Most entrepreneurs focus on the hard economics of the deal when they negotiate with investors: percentage ownership, valuation, preferences and other terms. Those things are all important — but so is …
Do You Really Know Why Your Customers are Churning?
In previous posts I’ve written about the critical value of “customer success” for technology companies—tracking, retaining and upselling existing customers. Plenty of vendors are now offering sophisti…
A Bubbly Late-Stage Market? The Data Tells the Story
So: Are we in a late-stage, private-market tech bubble or not? It’s the talk of Silicon Valley today. Many investors and executives are fretting about the rise of pre-IPO company valuations, while the…
Why Hasn’t the Traditional Banking Industry Been “Amazon-ed”?
In the last two decades, dozens of traditional industries have been “Amazoned”—turned upside down by new business models made possible by the Internet.…
The Founding CEO Transition: Doing it Right
As a venture capitalist I have lived through many founder/CEO transitions–instances in which a founder moves on to a new role inside a company, and a new leader comes in to assume the CEO role. …
Choose More Diverse Boards
A few weeks ago, we were approached by a prominent Silicon Valley executive we both know, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, about helping her with a project called Boardlist to increase the number of women on …
The Fastest-Growing SaaS Unicorn You Haven’t Thought About
At the beginning of this year, I wrote a short post outlining a few predictions I have about how enterprise software is going to evolve in 2015. We’re at the halfway point, so let’s evalua…
Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook: MSG Is Not Just for Chinese Food Anymore
You’ve perhaps heard of the LAMP stack, the standard web-service building blocks of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Now there’s a new superstar technology stack on the rise: MSG.…
The Unlikely Birth of Customer Success—in St. Louis
A few years ago, I started noticing a strange business problem plaguing some of the companies I worked with: They knew more about prospective customers they hadn’t yet signed, but were courting, than …
Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Big Data Meets HR
Big data has permeated almost all aspects of the enterprise today—from sales and marketing to product management to back-end IT. Now, the smartest companies are using big data to help fuel next-genera…