New Year Musings: Speedier Cloud Boats
The problem is customers paid gold prices for on-premise implementations, but against cloud benchmarks, what is stored in that Fort Knox is merely gold plated and needs to be dramatically depreciated.
How Digital Collaboration is Fragmenting, and Why It’s a Major Opportunity
A significant issue has been developing in digital collaboration for the last several years, and it’s now starting to become somewhat acute. I’m referring here to the pronounced trend towards app, environment, and channel fragmentation. Over the last few of years, I have been speaking with beleaguered IT managers who are struggling to cope with […]
Aaron Levie of Box: “If We Just Sold to Silos-in-the-Enterprise, We’d Only Be a $25,000,000 Business”
Missed the 2015 SaaStr Annual? We’ve got your back. We’ll do a series where we publish both the videos and full transcripts of all the sessions. First up is Aaron Levie of Box, where we had a wide-ranging, 45 minute deep dive on how Box scaled from $0 to $250m in ARR. As you’re reading […]
Building the Cult of You
You may have noticed LinkedIn recently made its largest acquisition so far, of Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. If you haven’t heard of Lynda.com, it’s a SaaS / subscription service for training and e-learning. One thing to note is who its co-founder is: Lynda Weinman. The Wall Street Journal called her “the mother of the Internet.” […]
At Even Just $1m ARR — You Need to Stop Doing Low ROI Things
In SaaS, I think one of the biggest traps you can get yourself into as a founder is doing Low ROI things for one minute longer than you have to. Of course, this is true in all start-ups. But quickly in SaaS it becomes worse. Why? Because they are more functional areas to handle, earlier. […]
The Box S-1, Delayed IPO, and the Genius of Tien Tzuo
While I did my own post on the Box S-1, I also noticed that fellow CEO blogger, Tien Tzuo of Zuora, had done a post of his own with the catchy title These Numbers Show That Box CEO Aaron Levie is a Genius. I saw the post, clipped it to Evernote, and I decided to read […]
Coursera, edX Offer Free Online Courses As Cloud Computing Learning Options Proliferate
Stanford Hoover Tower (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The value and variety of online cloud computing programs being offered by leading colleges and universities is proliferating. Focusing on the learning needs of IT professionals who need to apply cloud technologies to solve complex business problems, many of these programs and courses sell out before classes begin. This […]
The Best Cloud Computing Companies and CEOs to Work For in 2013
Hiring great people and creating a culture of achievement that is fun, focused and able to get challenging tasks done is not an easy task. Keeping that culture strong and focused on the customer takes a unique leader that consistently earns trust and respect. Those are the qualities I think of whenever I’m asked to […]
Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
Enterprise software, long a complex domain only of interest to specialists, has become the darling of venture capital investors and start-ups. This post presents context and concludes with advice for CIOs on navigating the changing enterprise software landscape. Enterprise software eats the world (photo credit: Michael Krigsman) To get a sense of growing interest in […]
The cool kids grow up: Box.com and the SharePoint Shift
Levie is still funny and outrageous, and Box is still young and hip, but the company’s focus is clearly on making sure that growth and new markets are characterized by an astute reading of market forces, and not just on being cool and hip.
