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). […]
Quick Thoughts on Tagetik Acquistion by Wolters Kluwer
Yesterday, the tax and accounting division of Dutch publishing giant Wolters Kluwer announced the acquistion of Italian enterprise performance management (EPM) vendor Tagetik for 300M Euros, or about $318M. Founded in 1986, Tagetik was a strong regional European player in on-premises EPM and about 2.5 years ago had raised $37M in capital in order to attack the […]
16 Rookie Errors Founders Make Pitching to VCs — And Passing the “20 Minute” Test
Pitching VCs is like anything. You’ll get better at it over time. Later, you’ll even get great at it. Once you know how it works, it’s not even that hard to knock it out of the park. But until then, so many founders make unforced errors. Rookie errors. Here are 16 that you can […]
The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was to use the chart to […]
Mark Suster (Upfront Ventures): Bubble? What Bubble? How It’s Different This Time. And How It Most Certainly Isn’t. (Video +Transcript)
(Less than 30 days to SaaStr Annual 2017. Do you have your tix yet?) In this session, Jason Lemkin sits down with Mark Suster, Partner at Upfront Ventures, to discuss the state of the fundraising market and how venture capitalists feel about it. This session was recorded just days after the huge dip in the […]
