Boards
A critical part of the CEO's job is realizing when it's time to sell the company. I'm not talking about the easy cases, like when you're in year five of running a PE-backed company, and the numbers suggest an exit that
Competition
Of all the dime-store clichés that pass for business strategy, the one I hate the most is, "run your own race." Why? * As a quote from the winner, it's almost always survivor bias. "How'd I win? Well, I ran my own race.
Boards
Since many of you are in the midst of presenting your annual marketing budgets to your CEO, CFO, and board, I thought I'd write a quick post to remind people what board members actually care about when it comes to the marketing budget. I understand that, in the
AI
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the board of Techwolf, a Belgian HR tech company backed by a slew of top venture capital investors including Harry Stebbings' 20VC, Future of Work boutique Acadian Ventures, vertically-focused SemperVirens, and European-focused Felix Capital, Notion, and Stride.vc.
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
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 to the
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-
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&
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
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