“Category kings”, defined as market-share leaders in particular business sectors, often wind up creating the majority of the market value relative to their competition. This advantage is particularly pronounced in technology: According to some research, over 70% of the value created in technology mar … Read More »
How to Communicate with Your Board During Tough Times
For startup CEOs, tough economic periods are like stressful stretches in a marriage: They test your mettle while making ugly truths impossible to hide. And these days, amid industrywide belt-tightening, “down rounds” and a still-moribund (though hopefully improving) IPO market, many venture-backed CE … Read More »
5 Questions to Ask Before Saying ‘I do’ to Your VC
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 the soft stuff, especially in today’s volatile market. Think about it. Taking venture capital fund … Read More »
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 sophisticated technologies in this area, allowing companies to get up-to-the-minute data and advanced analyti … Read More »
Why Hasn’t the Traditional Banking Industry Been “Amazon-ed”?
This post was written by Battery team members Roger Lee, Ben Johnston and Jeff Lu. In the last two decades, dozens of traditional industries have been “Amazoned”—turned upside down by new business models made possible by the Internet. Obviously, Amazon has upended the retail market, making it p … Read More »
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 IPO markets themselves—and the stock performance of newly public companies—have been less than ro … Read More »
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. … Read More »
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 evaluate a few of them. “Customer success” will become a C-level position in many companies. It will be harder to … Read More »
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. That’s right, when it comes to building a robust customer lifecycle management program – from generating and nurturing l … Read More »
Why the Chief Customer Officer Will Be the New Fast Track to CEO
Recently I had the pleasure of leading a panel discussion in San Francisco at Pulse, the major user conference for the fast-growing "customer success" industry. Customer success--an emerging company function focused on helping companies retain, drive increased value for, and grow customer … Read More »