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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook: The End of Dumb Software
For all the technological advances of our time, business software is still profoundly dumb. Most enterprise software simply serves as a tool to get a particular job done faster or more efficiently, but few applications are really “smart”. True smart enterprise apps leverage ‘Big Data’ and predictive … Read More »
The Software Entrepreneur’s Playbook–How to Build a Breakout Software Company
A version of this post first appeared in Forbes. Organizations will spend $1.3 trillion worldwide on enterprise software and services this year. If you’re an entrepreneur building a next-generation software company, you’re no doubt wondering: How do I get my piece of the pie? It’s not easy. In … Read More »