Management
The good people of Costanoa Ventures invited me to speak at their summit where they gather portfolio company CEOs to participate in an impressive set of sessions related to building and scaling startups. I was honored to be in the company of friends and respected colleagues like Nick Mehta and
Entrepreneurship
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by UCLA Anderson professor Richard Rumelt is by far my favorite book on strategy. In this post I'll explain why I love this book, provide an overview of Rumelt's core concepts, and offer a few thoughts on (and dare I say an
GTM
I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice, the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, "on his top ten list." Ever the blogger, I replied, "what are the other nine?" Mark's been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies
Marketing
Just a quick post to plug my appearance on a podcast hosted by PMM Hive, a product marketing community that was recently launched by my old friend and colleague Crispin Read, and that's already loaded with some superb product marketing content. Check it out. I'm excited
Marketing
(Revised 06/27/20) I was talking to an old friend the other day who's marketing chief at a successful infrastructure startup. "Congratulations," I said, "I know it was a long slog, but after about a decade of groundwork it looks like things have really
Career
Markets are complex. Customers are complex. Products are complex, sometimes very. Heck, the world is complex. What's a marketer to do? Great marketing is about making things simple. We do that by imposing simplicity on a complex world. We might be attacked for so doing -- people might
Boards
We’re announcing today that I’m joining the board of directors of Profisee, a leader in master data management (MDM). I’m doing so for several reasons, mostly reflecting my belief that successful technology companies are about three things: the people, the space, and the product. I like the
Career
So, you're thinking of taking a job at a startup, but are nervous about the risk, perhaps having trouble telling one from another, and unsure about knowing what's really important in startup success. In this post, I'll share what I consider to be a
Bubbles
Today famed venture capital podcaster and now venture capitalist at StrideVC, Harry Stebbings, released a new episode of the Twenty Minute VC podcast with me as his guest. (iTunes version here.) Harry's interview was broad-ranging, covering a number of topics including: * Financing lessons I've learned during
Marketing
Business-to-business (B2B) high technology markets are all about the market and only less so about the technology. This is primarily driven by corporate buyer conservatism -- corporate buyers hate to make mistakes in purchasing technology and, if you're going to make one, it's far better to
Leadership
When it comes to evaluating a startup’s performance, I think there are two key, orthogonal questions that need to be examined: 1. Is the company delivering growth? 2. Is management in control of your business? Growth is the primary driver of value creation in a software startup. I’m
Leadership
I've been making a few presentations lately, so I thought I'd share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week at the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series. This one's kind of