AI
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the board of Techwolf, a Belgian HR tech company backed by a slew of top venture capital investors including Harry Stebbings' 20VC, Future of Work boutique Acadian Ventures, vertically-focused SemperVirens, and European-focused Felix Capital, Notion, and Stride.vc.
Finance
If you're VC-backed, you might well have taken some venture debt to top up your last financing round. If you're PE-backed, it's probable that your PE sponsor took a material amount of debt -- e.g., 1-2x ARR -- to help finance the
Entrepreneurship
Back in October, I did a live workshop with my second cohort in the Balderton Launched program in London. I sat down intending to use the slides from my first session, but -- always one to go with the flow -- ended up improvising most of the session in response to the
I've often quipped that board observers should be like Victorian children: seen and not heard. While that might sound obnoxious, it's not if you understand how hard board seats are to come by and the process through which you get one. There are three ways to
Communications
While I don't do politics on Kellblog, I do analyze messaging, including political messaging. My point is not to change your mind on a given issue, but to study what works in the major leagues [1]. Towards that end, I wrote a post back in January entitled Analyzing
Communications
Sometimes. But make sure it's not out of laziness or ignorance. Increasingly, you’ll hear the term “business outcomes” popping up in software marketing. While I initially loathed the phrase for its vagueness, over time I’ve come to believe that, much like the frequently-abused word “solutions,
AI
Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of sitting down for a 50-minute chat with SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin as part of their Workshop Wednesdays program. Our ostensible topic was What Really Matters in SaaS in 2025, but we ended up having a wide ranging and fast-paced conversation about
CEO
The cleverest answer I've heard to the question "When would you sell your startup?" is, "When somebody offers me more than I think it's worth." It's clever alright, but it's not that helpful. It's a meta-
Grateful Dead
While I'd been using the Internet since the early 1980s in my student job at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, the first time I remember using the worldwide web was in the mid 1990s. Well, August 9th, 1995, to be more specific. I'd recently moved to Paris and
AI
Just a quick post to highlight that the good people of Benchmarkit, host of SaaS Metrics Palooza 24, have posted the video of my presentation, The Impact of AI on SaaS metrics. The slides are here. https://vimeo.com/1020584064
Entrepreneurship
Organization design seems a popular topic these days. Maybe it's the downturn. Maybe it's just planning season. But either way, many people are asking me questions about how to design their organizations for 2025 and beyond. Questions like: * Should marketing report into sales? * Should engineering and
AI
Just a quick post to share my slides from today's presentation at SaaS Metrics Palooza 2024, entitled The Impact of AI on SaaS Metrics. The short summary is: * The concept of ARR is already challenged by monthly-varying pricing, e.g., usage-based pricing. * AI will exacerbate that