Imagine a World With Unlimited Capital, and See Where It Takes You
There’s an exercise BigCos do, that I was asked to do, that at first, I thought was a waste of time. The exercise is: ”How would you run your business if short-term revenues didn’t matter?” I thought (and still think) in that context it was a bit of a trick question. First, of course revenues [...]
Why You Should Kill Your Competitor in SaaS
IMHO, most SaaS CEOs/founders aren’t Killers. They can’t be. They’re Builders. In fact, the two jobs of a founder/CEO are antithetically opposed to zero-sum and attack thinking. First, at a strategic level, the founder/CEO has to see the future, a positive future, that is 100x bigger than today. Focused on putting the internal pieces together [...]
I Don’t Know about CEO Coaches. But We All Could Use CEO Trainers.
Once you’ve been venture backed, if not before, you’ll hear a lot about CEO Coaches. The classic example is Bill Campbell, CEO coach to Steve Jobs, Google, now Mark Pincus, and other leaders in between. VCs generally have great networks of ex-CEOs and want to help, and plug you in with a CEO coach. The [...]
If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.
Ok I know this post and its title seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But empirically, I can tell you isn’t. Over the past 12 months, I’ve met with friends/colleagues/partners/ex-customers who are total rockstars and working on starting a company. I mean, total rockstars. (Yes, I know that’s an abused team). What [...]
Making Sense of Color after Meraki, and Going Big
I had a draft post I’d written weeks ago entitled something like “Color: Just an Enormously Large Seed Round Gone Horribly Wrong”, or something like that. Which I guess it was — $41,000,000 to build an iOS app with no revenue that no one ever used. But it wasn’t that interesting, that post/story, so I [...]
4 Good Reasons Not to Start a SaaS Start-Up
There’s been one huge change in “entrepreneurship” IMHO over the past 10 years. >> No, it’s not that it’s cheaper than ever to do a start-up. That’s not even true. In the old days, when software came on a disk, or a CD-ROM, it was even cheaper. You didn’t even need a single server to [...]
Why I Hope BlackBerry10 Will Actually Make It
I don’t know about you, but I’ve basically bought every ‘cool’ gadget ever made, from the Creative Nomad to an original ReplayTV to all 3 generations of the AppleTV to a Uniden WebPhone to the Nintendo VirtualBoy. Yes, a VirtualBoy. Yeah, a lot of gadgets. Only a handful have really made a difference. The iPads [...]
SAP and SuccessFactors – Proven Integration is Hype
Early last month I wrote The Real Truth about SAP and SuccessFactors Integration to try to clear up some of the confusion in the marketplace. To my surprise I had several SAP customers reach out telling me they were very surprised at my article as it contradicted the message they were getting directly from SAP. These customers [...]
Unfortunately, We (Probably) Have No Idea If Your SaaS Idea is Any Good
Here’s the thing in SaaS: I appreciate you asking me. But, honestly, generally speaking — I probably have no idea if your pre-launch SaaS idea is any good. So no need even to show me any deck, any static demo, any mock-ups of your product-to-be. Because I have no idea if it’s truly a great [...]
The End of Legacy
The first time I heard “Legacy Systems” was in the early 90s when working at Coors. It was in reference to the mainframe and dumb terminals around the campus. I was far more excited about the cutting edge stuff like Windows For Workgroups including Schedule Plus. We were busy installing this stuff via Novell Netware [...]
On Not Forgetting to be 10x Better
I was struggling what to make of the news that now, AT&T too was jumping into the cloud storage-as-a-commodity business offering 5GB of free online storage. Just like DropBox. And Google Drive. And Box, if you use it that way. And iCloud. And SkyDrive. And. And. And. You could make fun of it, but it [...]
We’re Still Waiting for a Cloud That Just Works
SaaS entrepreneurs shouldn’t need a TechOps team until they hit $20m in revenue. I’m willing to write a piece of the Series A check to whoever can really fully solve this problem so that TechOps becomes a side issue.
The Shifting Sands of SaaS Relationships. Here’s How to Handle It.
I know why Steve Jobs was so very, very mad at Google and Eric Schmidt. Why he pledged to go “thermonuclear”. Why he vowed to spend up to $100 billion dollars (Apple’s cash) to “bury Google”. It couldn’t have been about Android per se. Google bought Android (the company) in 2005, a “software system for [...]
And So Begins the End of this SaaS M&A Cycle
… and hence the acquisition dies due to excessive capital requirements. It’s almost impossible to blend a profitable entity with a new acquisition that is burning tens of more millions per year, unless it’s a total make-the-company bet like Android.
The 10x Rule: What Raising $1 of Venture Capital Really Means
Recently, a good friend of mine asked me how much he should raise in his round. He was lucky enough to have a range of options. My simple advice was: assume you have to return a liquidity event (sale or IPO) of at least 10x the amount you raise. Valuations change from round to round. [...]
