Silicon Valley
As you may know, I have been experimenting with Clubhouse over roughly the past six months in several capacities: as a regular user, an occasional audience participant/questioner, and as the host of a regular room I've been running with Thomas Otter, the SaaS Product Power Breakfast. I
Demandgen
The other day I read a book on account-based marketing (ABM), entitled ABM is B2B, and I must say I disliked it. Capital D disliked. My Thoughts on the Book: ABM is B2B Why? It struck me as the kind of buzzword-laden, hype-filled, superficial-case-study-driven, strawman-arguing, compound-adjective-using [1] marketing book that
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.
GTM
There's some great content out there on the subject of hiring your first VP of sales at a startup, so in this post I'm going to do some quick thoughts on the subject in an effort to complement the existing corpus. In other words, this is
BI
I admit that I’ve been more than a little slow to put out this post, but at least I’ve missed the late December (and early January) predictions rush. 2020 was the kind of year that would make anyone in the predictions business more than a little gun shy.
Enterprise
About twenty years ago, before I ran two startups as CEO and served as product-line general manager, I went through an intrapreneurship phase, where I was convinced that big companies should try to act like startups. It was a fairly popular concept at the time. * I got all excited by
Culture
Most of us are familiar with Mark Leslie’s classic Sales Learning Curve and its implications for building the early salesforce at an enterprise startup. In short, it argues that too many startups put “the pedal to the metal” on sales hiring too early – before they have enough knowledge, 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
Career
This is a sister post to my recent one, Career Decisions: What to Look For in a Software Startup. That piece is all about what to look for when considering taking a job at a software startup. This piece is kind of the opposite: what to look out for when
Communications
One day back at MarkLogic, we invited our local congresswoman, Jackie Speier, to visit our offices. Regardless of what you may think of her politics, she's an impressive person with an fascinating background including, for those with long memories, that she was the congressional aide shot five times
Entrepreneurship
In an industry obsessed with the 1 in 10,000 decacorns and the stories of high-flying startups and their larger-than-life founders, Lost and Founder takes a real look at what it's like to found, fund, work at, and build a quite successful but not media- and Sand-Hill-Road-worshiped startup.
Churn
While I've blogged about this presentation before, I only recently stumbled into this full-length video of this very popular session -- a 30-minute blaze through some subtle SaaS basics. Enjoy! I look forward to seeing everyone again at SaaStr Annual 2019.