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.
The Two Dimensions of Startup Performance
When it comes to evaluating a startup’s performance, I think there are two key, orthogonal questions that need to be examined: Is the company delivering growth? Is management in control of your business? Growth is the primary driver of value creation in a software startup. I’m not going to quantify what is good vs. bad […]
Is Another SaaSacre In The Offing?
I’m not a financial analyst and I don’t make stock recommendations [1], but as a participant and observer in the software investing ecosystem, I do keep an eye on macro market parameters and I read a fair bit of financial analyst research. Once in an while, I comment on what I’m seeing. In February 2016, […]
The Three Marketing Books All Founder/CEOs Should Read
Few founder/CEOs come from a marketing background; most come from product, many from engineering, and some from sales, service, or consulting. But few — ironically even in martech companies — grew up in the marketing department and consider marketing home. When you combine this lack of experience with the the tendency that some marketing leaders […]
What It Takes to Make a Great SaaS Company
I’ve been making a few presentations of late, so I thought I’d share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week to the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series. This one’s kind of a romp — it starts with some background on Kellblog […]
Are You Counting Payments as Renewals?
Enterprise SaaS has drifted to a model where many, if not most, companies do multi-year contracts on annual payment terms. How did we get here? Most enterprise SaaS products are high-consideration purchases. Buyers typically perform a thorough evaluation process before purchasing and are quite sure that the software will meet their needs when they deploy. […]
Let’s Take the Cult out of Silicon Valley Culture
I am big believer in strong corporate cultures. Culture can be used to set powerful norms. Culture can bind people in an organization to a common set of values bigger than their quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs). Culture helps attracts the right people to your organization – and can drive out the wrong ones […]
Price Qualification: The Tiffany Way
Most salespeople are familiar with so-called BANT qualification: does the prospect have Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe in order to make a purchase? While Solution Selling purists dislike BANT (arguing that it’s great way to find existing deals that have been already rigged for the competition), most sales organizations today use BANT, or some form of […]
Slides from My SaaStr Annual 2019 Presentation (5 Questions CEOs Struggle With)
Thanks to everyone who attended my session yesterday at the amazing — and huge — SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose. In this post, I’ll share the slides from my presentation, Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (and some thoughts on how to answer them). The folks at SaaStr recorded the session, so at […]
Rule of 40 Glideslope Planning
Enterprise SaaS companies need a lot of money to grow. The median company spends $1.32 to acquire $1.00 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) [1]. They need to make that investment for 14 years before getting to an IPO. It all adds up to a median of $300M in capital raised prior to an IPO. With such vast amounts […]
SaaStr 2019 Presentation Preview: Five Questions SaaS CEO Wrestle With
I’m super excited for the upcoming SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose from February 5th through the 7th at the San Jose Convention Center. I hope to see you there — particularly for my session from 10:00 to 10:30 on Tuesday, February 5th. Last year they ended up repeating my session but that won’t be […]
