as their final show before an indefinite hiatus. The band was burned out. The touring
Startups
The first time I read Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, I breathed a sigh of relief. Someone had finally written the positioning book that desperately needed to exist — and one that I had long suspected I might someday need to write myself. My reaction came not from the material — which