Bubbles
The following tweet is the umpteenth time I've seen the media size a company by valuation, not revenue, in the past few years: Call me old school, but I was taught to size companies by revenue, not market capitalization (aka, valuation). Calling Palantir a $20B company suggests they
CEO
In the past year or so, two of our competitors have abruptly transitioned their CEOs and both have perpetuated a lot of mythology about what happens and/or will happen in such transitions. As someone who's run two startups as CEO for more than a combined ten years,
Management
I remember years and years ago attending a training class for job candidates on how to improve their interviewing skills. The crux of the course was this: * Most people are bad interviewers. * Since they don't know what to ask, you need to tell them what they need to
Management
It was HP co-founder, David Packard, of all people, who came up with one of my favorite quotes on marketing, specifically that "marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department." This quote is often mentioned in the same breath as these famous Peter Drucker
BI
I said in yesterday's post, entitled Too Much Money Makes You Stupid, that while I don't have much of a beef with Domo, that I did want to observe in today's fund-to-excess environment that any idea -- including making a series of Alec
BI
There are two sayings I like when it comes to the unicorn bubble: * "Too much money makes you stupid" * "Any idea's a good one when you've got $100M burning a hole in your pocket." Startups are supposed to be focused. Startups are
Enterprise
The single most misunderstood software-as-a-service (SaaS) metric I’ve encountered is the CAC Payback Period (CPP), a compound metric that is generally defined as the months of contribution margin to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer. Bessemer defines the CPP as: I quibble with some
IPO
From everything I've heard for a long time, Jeff Weiner is a wonderful guy and great CEO. In addition, LinkedIn is certainly a great company, so please don't view this post as dissing either Jeff or the company. I will say, however, that I found media
Management
This post reviews Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s new book, From Impossible to Inevitable, which is being launched at the SaaStr Conference this week. The book is a sequel of sorts to Ross’s first book, Predictable Revenue, published in 2011, and which was loaded with great ideas about
SaaS
In response to my post, SaaS Stocks: How Much Punishment is in Store, a few of my banker friends have sent me over some charts and data which shine more light on the points I was trying to make about SaaS forward twelve month (FTM) enterprise value (EV) revenue multiples,
SaaS
The stock market feels like Nordstrom Rack these days: * Salesforce at $56/share * Tableau at $38/share * ServiceNow at $47/share * Zendesk at $15/share * Workday at $49/share * NetSuite at $54/share Redpoint's Tomasz Tunguz points out that SaaS forward revenue multiples have been more than cut
Since we're wrapping up what has been a simply amazing Host Analytics 2016 sales kickoff, I thought I'd share some of the rules I've developed, learned, appropriated, discovered, et cetera during my career. Rule 1: for salespeople, your signed compensation plan is your admission