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
HR
I've worked with several startups that fell into the following pattern: * Selling a SaaS application at a healthy price (e.g., $100K to $200K ARR) * With low, fixed-cost implementation packages (e.g., $25K) * But a product that actually takes maybe $50K to $75K to successfully deploy * Resulting in
Finance
[Updated 3/10 12:09] This is part II in this series. Part I is here and covers the basics of management education, employee communications, and simple steps to help slow virus transmission while keeping the business moving forward. In this part, we'll provide: * A short list of
Startups
I'm working with more early-stage companies these days (e.g., pre-seed, seed, seed-plus [1]) and one of the things I've noticed is that many founders cannot clearly, succinctly, and confidently answer some basic questions about their businesses. I decided to write this post to help entrepreneurs
Databases
As I’ve been doing every year since 2014, I thought I’d take some time to write some predictions for 2020, but not without first doing a review of my predictions for 2019. Lest you take any of these too seriously, I suggest you look at my batting average
Career
When I lived in France for five years I was often asked to compare it to Silicon Valley in an attempt to explain why -- in the land of Descartes, Fourier, and Laplace, in a country where the nation's top university is a military engineering school that wraps
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
Entrepreneurship
Who else but my old friend Jim Milbery, a founding partner at ParkerGale, could come up with a podcast called the Private Equity Funcast, complete with its own jingle and with a Thunderbirds-inspired opening? Jim and I worked together at Ingres back in the -- well “pre-Chernobyl” as Jim likes
Entrepreneurship
I’ve increasingly spoken to startup employees who find themselves in a difficult trap. Let’s demonstrate it via an example: Say you joined a startup in September 2009 as an early employee and immediately received a stock-option grant of 400,000 shares with a strike price of $0.10
Boards
I am surprised by how many startup CEOs leave the board hanging at the end of the quarter. As a CEO my rule of thumb was that if a board member ever asked me about the quarter then I'd failed in being sufficiently proactive in communications. In tight
Customer Success
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had
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