
Dreamforce 2014: Announcements, Paradigm Shift, Crowds
Dreamforce has always been about many things happening at once — a three-ring circus in a good way. There are announcements about applications, platforms, philanthropy, entertainment and, importantly, parties. This year there was all of that and then some I was a guest with a ringside seat. Since most of the product announcements came out […]

A Lot to Like in the Mid-West
There was a lot to like at Salesforce ExactTarget’s Connections 2014 user conference in Indianapolis last week. Now all they need to do is reduce the size of the name — the words Marketing Cloud need to be fitted in there too but I forget how. First, a quick shout out to Indy, home of […]

2Q13 Performance for Trident Capital’s SaaS Portfolio; Strong Quarter with Upside
The second quarter of the year typically proves to be one of the strongest. This time around not only we were not disappointed but we also started seeing some strong upside for the remainder of the year. Both our enterprise SaaS and adtech platform portfolio companies performed extremely well, and a few (both from enterprise […]

No Fault Divorce?
How many euphemisms are there for divorce? We’re still good friends. It was mutual. Time to move on. Whatever. It happens all the time. In business, relationships form and dissolve faster than last week’s nuptials in Vegas. Companies do what’s best for them and their shareholders and that’s the way it is. But we don’t […]
What If There Are No Natural Acquirers (For Your Company)?
I recently had coffee with a very successful VC and we chatted about our views of what’s happening in SaaS. The things we are both interested in are very similar, our thoughts on risks and markets were well aligned. At the end, he noted how the key final thing he looks for in SaaS start-ups […]

Salesforce Fills Out the "Marketing Cloud"
Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire email marketing and marketing automation vendor ExactTarget for ~$2,5B or $33.75/share, ending a few years worth of speculation as to which marketing automation vendor it would eventually acquire. The leading contender up to last December was marketing automation heavyweight Eloqua, but Oracle ended that line of thinking by acquiring […]

Salesforce Acquiring Exact Target? Good Move (With A Question)
Ever since Salesforce launched a fully-working and functional version of Service Cloud (about three-four years ago) following the tiring attempts to build it itself for five or six years (which they later gave up to acquire Instranet – learning along the way that acquisitions work better than building-up) we have been waiting for something like […]