Big Data | Thinking Outside the Firewall
A few months back, Gartner placed big data at the peak of its hype cycle for cloud computing, meaning most big data products are solutions looking for a problem. I always find this bad entrepreneurial habit to be one of the most frustrating of our industry. Having recently joined Meltwater as head of marketing and [...]
Your Customer Success Team. Hire Early. And No Squishy Goals — It’s All About the Numbers.
If this is your first SaaS company, you may not have ever hired or built a Client Success team. This one isn’t nearly as risky as a VP of Sales, or a VP of Marketing hire. If you hire a great, experienced Client Success leader as your first hire here, and you like him/her, and [...]
Is the desktop dead? Scoble and friends face-off on mobile
As part of the BusinessNext and (New Media Expo) conference, held this past January in Las Vegas, I asked a couple of interesting and highly accomplished friends — Robert Scoble and Vala Afshar — to discuss the impact of cloud, social, and mobile in the enterprise. Famous blogger, author, and Rackspace executive, Robert Scoble, spends significant time with large [...]
What do you mean customers don’t know what they want?
If I’d asked customers what they want, they’d have said more convenience and relevance. Look familiar? I’ve riffed on that Henry Ford quote about faster horses, yada, yada. It’s not too far off from what customers would theoretically have been seeking in faster horses. I altered that quote to fit a modern day phenomenon: 3D [...]
