Career
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping
Management
I get a fair number of emails and calls from former colleagues and friends asking for career advice. I'm always happy to provide it and the process of doing so is both thought-provoking and fun. I have a learned a lot from having these conversations and have
Databases
It took me a week or so to get to it, but in this post I’ll take a dive into the Hortonworks S-1 filing in support of a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of their stock. While Hadoop and big data are unarguably huge trends driving the industry
Management
I have to admit I’m not a fan of succession planning in general, at startups in particular, and especially when the successee is involved in the process. Why? Because the process quickly ends up presumptuous and political. In my experience, the successee is more concerned with being a “good
Grateful Dead
As a long-time Grateful Dead fan, I have to say that I was advantaged in understanding how the Blown to Bits problem would affect digital media businesses. You see, for years, the Dead had changed the business model of the music industry, choosing to use albums as a loss
Cloud
I'm pretty busy this week so I was hoping not to dive into the Box S-1, but David Cummings' excellent summary served only to whet, as opposed to satiate, my appetite. Perhaps it was the $168M FY14 operating loss. Maybe it was the $380M in financing
Boards
I once asked one of my board members which CEO ran the best board meetings across his portfolio companies. His answer was, let's call him, Jack. Here's what he said about him: * Jack got the board deck out 3-4 days in advance of the board
Enterprise
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) space is full of seemingly simple metrics that can quickly slip through your fingers when you try to grasp them. For example, see Measuring SaaS Renewals Rates: Way More Than Meets the Eye for a two-thousand-word post examining the many possible answers
Management
Dear Dave: I think the art of negotiation is dead. Over the past two years we have won over prospects on our product capabilities, but then lost out on price to inferior products. In all recent cases the prospect never once negotiated with us for a lower cost but clearly
SaaS
If you've ever wondered what drives the valuation of a SaaS vendor, then take a look at this chart that a banker showed me the other day. The answer, pretty clearly, is revenue growth. The correlation is stunning. Taking some points off the line: * 10% growth gets you
Boards
Last week a scathing post by Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos, entitled Dear Dumb VC, generated some stiff controversy in the blog- and Twitter-spheres. Serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Mark Suster, author of the superb Both Sides of the Table blog, weighed in with a long, fact-filled
Management
Since I've had the good fortune to work at small, large, and small-that-became-large software companies, people sometimes ask me about the pro's and con's of working at companies of different sizes. Let's start with the basics. At a small
