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, and discussed
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, but instead
Marketing
In my capacity as an EIR at London-based Balderton Capital, I spoke earlier today at SaaStock in Dublin on What Founders Need To Know About Product Marketing. In the session, we discussed four key questions: * What is product marketing? (Surprisingly vague and varied.) * How do you know if someone’s
SaaS
When a company is transitioning from founder-led sales (FLS) to sales-led sales (SLS), you hear the word "playbook" a lot. For early-stage companies, this rubs me the wrong way because when I hear playbook, it conjures up an image of: * A large sales enablement team * A hefty three-ring
Marketing
I decided to take a quick break from SaaS metrics after doing a matched set of conference presentations in the past two months (strategic at SaaStr Annual and tactical at SaaS Metrics Palooza) -- and that's not to mention starting the SaaS Talk podcast with my "metrics
Metrics
Last month I spoke at SaaStr Annual 2023 on The Strategic Use and Abuse of SaaS Metrics (video here). When I wrote that presentation I found myself with something of a content blivit on my hands. I had a bunch of strategic things I wanted to say, but darn it,
Metrics
At some point the folks at SaaStr will release the official video of my SaaStr Annual 2023 presentation, but for now they have posted the livestream from the room, done with some nice edits that cut back and forth between the stage and the slides. It even includes the Q&
CEO
It's fun when the person who ran marketing at one of your rivals asks you some 20 years later to speak at their annual conference. It's even more fun when it's a fellow CMO-turned-CEO and he's assembled quite an amazing group of
Metrics
This is a quick post to share the slides from my SaaStr Annual 2023 presentation entitled The Strategic Use and Abuse of SaaS metrics. Thanks to everyone who attended the session, laughed at my jokes (yes, there were jokes in a SaaS metrics presentation), asked questions in the session, and