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 »
Chatting Current Tech Events and News with CNBC Squawk Alley
On Friday, May 22, I joined the hosts of CNBC's Squawk Alley--Kayla Tausche, Jon Fortt, and Simon Hobbs--to chat about the morning's breaking news. It was a lot of fun--even though I had to spend quite a bit of time scrubbing makeup off my face afterward. Following the announcement of H-P's q … Read More »
Enterprise Software in 2015: Bubbles, Box and Kim Jong-un
It was a busy and fruitful year for enterprise-software companies: Zendesk, HortonWorks and New Relic went public, while privately-held heavyweights like Box, Nutanix, Atlassian, Palantir, AppDynamics* and Cloudera pushed beyond $1 billion valuations. As we look forward to 2015, it’s clear we’ll see … Read More »
Snapchat for the Enterprise
Two of the biggest trends in corporate IT today are BYOD—the “bring your own device” preference of employees who want to use their own phones and tablets at work—and software delivered as a service (SaaS). But those two trends are creating a huge security headache for companies. And no one, to date, … Read More »
Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Skip the Sales Team. Go Freemium to Build a $1 Billion Business
Can you build a billion-dollar enterprise software company without a sales force? Today, not only is that possible, it’s preferable – at least for some types of software companies. Take the software development tools company Atlassian. Without a single salesperson, Atlassian has acquired over 25, … Read More »
Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Why Every Enterprise Startup Needs a Killer UX Team
Who’s the hottest hire in Silicon Valley today? No, it’s not the data scientist, mobile app engineer, or digital marketer; it’s a user experience designer. Today, if your enterprise app isn’t beautiful, simple, elegant, and easy-to-use from day one, your company has little hope of becoming a billion … Read More »
A View from the Boardroom: Reducing Customer Churn and Focusing on Customer Success
Last week, Battery Ventures General Partner Roger Lee joined Ajay Agrawal of Bain Capital and Harrison Miller of Summit Partners for a keynote panel at the Pulse 14 Conference, hosted by Gainsight. Moderated by Rich Karlgaard of Forbes, the panel, “How to Make Customer Success a Board Priority” discu … Read More »