Career
So, you're thinking of taking a job at a startup, but are nervous about the risk, perhaps having trouble telling one from another, and unsure about knowing what's really important in startup success. In this post, I'll share what I consider to be a
Bubbles
Today famed venture capital podcaster and now venture capitalist at StrideVC, Harry Stebbings, released a new episode of the Twenty Minute VC podcast with me as his guest. (iTunes version here.) Harry's interview was broad-ranging, covering a number of topics including: * Financing lessons I've learned
Marketing
Business-to-business (B2B) high technology markets are all about the market and only less so about the technology. This is primarily driven by corporate buyer conservatism -- corporate buyers hate to make mistakes in purchasing technology and, if you're going to make one, it's far better
Metrics
Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett of Battery Ventures recently published the 2019 version of its outstanding annual software round-up report. I highly recommend this report -- it's 78-pages chock full of great data about topics like: * Why Battery is long software overall * The four eras of software
SaaS
(Revised 5/4/19, 10:41 AM.) After years of experience with and thinking about multi-year, prepaid SaaS deals, my mental jury is back in the box and the verdict is in: if you're a startup that is within my assumption set below, don't do
Communications
The other day I saw this tweet from my friend Nick Mehta, CEO of GainSight, and it got me thinking. It turns out that in addition to making fun music videos for company events, that Nick and I have another thing in common: we both wrestle with finding the right
Leadership
When it comes to evaluating a startup’s performance, I think there are two key, orthogonal questions that need to be examined: 1. Is the company delivering growth? 2. Is management in control of your business? Growth is the primary driver of value creation in a software startup. I’m
Churn
Enterprise SaaS has drifted to a model where many, if not most, companies do multi-year contracts on annual payment terms. How did we get here? * Most enterprise SaaS products are high-consideration purchases. Buyers typically perform a thorough evaluation process before purchasing and are quite sure that the software
Leadership
I've been making a few presentations lately, so I thought I'd share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week at the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series. This one's kind
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 the tendency
Recruiting
Happily, in the past several years startups are increasingly recognizing the value of strong sales enablement and sales productivity teams. So it's no surprise that I hear a lot about high-growth companies building onboarding programs to enable successfully scaling their sales organizations and sustain their growth. What&
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 at SaaStr