Finance
If you're VC-backed, you might well have taken some venture debt to top up your last financing round. If you're PE-backed, it's probable that your PE sponsor took a material amount of debt -- e.g., 1-2x ARR -- to help finance the acquisition.
Entrepreneurship
Back in October, I did a live workshop with my second cohort in the Balderton Launched program in London. I sat down intending to use the slides from my first session, but -- always one to go with the flow -- ended up improvising most of the session in response
CEO
The cleverest answer I've heard to the question "When would you sell your startup?" is, "When somebody offers me more than I think it's worth." It's clever alright, but it's not that helpful. It's a meta-answer
AI
Just a quick post to highlight that the good people of Benchmarkit, host of SaaS Metrics Palooza 24, have posted the video of my presentation, The Impact of AI on SaaS metrics. The slides are here. https://vimeo.com/1020584064
Entrepreneurship
Organization design seems a popular topic these days. Maybe it's the downturn. Maybe it's just planning season. But either way, many people are asking me questions about how to design their organizations for 2025 and beyond. Questions like: * Should marketing report into sales? * Should engineering and
Culture
This is a huge distinction and sadly I think many people miss it. You go a mid-quarter ops meeting. The CMO shows quarter-to-date MQLs. Someone asks how we define MQL. A 15-minute conversation ensues. The SVP of Alliances talks about influenced ARR. Someone asks how that's defined, but
Leadership
"Phew, we sure have a lot of challenges right now," the frustrated CEO mused after completing a day at the annual planning offsite. "While my executive team is pretty solid day to day, they're too in-the-box. They're not creative. They never have any
AI
You can't run a financial planning company for six years and not develop a certain affection for working with the office of the CFO. It doesn't hurt when, despite your exterior marketing shell, there's an inner finance person down there underneath. Since selling Host
Career
Lack of savoir faire, like hypertension, is a silent killer. There are few symptoms, other than the odd cringe that often goes unnoticed. But the outcomes are clear if the reasons are not: you're omitted from meetings, passed over for promotions, underperform in nine-box reviews, find advisors suddenly
Silicon Valley
“You’re fired,” said the general counsel (GC) of the public, multi-billion-dollar software company and I wasn't just happy, I was ecstatic. I’d known this company for a long time. I’d helped their VCs with diligence. I’d worked with them in the early days as
SaaS
Excluding VC funds, I've directly invested in a few dozen startups. While the jury's still out on my performance, I can share a few things that I've learned along the way: * This isn't easy. Though I'd never thought I'
GTM
Just a quick post to share the slides I used today in a nearly 90-minute discussion with founders participating in the most recent cohort of the Balderton Launched incubator program. Because this is focused on incubation-stage startups, we walked mostly about $0 to $1M (or $2M) issues, both how to