Why You’ll Need Just about $3,000,000 to Build Your First Real Sales & Marketing Team
Every week, I meet with several entrepreneurs, often bootstrapped or close to it, who fit the following sort of model: Gotten to Initial Traction (~$1.5m ARR), or getting close to it, or a bit beyond; and With nice growth (>=100% YoY); and Company isn’t really burning much cash because The CEO basically is the VP […]
Salesforce and the New Bucket of Bits. Phoenix, Ashes.
When Salesforce.com and Oracle announced a renewal of their vows last year I was kind of surprised. Why would Salesforce deepen its reliance on the Oracle database at a time when others across the industry were lessening their reliance on that venerable and not inexpensive platform. To be fair Oracle database has excellent high availability […]
Come to the SaaStr Sessions at Dreamforce — And Win a Free Ticket to the SaaStr Annual in February (And Other Good Stuff)
We’ve got 2 great SaaStr sessions at Dreamforce on Wednesday, October 15 at 1pm and 3pm. Each has about 15 seats left so add them to your Dreamforce event planner now! To make it (even more) fun, we’ll give away 2 free tickets to the SaaStr Annual on Feb 5, 2015 in San Francisco (details […]
Oracle’s Approach Makes Sense (But It Sucks)
If you follow the conference circuit you’d know that Oracle held its user group conference this past week – Oracle Openworld 2014 was held at the Moscone Center between Sunday afternoon and — well, today officially. First off, I did not attend in person. I watched the keynotes from the comfort of my home office […]
SaaS Status Pages and “Trust”
Okta Trust pages jukes the stats with a synthetic measure of uptime and “minutes up” that includes days that have not yet elapsed.
What the Second Time SaaS CEOs are All Doing
We’re in the third generation of SaaS companies by my reckoning. The first generation was Salesforce, Netsuite, Webex, morphed-into-SaaS companies like Concur, etc. The next generation came of age and often leveraged Salesforce or other web platforms or paradigms to scale. Now, every business process is being webified. Markets that just a few years ago […]
How to Hire A Great VP Sales: The Full Video (and Transcript)
Recently in New York I was invited to give the keynote at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). It turned out to be a great event, with the maximum 250 capacity hit days earlier and unfortunately a lot of folks didn’t get to attend. […]
Building the Enterprise SaaS Startup: An Interview with #BoxWorks Speaker Jason Lemkin
Box did a nice SaaStr interview the other day ahead of BoxWorks, their big annual user conference September 2-4. It hits on a lot of the key themes we’ve worked on together here. It’s definitely worth attending BoxWorks if you can. We’ve talked in the past about why you should probably have a customer conference as […]
CEO Removed at Adaptive Planning / Insights
Although I don’t know the circumstances of the seemingly sudden CEO change at Adaptive Insights (formerly known as Adaptive Planning) I can share what appears to be known at this point along with a few observations. Adaptive Insights CEO John Herr, appointed on 10/31/2011, is no longer listed on the management section of the company’s web page or listed a member of the […]
Turn the Tables
This week the crazy internets have been abuzz with the story of AOL executive Ryan Block, who attempted to do something rather mundane, cancel his cable, and was subjected to an excruciatingly long ordeal with the customer service representative at Comcast. This is well covered, I don’t need to relive it… and more to the […]
