Marketing
Theodore Levitt At some point in every marketer's career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean machine learning. When
SaaS
While I did my own post on the Box S-1, I also noticed that fellow CEO blogger, Tien Tzuo of Zuora, had done a post of his own with the catchy title These Numbers Show That Box CEO Aaron Levie is a Genius. I saw the post, clipped it to
Marketing
[Major revision 5/11/14 5:10 PM] * "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Benjamin Disraeli. * "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." -- Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of communications theory and coiner of the phrase "the medium
IPO
I thought I'd take a quick read of the Zendesk S-1 today, so here are my real-time notes on so doing. Before diving in, let me provide a quick pointer to David Cummings' summary of the same. My notes: * 40,000 customers in 140 countries * 2012 revenues
Leadership
In business we have a sad tendency to copy success blindly. I remember the first time I read about this I didn't even understand what I was reading: "Nothing in business is so remarkable as the conflicting variety of success formulas offered by its numerous practitioners and
Grateful Dead
As a long-time Grateful Dead fan, I have to say that I was advantaged in understanding how the Blown to Bits problem would affect digital media businesses. You see, for years, the Dead had changed the business model of the music industry, choosing to use albums as a loss leader
Cloud
I'm pretty busy this week so I was hoping not to dive into the Box S-1, but David Cummings' excellent summary served only to whet, as opposed to satiate, my appetite. Perhaps it was the $168M FY14 operating loss. Maybe it was the $380M in financing raised
Boards
I once asked one of my board members which CEO ran the best board meetings across his portfolio companies. His answer was, let's call him, Jack. Here's what he said about him: * Jack got the board deck out 3-4 days in advance of the board meeting
There's a rule out there, circulated widely as conventional wisdom, that you should never bring up a problem in the workplace unless you have a proposed solution. For example, consider the following excerpt from this Inc. Magazine article, Eight Things Great Bosses Demand from Employees: Rule 6: Provide
Strategy
Like many others, I have often used Salesforce / Siebel as a classic example of Innovator's Dilemma style disruption. Several months ago, in response to this article about Host Analytics, I received a friendly note from former Siebel exec and now venture capitalist Bruce Cleveland saying roughly: “nice PR
Business travelers spent $260B in 2012 with food services being the #1 source of expense. Salespeople love dinners with customers and prospects. Marketers love networking dinners. We have customer advisory board dinners, pre-board dinners, awards dinners, relationship-building dinners, team dinners, customer appreciation dinners, partner summit dinners, project completion dinners, analyst
Management
Congratulations! If your company is like most, you've recently finished a (hopefully) solid 2013 and, from an EPM perspective, completed your 2014 annual planning process. Before we get too excited, however, let’s ask one quick question: did you just make a plan or a budget? In business,
