IPO
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was
Management
I'm not going to talk about columnar databases, compression, horizontal partitioning, SAP Hana, or real-time vs. pre-aggregated summarization in this post on in-memory analytics. I'm going to talk about the other kind of in-memory analytics. The kind that can make or break your career. What do
BI
New Year’s means three things in my world: (1) time to thank our customers and team at Host Analytics for another great year, (2) time to finish up all the 2017 planning items and approvals that we need to get done before the sales kickoff (including the one most
Management
[Editor's note: revised 3/27/17 with changes to some definitions.] It’s been nearly three years since my original post on calculating SaaS renewal rates and I’ve learned a lot and seen a lot of new situations since then. In this post, I’ll provide a
Boards
[Updated 5/1/18 to add net new ARR, LTV/CAC, and both customer and employee NPS.] In the course of my board and advisory work, I get to look at a lot of software as a service (SaaS) startups financials and I'm often surprised how people choose
Startups
One of the hardest hires -- and one of the hardest jobs -- is to be the first VP of sales at a startup. Why? * There is no history / experience * Nobody knows what works and what doesn't work * The company may not have a well defined strategy so
Metrics
There are a lot of SaaS posts out there with some pretty fancy math in them. I'm a math guy, so I like to geek on SaaS metrics myself. But, in the heat of battle running a SaaS company, sometimes you just need to keep it simple. Here&
Bubbles
The following tweet is the umpteenth time I've seen the media size a company by valuation, not revenue, in the past few years: Call me old school, but I was taught to size companies by revenue, not market capitalization (aka, valuation). Calling Palantir a $20B company suggests they
CEO
In the past year or so, two of our competitors have abruptly transitioned their CEOs and both have perpetuated a lot of mythology about what happens and/or will happen in such transitions. As someone who's run two startups as CEO for more than a combined ten years,
BI
I said in yesterday's post, entitled Too Much Money Makes You Stupid, that while I don't have much of a beef with Domo, that I did want to observe in today's fund-to-excess environment that any idea -- including making a series of Alec Baldwin
Enterprise
The single most misunderstood software-as-a-service (SaaS) metric I’ve encountered is the CAC Payback Period (CPP), a compound metric that is generally defined as the months of contribution margin to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer. Bessemer defines the CPP as: I quibble with some of the Bessemerisms
IPO
From everything I've heard for a long time, Jeff Weiner is a wonderful guy and great CEO. In addition, LinkedIn is certainly a great company, so please don't view this post as dissing either Jeff or the company. I will say, however, that I found media