Boards
Have you ever been to a board meeting where 60 minutes were allocated on the agenda for discussion of a strategic topic? What happened in that session? * You probably started late because board meetings are hard to keep on time. * Some exec, maybe the CEO, probably presented a "few
CEO
"Data, data everywhere. Nor any drop to drink." -- adapted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge [2] In a world where many executives are overwhelmed with sales and marketing metrics -- from MQL generation to pipeline analysis to close-rates and everything in between -- I am writing this post in
CEO
About two weeks ago I spoke at SaaStr Annual 2021, giving a presentation entitled A CEO's Guide to Marketing, which discusses why marketing is sometimes seen as a dark art and then discusses 5 things that every CEO (and startup exec) should know about marketing in order to
CEO
SaaStr is my favorite conference and I'll be speaking there again this year on Monday, Sept 27th at 1:00 PM Pacific with a session titled A CEO's Guide to Marketing. I will be doing the speech live, I'm not sure if they'
Career
[Edited 4/16, see notes at bottom] I've worked with scores of founders and companies over the years and I've come to make bright-line distinction between founders and managers. Let me demonstrate it with a story. One day long ago I was in a board meeting.
Boards
I'm a SaaS metrics nut and I go to a lot of SaaS board meetings, so I'm constantly thinking about (among other things) how to produce a minimal set of metrics that holistically describe a SaaS company. In a prior post, I made a nice one-slide
Boards
I was talking to a founder friend of mine the other day, and she made a comment about her startup's search for its first non-founder (aka, "professional") CEO. She said the following about the nearly one-year recruiting process: "Because every person in the search process
Boards
Over the years I've noticed how different CEOs take different degrees of ownership and accountability when it comes to the board of directors. For example, once, after a long debate where the board unanimously approved a budget contingent on reducing proposed R&D spending from $12M to
Boards
I am surprised by how many startup CEOs leave the board hanging at the end of the quarter. As a CEO my rule of thumb was that if a board member ever asked me about the quarter then I'd failed in being sufficiently proactive in communications. In tight
CEO
Few founder/CEOs come from a marketing background; most come from product, many from engineering, and some from sales, service, or consulting. But few -- ironically even in martech companies -- grew up in the marketing department and consider marketing home. When you combine this lack of experience with the
CEO
A few days ago, Jason Lemkin from SaaStr sent me a link to the video of my SaaStr Annual 2019 conference presentation, The Five Questions Startup CEOs Worry About. Those questions, by the way, are: 1. When do I next raise money? 2. Do I have the right team? 3.
CEO
Thanks to everyone who attended my session today at the amazing -- and huge -- SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose. In this post, I'll share the slides from my presentation, Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (and some thoughts on how to answer them). The folks