Strategy
Founders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and startup employees often spend a lot of time wondering, worrying, and pondering if a company is in a hot market. Will the company shoot the moon? What is the market potential? Are you in Geoffrey Moore's tornado? After 25 years or so doing
Strategy
It’s fairly common to hear the CEO of a company that makes most of its money doing thing-X announce that the future of this company is thing-Y. Why might they do this? I think it’s often just to sound visionary and bold. In rare cases it
VC
I’m often asked by entrepreneurs: when is the right time to raise money at a startup? I invariably say two things in response: * Whenever you can * Right now Whenever You CanMost startups typically go through ups and downs. Say you’ve just completed 4 consecutive quarters above plan. You
Technical founders and entrepreneurs can easily overlook the coin-operated nature of salespeople. Why? Because they aren’t salespeople, they’re product people and they’re just not wired the same way. Founders might be motivated by changing the market, popularizing a product, or just proving they are right. Salespeople,
It's that time of the year again. With many tech companies now on a 1/31 fiscal year end, that makes February kickoff month. So it's a time to say "thanks" for a great last year, but also to move quickly on to launching
Management
I can't tell you how many times over the years that I've needed to coach people to "answer the question" when dealing with senior executives. It amazes me to sit in meetings and watch people hem, haw, dodge, extemporize and do just about anything
Management
When I was new to the workforce, I was violently opposed to matrixed organizational structures. “They're bullsh*t," I thought, "people will always favor one direction over the other, making one of the two managers superfluous. And, if that's the case, then why bother
IPO
Zynga went public last Friday. The company raised $100M and was valued at around $7B off TTM revenues of about $1B (see S-1 here). This puts the Zynga's valuation in the same range as Electronic Arts, a company founded in 1982 and whose TTM revenues are 3.
VC
Let's go back to July of 2010. Imagine you're having coffee with Endeca's CEO, Steve Papa, a brilliant guy and someone for whom I have great respect. But let's say we're having a coffee with Steve in July, 2010 and
Enterprise
I finally found some time to read over the approximately 175-page registration statement (S-1) that enterprise social networking software provider Jive Software filed on August 24, 2011 in support of a upcoming initial public offering (IPO) of its stock. In this post, and subject to my usual disclaimers,
I've heard a fair bit of discussion about whether IBM or Oracle is likely to step in and start a bidding war for Autonomy which HP last week announced that it will buy for $42.21 per share, or $10.2B, as discussed last week in Kellblog when
Just a quick post to share the widely published rumors that HP is in discussions with Autonomy over an acquisition estimated to be about $10B. * TechCrunch: HP to Buy Enterprise Software Company Autonomy for $10B * Reuters: HP Nears $10B Autonomy Buy * AllThingsD: HP Reportedly Close To $10B Buyout of Autonomy
