Communications Lessons from Mayor Pete
Whenever I have the chance to watch a big league politician at work, I always try to study their communications skills in an effort to learn from the best. In a previous post, I presented what I learned watching Congresswoman Jackie Speier work a room, a pretty amazing sight, in The Introvert’s Guide to Glad-Handing. […]
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, […]
Some thoughts on evaluating job opportunities
I woke up at 4AM PST today to watch the first innings of Eng vs Pak in the cricket World cup. And at 5AM , I saw an email pop up from someone I mentor – who wanted some help in thinking through whether he should stay in his current job, or move to a […]
Salesforce buying Tableau – Quick thoughts
I am on vacation and woke up late and the first thing I saw on my phone is this news that Salesforce is buying Tableau . I – and many others – have predicted for a long time that Tableau would get acquired but several years passed by without that happening . And now that […]
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 […]
Highlights from the 1Q19 Fenwick & West Venture Capital Survey
Every so often I post highlights from the quarterly Fenwick & West Venture Capital Survey, as much to share knowledge about the existence of the survey [1] as to share its current-quarter data. This survey is important for two reasons. First, it shows trends in price changes over time across various VC rounds. This is […]
Reality check on promotions
Promotions are hard for the employee and the employer. Unless its the first couple of levels in the organizational ladder, there is always a lot of subjectivity that goes into the process from both sides. Even when a company says it is all data driven – it is often the case that subjective decisions ( […]
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 […]
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 […]
Is Another SaaSacre In The Offing?
I’m not a financial analyst and I don’t make stock recommendations [1], but as a participant and observer in the software investing ecosystem, I do keep an eye on macro market parameters and I read a fair bit of financial analyst research. Once in an while, I comment on what I’m seeing. In February 2016, […]
