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On the podcast, we discuss: * A bit of my career history and background * How COVID-19 will change work in Silicon Valley * Innovation beyond Silicon Valley (one of my favorite topics, given my five years in Europe.) * The one most important SaaS metric. (Hint: LTV/CAC.) * The most misunderstood SaaS metric.
Boards
I'm a SaaS metrics nut and I go to a lot of SaaS board meetings, so I'm constantly thinking about (among other things) how to produce a minimal set of metrics that holistically describe a SaaS company. In a prior post, I made a nice one-slide
Boards
I was talking to a founder friend of mine the other day, and she made a comment about her startup's search for its first non-founder (aka, "professional") CEO. She said the following about the nearly one-year recruiting process: "Because every person in the search process
Leadership
One of the hardest things about running a startup is you're never sure who to listen to. Your board members own big stakes in the company, but that doesn't automatically align them with you. Your late-stage investors want low multiples on big numbers. Your early-stage investors
Management
I'm amazed by the number of times I see companies performing searches, even for key positions, without a clear idea of what they're looking for. Rephrasing Lewis Carroll, "if you don't know what you're recruiting for, any candidate looks great."
Customer Success
The CEO. Thanks for reading. # # # I was tempted to stop there because I've been writing a lot of long posts lately and because I do believe the answer is that simple. First let me explain the controversy and then I'll explain my view on it. In
SaaS
Some SaaS startups develop a form of zero-sum delusion early in their evolution, characterized by following set of beliefs. Believing that: * A customer has a fixed budget that is 100% fungible between ARR (annual revenue revenue) and services * It is in the company's best interest to turn as
Management
This post in part III in a series. Part I covers the basics of employee communications. Part II provides information on how several leading companies are handling the situation and offers specific thoughts on financial planning. This part, a set of curated links that I have found useful, was formerly
Marketing
In my last post, I made the case that the simplest, most intuitive metric for understanding whether you have too much, too little, or just the right amount of pipeline is opportunities/salesrep, calculated for both the current-quarter and the all-quarters pipeline. This post builds upon the prior one by
Marketing
Pipeline is a frequently scrutinized SaaS company metric because it's one of relatively few leading indicators in a SaaS business -- i.e., indicators that don't just tell us about the past but that help inform us about the future, providing important clues to our anticipated
Boards
Over the years I've noticed how different CEOs take different degrees of ownership and accountability when it comes to the board of directors. For example, once, after a long debate where the board unanimously approved a budget contingent on reducing proposed R&D spending from $12M to
Demandgen
I’m frankly shocked by how many startups treat pipeline as a monolith. Sample CMO: “we’re in great shape because we have a total pipeline of $32M covering a forward-four-quarter (F4Q) sales target of $10M, so 3.2x coverage. Next slide, please.” Regardless of your view on the appropriate