Why has Standalone Cloud BI Been Such a Tough Slog?
I remember when I left Business Objects back in 2004 that it was early days in the cloud. We were using Salesforce internally (and one of their larger customers at the time) so I was familiar with and a proponent of cloud-based applications, but never felt great about BI in the cloud. Despite that, Business […]
The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was to use the chart to […]
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), […]
Thoughts on the Coupa S-1
It’s been a while since I dove into an S-1 and while I almost never get all the way through, here we go with another quick romp through a recent S-1. Coupa, a ten-year old company that sells cloud-based spend management software and who pitches “value as a service” (ugh) recently filed its S-1. Before […]
Thoughts on Jeff Weiner’s “Pay No Attention to the Stock” Message
From everything I’ve heard for a long time, Jeff Weiner is a wonderful guy and great CEO. In addition, LinkedIn is certainly a great company, so please don’t view this post as dissing either Jeff or the company. I will say, however, that I found media coverage of Jeff’s now famous all-hands speech after the […]
The “Dry Bubble” We May Be In. What That Means.
The other day, Bill Gurley, who has to be on the Top 5 most successful and smartest VCs, had a few semi-cryptic tweets. Cryptic to non-VCs, at least: Wet bubbles (1999) are more fun than dry ones (2015). — Bill Gurley (@bgurley) June 10, 2015 At our recent LP meeting, an LP told me industry […]
Why Only 12% of VCs Can Be Considered Successful. Max.
Continuing our recent series on The Catharsis is Understanding How VC Really Works, it was only recently, spurred by Quora, I really thought through just how many VC partners can really be considered a success. Turns out math says it can’t be that many. No matter how it may look from the outside. . Why? Well… […]
All These Enterprise IPOs: Why It’s Just Getting Good. Why These are The Best of Times for SaaS.
Reading the tech press you might get the sense that The Enterprise is something they are sort of forced to write about because it’s having a good run. We had a great Consumer run, a nice set of Multi-Billion Dollar deals around Social Networking, a WhatsApp/Snapchat fad around mobile messaging, an Alibaba, Instacart, Fab-ulous e-commerce […]
The Great Reckoning: Thoughts on the Deflation of Technology Bubble 2.0
This post shares a collection of thoughts on what I’ve variously heard referred to as “the tightening,” “the unwinding,” “the unraveling,” or “the great reckoning” — the already-in-process but largely still-coming deflation of technology-oriented stock valuations, particularly in consumer-oriented companies and particularly in those that took large, late-stage private financings. The Four Horsemen Here are […]
It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source: Thoughts on the Hortonworks S-1
It took me a week or so to get to it, but in this post, I’ll take a dive into the Hortonworks S-1 filing in support of a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of their stock. While Hadoop and big data are unarguably huge trends driving the industry and while the future of Hadoop looks very bright indeed, […]
