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 […]
Do these five things to get badass BD SaaS partnerships done
Last year, Jeff Clavier asked me to present at Uncork Capital’s (formerly SoftTech VC) CEO summit on how to do BD deals with large software companies. I was then CEO of an Uncork portfolio company, but the content here draws on my prior experience as GM at largeco (in this case, SuccessFactors/SAP) when I was […]
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 […]
Big Idea: Extreme Capitalism And The Dawn Of Digital Duopolies
Organizations Move Beyond The Post-Digital Era I am consciously scaring you into existence. The disruption ahead is not a fantasy. When I founded Constellation Research and then wrote the best-selling book, Disrupting Digital Business, we stood at the dawn of a major shift in business models and disruptive technologies that powered what we coined digital […]
RPA is dead. Long live Integrated Automation Platforms
The biggest problem with enterprise operations today is the simple fact that most firms still run most of their processes exactly the same way as they did 20/30/40 years ago, with the only “innovation” being models like offshore outsourcing and shared service centers, cloud and digital technologies enabling those same processes to be conducted steadily […]
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 […]
These 4 terms will kill your SaaS business
A giant caveat: this post is focused on high growth SaaS. Not on mature businesses where you are trying to coordinate the build, sale and adoption of a large portfolio of products. In the world of high growth SaaS, all too often we tend to believe that it is our functional or technical inferiority that will […]
A wartime Customer Success SaaS Leader has these five attributes
Dave Kellogg wrote a solid post about the three types of Customer Success Managers. Contrasting them as product-oriented, process-oriented or sales-oriented, it’s a much-needed primer at a time where the vocation of Customer Success is still nascent. Dave’s post got me thinking that there is also a need to contrast happy time vs war time CS leaders. During […]
Event Report: Apple Formally Launches Services Strategy #AppleEvent
Services Revenue Mix Could Reach 20% By 2020 Photo: @rwang0 On March 25, 2019, Apple held its special event on services at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, CA to launch and/or revamp 4 key services including: Apple News+. New service adds 300 magazines, the Wall Street Journal and more publications to 875 million iPhone […]
Combining functions in a SaaS business is a terrible idea
Ok, here is the punch line: No two SaaS functions should be coupled together. Any combination forces conflicts of interest and while you and the board are busy charting out your world domination strategy, this dysfunctional org design will eat the company from the inside out. The long form: Combining Product and Engineering Why it’s a […]
