What are the secrets to raising a Series A round, if you’re a seed-stage company, in today’s fast-paced but still discerning market? In this podcast—taped at a dinner in San Francisco hosted by Battery Ventures in Sept. 2018—some of the industry’s most prominent early-stage investors tackle this t … Read More »
EmBARKing on a new journey: Dog Walking and the Power of Online Marketplaces
A little less than a year ago, we published the Battery Network Effects Index, a market index including 36 current or previously publicly traded, consumer-Internet companies, each valued at $1 billion or more at the time. We highlighted the companies because all exhibited profound “network effects”, … Read More »
Board Dynamics 101: Perspectives from A VC and Founder Duo
For founders navigating the stormy waters of entrepreneurship, the effectiveness and engagement of the board can keep a company afloat—or, conversely, sink it. In the second of a four part video mini-series, Roger Lee, general partner at Battery Ventures, and Nick Mehta, CEO of customer success m … Read More »
Marriage, VC-style: How One VC and One Prominent Software CEO Make it All Work
There’s a saying in the technology industry that it’s harder to split from your venture capitalist than it is to get a divorce from your spouse. In some ways, it’s true. But what happens when you and your VC are actually friends before he or she makes an investment—and all the hard years of company … 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 »
The Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook: You’ve Heard of LAMP? Here’s the New MSG Technology Stack
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. What is MSG? It’s an acronym for a customer-lifecycle management software stack comprised of products from Marketo*, Sales … Read More »
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 their existing base of customers. This didn’t make any sense to me. In fact, in many cases, the C … Read More »
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-generation HR operations. Traditional tools like LinkedIn, outside recruiting firms and even the t … Read More »
Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Don’t Make the Mobile Web a Stepchild
Today’s business-software entrepreneurs must start out mobile-first, building an elegant, simple mobile app before dealing with the desktop. (It’s a topic I wrote about in a previous “Playbook” post.) And while it’s always preferable to access a product via a company-specific, mobile app--instead of … Read More »