The Strong Shall Inherit the Nasdaq
I wrote this post on Feb 3, 2016 — and like clockwork two years later, its timely again. The Dow Jones and Nasdaq are tanking and people are out with stories of imminent end. This too shall pass The unicorn, the billion dollar startup, is finally dead. The same columnists and magazines that turned every startup funding […]
The One Best, “Secret” Hack to Getting Venture Funding
I am fairly confident there are at least 10,000 Medium posts, 20,000 WordPress articles, and over well over 1,000,000 Tweets on How to Get Funded. It bores me personally, but I know it’s an important topic. Raising money for many CEOs is one of the their top 5 priorities. Without venture capital, I’d be nowhere. […]
Small Checks From Large Venture Funds: Maybe One is Enough
Apologies in advance to my friends and colleagues that will disagree and/or dislike this post. But anyhow … The world of venture fundraising has changed again dramatically the past 24 months. 250+ new seed funds have been raised (wow!) in the past 24 months. That really is crazy. And Big Funds have added even more […]
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 […]
