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 Rule of 40 — Down, But Not Out!
Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett of Battery Ventures recently published the 2019 version of its outstanding annual software round-up report. I highly recommend this report — it’s 78-pages chock full of great data about topics like: Why Battery is long software overall The four eras of software evolution The five forces driving software’s accelerating growth […]
Highlights from the 1Q19 Fenwick & West Venture Capital Survey
Every so often I post highlights from the quarterly Fenwick & West Venture Capital Survey, as much to share knowledge about the existence of the survey [1] as to share its current-quarter data. This survey is important for two reasons. First, it shows trends in price changes over time across various VC rounds. This is […]
My Final Verdict on Multi-Year, Prepaid Deals
After years of experience with and thinking about multi-year, prepaid SaaS deals, my mental jury is back in the box and the verdict is in: don’t do them. Why? Multi-year, prepaid deals: Are not the norm, so they raise eyebrows among investors and can backfire with customers [1]. Complexify SaaS metrics. SaaS businesses are hard […]
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 […]
