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
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
Competition
Yes. And, by the way, I'm not joking with that answer. I'm not saying you need 17 patents. I'm not saying you need any patents at all -- but you probably do. I am saying that despite the frenetic life of running a startup, you
Metrics
As readers will hopefully know, I've been running a podcast with Ray Rike for about the past year called SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC. (Ray's growth and I'm CAC.) If that name rings familiar, it's because our naming
Growth
Back in 2018, Rory O'Driscoll, a VC at Scale and the inventor of the SaaS magic number, came up with another important SaaS concept: the Mendoza line for SaaS growth. Taking an idea from baseball, the Mendoza line is a measure of "offensive futility" named after
Metrics
I was reading a SaaS benchmark report the other day and encountered this line: "Win rates declining [over the two-year period] from 23% to 19% might not seem all that significant. But in terms of required pipeline, it represents a dramatic shift from 4.3x to 5.3x
Private Equity
All strategy is a function of situation. Situation varies not only as a function of the individual company and market, but also of time. Remember that classic Silicon Valley strategy books were written in a different time and thus had some implicit assumptions built into them. For example, * That you’
Management
For no apparent underlying reason, a lot of the companies I have worked at over the years have been quite successful in Japan. Thus, while I don’t write about it much, I have a fair bit of experience working with Japanese subsidiaries and/or distributors in the enterprise software
Startups
“When you read their profiles and interview them, you think one thing: these people are gods.” -- European founder on early US hiring. Despite numerous warnings, I continue to see many European founders fall into the same trap when it comes to hiring in the first years of their US expansion.
Leadership
I'm always looking for better ways to distill strategy. My favorite strategy author is Richard Rumelt, who wrote Good Strategy, Bad Strategy and the more recent but less acclaimed follow-on, The Crux. I love Rumelt's work for two reasons: * He takes a wrecking ball to
Career
Many concepts in Silicon Valley are defined from the point of view of the venture capitalist (VC), not the employee or founder. For example, the term "exit" is a misnomer when seen from the employee point of view. An IPO is usually anything but an exit for executives