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, […]
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 […]
A wartime Customer Success SaaS Leader has these five attributes
Dave Kellogg wrote a solid post about the three types of Customer Success Managers. Contrasting them as product-oriented, process-oriented or sales-oriented, it’s a much-needed primer at a time where the vocation of Customer Success is still nascent. Dave’s post got me thinking that there is also a need to contrast happy time vs war time CS leaders. During […]
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, […]
The State of Recruiting Technology in 2019 — A Year of Consolidation, Growth & Innovation
The State of Recruiting Technology in 2019 — A Year of Consolidation, Growth & Innovation What’s happening in Recruiting Technology? A lot! We are in the midst of a significant technology revolution in recruiting. While corporate spending in recruiting technology continues to grow, expected to surpass $10 billion by 2022, talent acquisition as a function […]
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 […]
Are You Counting Payments as Renewals?
Enterprise SaaS has drifted to a model where many, if not most, companies do multi-year contracts on annual payment terms. How did we get here? Most enterprise SaaS products are high-consideration purchases. Buyers typically perform a thorough evaluation process before purchasing and are quite sure that the software will meet their needs when they deploy. […]
Slides from My SaaStr Annual 2019 Presentation (5 Questions CEOs Struggle With)
Thanks to everyone who attended my session yesterday at the amazing — and huge — SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose. In this post, I’ll share the slides from my presentation, Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (and some thoughts on how to answer them). The folks at SaaStr recorded the session, so at […]
