Stopping Inception Churn: The Prospective Customer Success Review
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had flat refused to implement. (Huh?) […]
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 […]
GitHub Satellite 2019 Berlin. The Social Code – It’s Just Dependencies All The Way Down and Up
The keynote at GitHub Satellite 2019 in Berlin last month was a model of crisp story-telling. The comms team did a bang up job. The opening narrative was engaging and emotionally powerful. It asked us to think about our place in the world, our role as collaborators, at a very deep level. It began, as […]
Progressive Delivery at GitLab
I have been talking about Progressive Delivery for a while now – it’s an approach to deliver application and service functionality incrementally, to targeted user segments and production environments, limiting the last radius, enabling experimentation with reduced risk. Progressive Delivery builds on the foundations laid by Continuous Delivery/Continuous Integration. It’s gratifying to see engineers and […]
The DIY movement in IT – what does it take to succeed ?
A few days ago, my friend Frank Scavo wrote about the pendulum starting to swing from commercial software to custom built software . Today morning, I listened to his podcast with another common friend Den Howlett . Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com I would highly encourage you to read Frank’s blog and listen to the […]
On Open Source Dependencies, GitHub, Gender, Philosophy of Science and the nature of Self
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu Recently I posted about GitHub. One reason it took me so long to write the piece was the amount of thinking time I gave it. Why should a report about a tech conference require that much attention? One reason is that I was deeply inspired by the event. When the framing narrative concerns […]
When scaling for high growth, make sure you hire cogs that can design wheels
One of the many things that stuck with me from the excellent annual Sequoia Capital Founder/ CEO summits was an astute comment about scaling growth stage companies by Sequoia partner and early President/ COO of VMWare Carl Eschenbach that went something like this: Think very carefully about whether you want to hire someone who grows […]
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 […]
