Entrepreneurship
I remember one day, years ago, when I was a VP at $10M startup and Larry, the head of sales, came in one day handing out t-shirts that said: "Code, sell, or get out of the way." Neither I, nor the rest of marketing team, took this particularly
CAC
Financial analysts speak a lot about “billings” in a public SaaS companies, but in private VC-backed SaaS companies, you rarely hear discussion of this metric. In this post, we’ll use a model of a private SaaS company (where we know all the internal metrics), to show how financial analysts
CAC
My ears always perk up when I hear someone say "net new ARR" -- because I'm trying to figure out which, of typically two, ways they are using the term: * To mean ARR from net new customers, in which case, I don't know why
BI
Last week I sat down with interviewers Doug Henschen, Vala Afshar, and a bit of Ray Wang (live from a 777 taxiing en route to Tokyo) to participate in Episode 100 of DisrupTV along with fellow guests DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth and big data / science recruiter Virginia Backaitis. We covered
Boards
Dave Kellogg's presentation at SaaStr 2018 on the ten non-obvious things about scaling a SaaS startup.
Leadership
In an effort to promote my upcoming presentation at SaaStr 2018, which is currently on the agenda for Wednesday, February 7th at 9:00 AM in Studio C, I thought I'd do a quick post sharing what I'll be covering in the presentation, officially titled, "
Marketing
Hey, what's your win rate? It's another seemingly simple question. But, like most SaaS metrics, when you dig deeper you find it's not. In this post we'll take a look at how to calculate win rates and use win rates to introduce
Management
Just a quick post to highlight the fact that last week I was the featured guest on Episode 142 of the Official SaaStr podcast produced by the SaaStr organization run by Jason Lemkin and interviewed by a delightful young Englishman named Harry Stebbings (who also runs his own podcast entitled
Management
Quick: what's the biggest deal in this quarter's sales pipeline? Was that the biggest deal in last quarter's pipeline? How about the quarter before? Do you have deals in your pipeline older than your children? If you're answering yes to these questions,
Entrepreneurship
Every now and then I take a dive into an S-1 to see what clears the current, ever-changing bar for going public. After a somewhat rocky IPO process, Tintri went public June 30 after cutting the IPO offering price and has traded flat thus far since then. Let's
HR
I love to create reductionist mission statements for various departments in a company. These are designed to be ultra-compact and potentially provocative. My two favorite examples thus far: * Marketing exists to make sales easier. * HR exists to help managers manage. I like to make them based on real-life situations, e.
IPO
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was