BI
I preferred Silicon Valley [1] back in the day when companies raised modest amounts of capital (e.g., $30M) prior to an IPO that took 4-6 years from inception, where burn rates of $10M/year looked high, and where $100M raise was the IPO, not one or more rounds prior
Boards
Startup boards are complex. While all board members own stock in the company their interests are not necessarily aligned. * Founders may be motivated by a vision to change the world, to hit a certain net worth target, to see their name in an S-1, to make the Forbes 500, or
BI
In continuing my tradition of offering predictions every year, let's start with a review of my hits and misses on my 2017 predictions. 1. The United States will see a level of divisiveness and social discord not seen since the 1960s. HIT. 2. Social media companies finally step
Sales
After the SaaSacre of early 2016, investors generally backed off a growth-at-all-costs mindset and started to value SaaS companies using an "appropriate" balance of growth and profitability. The question then became, what's appropriate? The answer was: the rule of 40 [1]. What's the rule
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
Few phrases bother me more than this one: “I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy. We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.” Huh. Wait minute. If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy.
AR
How would you like our company to win deals even when you tie or lose the product evaluation? Halo effects do precisely that. This post discusses what halo effects are and how to use them to your advantage.
Entrepreneurship
It was early in my career, maybe 8 years in, and I was director of product marketing at a startup. One day, my peer, the directof of marketing programs hit me with this in an ops review meeting: You want to be judged on intentions, not results. I recall being
BI
New Year’s means three things in my world: (1) time to thank our customers and team at Host Analytics for another great year, (2) time to finish up all the 2017 planning items and approvals that we need to get done before the sales kickoff (including the one most
Bubbles
The following tweet is the umpteenth time I've seen the media size a company by valuation, not revenue, in the past few years: Call me old school, but I was taught to size companies by revenue, not market capitalization (aka, valuation). Calling Palantir a $20B company suggests they
CEO
In the past year or so, two of our competitors have abruptly transitioned their CEOs and both have perpetuated a lot of mythology about what happens and/or will happen in such transitions. As someone who's run two startups as CEO for more than a combined ten years,
Enterprise
The single most misunderstood software-as-a-service (SaaS) metric I’ve encountered is the CAC Payback Period (CPP), a compound metric that is generally defined as the months of contribution margin to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer. Bessemer defines the CPP as: I quibble with some of the Bessemerisms