Career
[Edited 4/16, see notes at bottom] I've worked with scores of founders and companies over the years and I've come to make bright-line distinction between founders and managers. Let me demonstrate it with a story. One day long ago I was in a board meeting.
Marketing
I'm working with a lot of different companies these days and one of the perennial topics is pipeline. * Do we have enough? * Is it spread across reps in a healthy way? * Should I build pipeline then hire reps or hire reps to build pipeline? * From where should pipeline
Grateful Dead
The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has been popularized in the past decade thanks to the success of the wonderful book, The Lean Startup. It's thrown around so casually, and you hear it so often, that sometimes you wonder how -- or even if -- people define
Cloud
It feels like the just the other day when I met a passionate French entrepreneur in the bar on the 15th floor of the Hilton Times Square to discuss Nuxeo. I remember being interested in the space, which I then viewed as next-generation content management (which, by the way, seemed
IPO
Download Dave-Kellogg-SaaS-Metrics.mp3 The SaaShimi podcast just dropped the first two episodes of its second season and I'm back speaking with PNC Technology Finance banker Aznaur Midov, this time discussing some of the key difference between private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) when it comes to philosophy,
Culture
Quick: * How big is the Acme deal? $250K. * What's Joe's forecast for the quarter? $500K * What's the number this year? Duh. $7,500K. Awesome. By the way: $250K what? $500K what? $7,500K what? ARR, ACV, bookings, TCV, new ARR, net new ARR, committed
Branding
I first read The One to One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in 1997, four years after it was published. As a marketer, the book made a big impression on me. It was revolutionary stuff: we should make the paradigm shift from mass marketing to individualized marketing. When
GTM
There's some great content out there on the subject of hiring your first VP of sales at a startup, so in this post I'm going to do some quick thoughts on the subject in an effort to complement the existing corpus. In other words, this is
Demandgen
Download USS_Nimitz_%28CVN-68%29_general_quarters_drill%2C_ca._2013.oga It’s that time of year, I suppose. You’ve hopefully approved your 2021 operating plan by now -- even if you’re on an increasingly popular 1/31 fiscal year end. You’ve signed up for some
Finance
This post was prompted by feedback to the last prediction in my 2021 annual predictions post, The Rebirth of Planning and Enterprise Performance Management. Excerpt: EPM 1.0 was Hyperion, Arbor, and TM1. EPM 2.0 was Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, and Planful (nee Host Analytics). EPM 3.0 is being
BI
I admit that I’ve been more than a little slow to put out this post, but at least I’ve missed the late December (and early January) predictions rush. 2020 was the kind of year that would make anyone in the predictions business more than a little gun shy.
Enterprise
About twenty years ago, before I ran two startups as CEO and served as product-line general manager, I went through an intrapreneurship phase, where I was convinced that big companies should try to act like startups. It was a fairly popular concept at the time. * I got all excited by