When will a start up’s management team feel comfortable telling employees they’re safe to return to work? Is it when the government declares it safe? Or schools re-open? Or customer prospects agree to meet in person? Or when we each record a positive antibody test? How will we conduct meetings? With masks and gloves? What […]
Product Launches Become the Operating Cadence of a Startup
In November 2019, two spectacles occurred. The first is Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual event and the largest software conference in the world. The second is Elon Musk announcing the Tesla Cybertruck. Benioff and Musk use these events strategically. They engender an operational cadence to Salesforce and Tesla. There’s no feeling like launch day. It’s the day […]
Why Product Innovation Slows After The Series A
You’ve found product market fit. You’ve hired a team, including some managers. Your initial, small customer base is very happy. You’ve discovered an initial channel of customer acquisition that’s working. You’ve raised a meaningful round of capital. And then, right then, product innovation decelerates to zero. The fast pace that characterized the past 12-18 months, […]
The Fundraising Environment In 2019 – Three Major Shifts
In a recent meeting, a founder asked me what I thought of the fundraising environment. My answer was: it’s become incredibly sophisticated along three dimensions: diversity of product offering, pricing sophistication, and efficiency of investment processes. If you read eBoys or Done Deals or Creative Capital, you’ll get a sense of the early days of […]
Benchmarking Slack’s S-1: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
Slack has transformed the way we work. By replacing email with beautiful and simple internal chat, Slack has productized productivity. Founded as a gaming company called Tiny Speck in 2009, the company’s initial product, Glitch, didn’t catch on as expected. So the business pivoted to commercialize an internal tool – a Searchable Log of All […]
Benchmarking PagerDuty’s S-1:How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up
PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by 3 former Amazon engineers who were often on-call. To engineers, being on call means carrying a pager to respond to crises when software breaks or services go down. In the 10 years since that day, PagerDuty has built an exceptional business. Their product has evolved from on-call management, which […]
Should Your Startup Employ Both Assisted and Unassisted Trials to Acquire Customers?
A founder posed me a question earlier this week: Do you have any data/perspective on whether it’s worth keeping the unassisted free trial flow vs. providing only one path which leads to a demo and an assisted free trial? This is a complex question. Let’s break it down.The unassisted free trial has benefits. There’s a […]
Predictions for 2019
Here are some predictions for 2019 and a review of my thoughts for 2018, many of which were wrong. The M&A market slows meaningfully, especially at the multi-billion dollar level. The recent seasickness in the public markets forces most CEOs adopt a more conservative approach to acquisitions. Facing large swings in valuation, these leaders may […]
Selling Your Product While You Build It
Customers will pay you to build your SaaS product. It’s one of the great advantages of a SaaS model. Annual prepay contracts – wherein customers pay for a year’s cost on day – is a free loan from customers. And every startup can benefit from this advance. There’s only one requirement: you must be able […]
The Four Stages of Sales Compensation Structures in Early Stage Startups
Your startup is just getting off the ground. You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? I’ve […]
