Career Decisions: What To Look For In a Software Startup
So, you’re thinking of taking a job at a startup, but are nervous about the risk, perhaps having trouble telling one from another, and unsure about knowing what’s really important in startup success. In this post, I’ll share what I consider to be a great checklist for CXO and VP-level positions, which we’ll try to […]
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 […]
The Market Leader Play: How to Run It, How to Respond
Business-to-business (B2B) high technology markets are all about the market and only less so about the technology. This is primarily driven by corporate buyer conservatism — corporate buyers hate to make mistakes in purchasing technology and, if you’re going to make one, it’s far better to be in the herd with everyone else, collectively fooled, […]
CIO Transformation Live gets Disruptive in Manchester
You may know that I’ve been a regular contributor to Trafford Associates CIO events over the last couple of years. I chaired and opened their CIO Transformation Live conference near Silverstone on March 20th this year, and with Andy McLean and the team from Disruptive.Live we amplified the event on the day by live streaming […]
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 […]
Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it
I attended the Hannover Messe 2019 for the first time, courtesy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It’s not as big as CeBIT was, but it is still a huge conference with over 20 halls of exhibitors, covering everything from Industry 4.0, integrated automation, the digital factory, industrial supply, research & technology to the digital workplace. HPE are […]
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 […]
The Question that CEOs Too Often Don’t Discuss with the Board
Startup boards are complex. While all board members own stock in the company their interests are not necessarily aligned. Founders may be motivated by a vision to change the world, to hit a certain net worth target, to see their name in an S-1, to make the Forbes 500, or — and I’ve seen crazier […]
EPM, Project Orion, and the Beginner’s Mind
I’ll always be thankful for my time at Salesforce both because I met so many amazing people and because I learned so much. I learned about the importance of Trust in a SaaS company (and was drilled in the mantra, “nothing is more important than the Trust of our customers.”) And I learned about shoshin, […]
