Dave Kellogg
CEO, HostAnalytics, a leader in cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM).
Previously Dave was SVP/GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce , CEO at MarkLogic and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as it grew from $30M to over $1B. See Dave's disclaimers at Kellblog.
My Appearance on DisrupTV Episode 100
Last week I sat down with interviewers Doug Henschen, Vala Afshar, and a bit of Ray Wang (live from a 777 taxiing en route to Tokyo) to participate in Episode 100 of DisrupTV along with fellow guests DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth and big data / science recruiter Virginia Backaitis. We covered a full gamut of topics, […]
The Question that CEOs Too Often Don’t Discuss with the Board
Startup boards are complex. While all board members own stock in the company their interests are not necessarily aligned. Founders may be motivated by a vision to change the world, to hit a certain net worth target, to see their name in an S-1, to make the Forbes 500, or — and I’ve seen crazier […]
EPM, Project Orion, and the Beginner’s Mind
I’ll always be thankful for my time at Salesforce both because I met so many amazing people and because I learned so much. I learned about the importance of Trust in a SaaS company (and was drilled in the mantra, “nothing is more important than the Trust of our customers.”) And I learned about shoshin, […]
The Single Biggest Myth about MBOs and OKRs
I’m a big believer in written quarterly goals. The old way to do this was to adopt “management by objective” (MBO) and to write down a set of MBOs for each quarter for each team member. Most folks would do this either in Word, or if they liked weightings and scores as part of calculating an […]
My SaaStr 2018 Presentation: Ten Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS
Below please find the slides from the presentation I gave today at SaaStr 2018, about which I wrote a teaser blog last week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. I hope to see everyone next year at SaaStr — I think it’s the preeminent software, SaaS, and startups conference. (Cross-posted […]
How to Walk From a Deal
Like it or not, once in a while it’s appropriate for a vendor to walk away from a prospective deal. Why might you want to do that? You think your product is a poor fit with the customer’s needs. You believe there is insufficient budget to achieve success on the project. You feel like the […]
My SaaStr Talk Abstract: 10 Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS
In an effort to promote my upcoming presentation at SaaStr 2018, which is currently on the agenda for Wednesday, February 7th at 9:00 AM in Studio C, I thought I’d do a quick post sharing what I’ll be covering in the presentation, officially titled, “The Best of Kellblog: 10 Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS.” Before […]
Quota Over-assignment and Culture
Here’s a great slide from the CFO Summit at Zuora’s 2017 annual flagship Subscribed event. Since they talk about this as under-assignment, since people aren’t great at flipping fractions in their head, and since I think of this more intuitively as over-assignment, I’m going to invert this and turn it into a pie chart. So, here you […]
Speaking of India: Five Lessons on India-Based Product Development
One of the interesting new challenges I faced when I joined Host Analytics about 5 years ago was working with an offshore development team in India. Host was originally co-founded in both the US and India, so literally from inception we had employees in both places. While this has proven to be a huge advantage […]
Eight Words that Can Limit Your Career: “Let Me Get Back To You On That”
As executives there are certain things we are expected to know — in our heads — about our jobs and our functions. Sometimes I call this “the 3:00 AM test” because someone should be able to wake you up at 3:00 AM in the middle of a sound sleep and you should be able to […]
