Appearance on the Twenty Minute VC: Financing Thoughts, The Private Equity Sales Process, and More
Famed venture capital podcaster and now venture capitalist at StrideVC, Harry Stebbings, released a new episode of the Twenty Minute VC podcast with me as his guest. (iTunes version here.) Harry’s interview was broad-ranging, covering a number of topics including: Financing lessons I’ve learned during prior bubble periods and, perhaps more importantly, bubble bursts. The […]
Cryptocurrency’s duality
Disruptive innovations all have at least one characteristic in common. They percolate through an economy seeking a best use scenario because it’s the market, and not the inventor, that makes a determination of utility. Cryptocurrency is undergoing such a moment and it may be hampered by use of “currency.” Is it a currency or a […]
How To Get Your Startup a Halo
How would you like your startup to win deals not only when you win a customer evaluation, but when you tie — and even sometimes when you lose? That sounds great. But is it even possible? Amazing, yes — but you need have a halo effect working to your advantage. What is a halo effect? Per […]
Kellblog’s 2017 Predictions
New Year’s means three things in my world: (1) time to thank our customers and team at Host Analytics for another great year, (2) time to finish up all the 2017 planning items and approvals that we need to get done before the sales kickoff (including the one most important thing to do before kickoff), […]
Can the Media Please Stop Referring to Company Size by Valuation?
The following tweet is the umpteenth time I’ve seen the media size a company by valuation, not revenue, in the past few years: Call me old school, but I was taught to size companies by revenue, not market capitalization (aka, valuation). Calling Palantir a $20B company suggests they are doing $20B in revenues, which is certainly […]
Unicorrection
We’ve had a correction in Unicorn financing that has trickled throughout venture capital. A lot of people lost jobs, opportunity and wealth. You could say this began with the creation of a the secondary market for private equity, and the dust on Chris Sacca’s spurs. But the correction began with Fidelity’s very public markdown […]
Introducing a New SaaS Metric: The Hype Factor
I said in yesterday’s post, entitled Too Much Money Makes You Stupid, that while I don’t have much of a beef with Domo, that I did want to observe in today’s fund-to-excess environment that any idea — including making a series of Alec Baldwin would-be viral videos — can sound like a good one. While I credited Domo with […]
Too Much Money Makes You Stupid — Let’s Make an Alec Baldwin Viral Video
There are two sayings I like when it comes to the unicorn bubble: “Too much money makes you stupid” “Any idea’s a good one when you’ve got $100M burning a hole in your pocket.” Startups are supposed to be focused. Startups are supposed to need to prioritize ideas and opportunities. Just as startups weren’t supposed […]
Kellblog Predictions for 2016
It’s time for another set of predictions, but before diving into my list for 2016, let’s review and assess the predictions I made for 2015. Kellblog’s 2015 Predictions Review The good times will continue to roll in Silicon Valley. I asserted that even if you felt a bubble, that it was more 1999 than 2001. While IPOs […]
Unicorn Tears, Beyond Ultimate, and the Silicon Valley Hype Mentality
Back in the day we working on a press release and I was a CMO. Me: “Somebody, get Randy (the PR director) in here.” Me: “Randy, what is this press release calling our new offering the ultimate in business intelligence?” Randy: “Yes and the problem is?” Me: “The problem is it’s not the ultimate, it’s […]
