One of the Biggest Mistakes Enterprise Startups Make
The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. “We want low-touch or zero-touch businesses” was the mantra. I believe it’s flawed. While I have some sympathy with [...]
ING Direct CEO Gives Employees “The Right to Bitch”
While I was speaking at the Newsgator conference in Amsterdam I learned of a very interesting story at ING Direct (Canada). For those of you not familiar with ING Direct, it has around 1,200 employees and is based in Canada and operates things such as savings accounts, retirement plans, mortgages, and mutual funds. Their CEO [...]
Facebook needs to learn to manage scruffy neighborhoods to stay relevant
Facebook needs to learn to manage scruffy neighborhoods to stay relevant Not all of us live in or want to live in a PG-13 world. But the recent rash of shutdowns over perfectly normal behavior has me wondering how Facebook’s going to set a global standard for what the social media neighborhood looks like. Failbook, [...]
Enterprises Are Climbing Aboard the Cloud Disruption Train
Saving money is nothing compared to beating your competitors to market with a better product. This is the revelation that’s rapidly taking hold in the enterprise CIO’s office. Until very recently, most enterprise IT leaders would tell you that their primary goal in moving to cloud computing was related to cost reduction, primarily through server [...]
Hyperaggresiveness … Can You Do It?
Recently I’ve met with several of my friends who are moving on, or have moved on, to their next SaaS company after some real success in their first one. SaaS 3.0 entrepreneurs, I guess. They all have some measure of initial success in their next venture. To me, given their backgrounds, and their ability to [...]
CxO Talk episode two: Big data, analytics, and HR technology
In this episode of CxO Talk, co-host Vala Afshar and I talk with two brilliant experts who shine a spotlight on analytics, big data, HR, and enterprise software. The conversation is fun (look at the image below), but also brings out an extraordinary level of insight from the guests. CxO Talk is a weekly show that [...]
Getting Github : JavaScript Libraries Spilled EVERYWHERE! Series #003
This how-to is going to kind of go all over the place. My goal is to get github data. The question however is, how and with what. I knew there were some available libraries, so writing straight and pulling straight off of the API myself seemed like it would be unnecessary work. The github API [...]
We Got Hacked, Now What?
Hopefully you really have a good answer for this. Getting hacked is no longer a distant probability; it’s a harsh reality. The most recent incident was Evernote losing customer information including email addresses and passwords to a hacker. I’m an Evernote customer and I watched the drama unfold from the perspective of an end user. [...]
The Cloud Dissipation Problem
Google has decided to kill Reader. This is not the first time a product I use and value has been discontinued. I continue to use lots of products that were discontinued, such as my TV and car. The difference is my TV and car continue to work just fine. I can still get service, and [...]
Quick Note: Dropbox – Mailbox Marriage Is A Hail Mary Pass
This morning an acquisition news got techies excited about Dropbox buying the iOS app with lots of buzz but few invites, Mailbox. In short, this is a hail mary pass after Google announced that you can now attach large attachments with Google Drive integration in Gmail. Dropbox had to react and they reacted by buying [...]
Growing Internationally
One of the greatest opportunities any established business faces is growth internationally. Take a company like Apple. Recently, much has been made about how they have saturated the domestic marketplace wi their iPhones and iPads. The thinking is a concern over how earth’s largest company can grow much more. This type of thinking lead to [...]
Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks
Creating awareness for your brand and products is one of the lifebloods of technology startups yet in a world where so many companies are being created it becomes difficult to rise above the noise. Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled [...]
Will Obama’s Cyber Warfare Policy Backfire?
Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council brings up an interesting thought about how diplomacy is shaping how we view cyber warfare. In an article over on usnews.com Mr. Healey brings up some interesting points about how we are approaching cyber warfare using a two-pronged approach. One approach is to [...]
Measure Your Churn. But What’s Even More Important is to Measure Your Almost Churn. 5 Tricks to Help You Here.
Churn is a paramount topic in SaaS, as we all know. If every dollar of ARR is worth $6+ in the long term, including upsells and second order revenue … then of course, by the same token, for every dollar of ARR that churns … you’re losing $6 of notional ARR. Lose a $100k customer? [...]
A cyberwar barely in the making
We are asking China to stop poking at our networks; maybe we should take a look at what everyone else is doing along the way. An international framework is probably in order at this point. Many news systems are broadcasting that America is asking/telling China to stop hacking American Companies. While in testimony Army Gen. [...]
