Management
Startup CEOs can learn an important lesson from pilots. Specifically, to always fly the aircraft first. Sounds obvious, like maybe you shouldn't need to remind pilots to do this, but here’s what they teach them and why: From the earliest days of flight training, pilots are taught
Marketing
This is a post to highlight a recent podcast appearance I made on The Growth Hub podcast with Seija Lappalainen and Reeta Westman, who are both based out of Finland, and with whom I had a lot of fun talking. So much fun, in fact, that we ran long and
SaaS
This is a quick post to share the slides today's SaaStr workshop where we discussed the seven things founders should know about sales. This material comes from the Balderton Founder's Guide to B2B Sales that I wrote and we published last fall. I've embedded
Marketing
Since there is much talk of AI replacing workers, including writers, I thought I'd give ChatGPT a crack at writing a Kellblog post. Here's what it came up with (and I'll post some thoughts on its work down below): Sure, here's a
Demandgen
Let’s say you’re a CEO. You don’t come from a marketing background. At every quarterly business review (QBR) and board meeting, your marketing head presents a chart like this: What happens next? More than likely, after 10 or 15 minutes of effectively random probes into this minefield
SaaS
Just a quick post to let you know that I'll be presenting at SaaStr's Workshop Wednesdays this week, on 5/3/23 at 10am Pacific. Our topic will be The Seven Things Founders Need to Know About Sales, which non-coincidentally happens to be the first
SaaS
I'm writing to propose that we limit discussion of my top, pet-peeve SaaS metric: ending ARR. Wait, but aren't you the guy who said that if you only knew two things about a SaaS company and needed to value it, one would be ending ARR
Management
(Republishing this 5/7/18 post that got deleted in a recent clean-up, and it's easier to repost than restore) As CEO of a company, I can’t tell you the number of times, I get emails like this: Dave, I know our policy is that we
Metrics
Just a quick post to share the slides from the presentation I gave today at the KiwiSaaS conference to discuss the SaaS metrics that matter in 2023 and 2024. The presentation has three sections: First, an introduction which quickly reviews the ways the startup world has changed in the past
Management
(Revised 8:56 am 3/19) Looks like I picked the wrong week to be off-grid in Argentina. When I came back on-grid last night, I quickly discovered that the world, or more precisely, my Silicon Valley business world, had basically exploded while I was flyfishing in Patagonia.
Leadership
"Is a dream a lie if don't come true?" -- Bruce Springsteen The River was one of my favorite songs in college and whenever I listen to the above line near the end, I start thinking about Silicon Valley. Consider three entrepreneurs. Founder 1: Elizabeth Holmes. Was
Marketing
In the first part of this two-part series we discussed the importance of timing in ensuring that market research is actionable. The moral was to time the arrival of research (e.g., win/loss reporting, NPS surveys, awareness and marketing funnel studies) with the cadence of your company'