Customer Success
Thanks to Frank Slootman, blowing up customer success (CS) teams is quite in vogue. "We don’t believe companies should have a separate customer success function. The first thing we did when Frank joined Snowflake was we blew up the customer success function. You are either going to do
AI
Well, it’s that time of year again, time for my annual predictions post, now in its tenth incarnation. As per my custom, let’s review my 2023 predictions before presenting those for 2024. Please remember that I do these for fun and fun alone. See my FAQ for my
Marketing
The other day an old friend, a highly accomplished marketing executive, asked me a simple question: if you only had five metrics to summarize marketing performance for a quarterly business review (QBR) or board meeting, what would you pick? In this post, I'll share my answer to that
Metrics
Quota attainment can get confusing quickly. It's simple concept, but: * Do you mean percent of reps at 100% of their quota or above some lower bar? Board members bark rules like, "we should shoot for 80% of our reps at 100% of quota," almost hearing the
Marketing
This post is going to get a little weird because it's going to do two things at once. * Discuss an interesting, if dated, survey [1] I found on the sometimes tense relationship between CEOs and PE operating partners (and other senior advisors like executives in residence) [2]. * Demonstrate
Marketing
Be the second kind. The other day I was meeting with an advisory client [1], talking with the CMO and a handful of go-to-market team members. We started to discuss marketing, topics like product positioning and the website. So I asked for some feedback. I displayed the company&
Management
Last week in London, fellow Balderton EIR David Vismans and I held a joint meeting to discuss the working relationship (or moreover, the lack thereof) between product and marketing organizations. David is a career product leader, who worked for over 8 years leading product at Booking.com. I am a
Leadership
I spoke a while back on go-to-market scaling at the 10X CEO Accelerate conference in Deer Valley to about eighty startup CEOs. I dropped a few references to popular business books into the material (e.g., Blue Ocean Strategy, Inside the Tornado, The Crux), as I often do,
Boards
I love writing and speaking about board meetings. Why? Because: * They're critically important. Board meetings can make or break careers. * You get little to no instruction on how to do them. Most training for CEOs and execs is of the "throw them in the deep end of
Finance
It's been a tough year. We're currently in peak planning season for 2024. With capital scarce and expensive, with companies increasingly trapped in Schrödinger's startup paradox, and with more startups than ever focused on positive cashflow and The Rule of 40, it's
Communications
After a negative customer experience on a recent fishing trip an old friend of mine said, "I judge people by the quality of their apologies." Interesting idea, I thought. This led to a discussion about the apology given to us by the proprietor of the ranch at which
Communications
Carta, an otherwise boring company solving a mundane-if-important problem, managed to get itself in the news this past week for all the wrong reasons. The fiasco was the result of CEO Henry Ward writing a post on recent negative press that was presumably intended to inoculate his audience,