Enterprise
Something fun happened today. A reader reached out who had been digging through my early-2000s and 2010s posts trying to understand the history of the software industry. That immediately got my attention because I love people who study history. It’s the best way to understand the present. And a
Marketing
How could I not love a marketing book that says -- on page one -- that "great marketing makes sales easier”? That's long been a mantra of mine, the North Star that drove my marketing career, and it served me well for many decades. Today, I'
GTM
Today Dan Teodosiu, Thor Mitchell, and I hosted a Balderton webinar entitled Aligning Product and Go-To-Market (GTM) Using Customer Value Metrics. We are all executives in residence (EIRs) at Balderton -- Dan covers technology, Thor covers product, and I cover go-to-market -- and, in a display of cross-functional walking-the-talk, we
GTM
My fellow Balderton Capital EIR Dan Teodosiu and I recently published an article on aligning product and go-to-market teams using metrics, specifically customer-value metrics. In this post, I'll talk a bit about the article and how we came to write it, with the hope that I'll
Boards
Let's say you're a CEO leading your startup's migration from mid-market to enterprise. To do that, you've hopefully already done the following: * Analyzed existing success in enterprise accounts. (Most people don't start purely from scratch, but instead have picked up
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 produces
Career
It's always fun to go back and look at my stats, and my best-of page (which amazingly came in at #11) is getting sufficiently long that I need to find additional summarization mechanisms. So this year, I thought I'd share the top-ten Kellblog posts of 2024
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."
Grateful Dead
Since It Costs A Lot to Win, and Even More to Lose [1] It's hard for a DNA-level marketer and inveterate deadhead [2] to review a book that fuses both. While I first read Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead not long after its publication in 2010, I&
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,
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’
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 the