Don’t Let Product Management Turn Into “The Roadmap Guys”
At many enterprise software companies product management (PM) ends up defaulting into a role that I can’t stand: The Roadmap Guys*. Like a restaurant with one item on the menu, the company defaults into ordering one thing from product management: a roadmap pitch. “The VP of PM is in Boston and Providence this week, can […]
Simple Rules to Make It Easier To Build Your Startup’s Board Deck
As someone who has assembled many startup board decks over the years, I thought I’d offer some advice to executives who contribute slides to board decks that should make it easier for the point-person to assemble, improve the deck’s appearance, and avoid any painful and/or embarrassing mistakes in the process. Marketing folks, who both build […]
The SaaS Rule of 40
After the SaaSacre of early 2016, investors generally backed off a growth-at-all-costs mindset and started to value SaaS companies using an “appropriate” balance of growth and profitability. The question then became, what’s appropriate? The answer was: the rule of 40 [1]. What’s the rule of 40? Growth rate + profit should be greater than or […]
A Look at the Tintri S-1
Every now and then I take a dive into an S-1 to see what clears the current, ever-changing bar for going public. After a somewhat rocky IPO process, Tintri went public June 30 after cutting the IPO offering price and has traded flat thus far since then. Let’s read an excerpt from this Business Insider […]
The Strategy Compiler: How To Avoid the “Great” Strategy You Couldn’t Execute
Few phrases bother me more than this one: “I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy. We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.” Huh. Wait minute. If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy. Maybe it was a great strategy for some other […]
European Founders: A Fundraising Primer with Front, Automile, and Algolia (Video + Transcript)
Being an American founder in the Valley is difficult enough, but as a European founder, what unique concerns do you have to think about while running a company and trying to scale it? Teddie Wardi, Partner at Atomico, leads this session with Mathilde Collin, CEO of Front App; Jens Nylander, CEO of Automile.com; and Nicolas […]
Byron Deeter + Kristina Shen, Bessemer Venture Partners: The State of the Cloud: 2017 Edition (Video + Transcript)
In this talk with Byron Deeter and Kristina Shen of Bessemer Venture Partners, we get an illuminating glimpse into the state of the cloud for 2017-2018. They run through what 2016 was like – M&As were at a record high; IPOs were at a record low – and let companies know what they should know […]
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 […]
Engineer’s Guide to Picking an Early Stage Startup
What I wish I had known 10 years ago One of the questions I often get from engineers I mentor is how do you decide on what early stage startup is worth working for? Often, this is long before you have paying customer logos or big name venture funds with substantial commitments as ‘signals’ of potential […]
Don’t Start a Customer Relationship with a Lie
As a manager, I like to make sure that every quarter that each of my direct reports has written, agreed-to goals. I collect these goals in a Word document, but since that neither scales nor cascades well, I’ve recently been looking for a simple SaaS application to manage our quarterly Objectves and Key Results (OKRs). […]
