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 [...]
Cloud app integration: Incredibly important, but also problematic
My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource [...]
Workday Launches Version 18 – Quick Analysis
At the Workday Rising event being held in Las Vegas this week, Workday announced the latest version of its product, on top of which they held an analyst/influcner day that I was following remotely. I’ve got a few thoughts about the analyst day but first a recap of the news.
Beware of the Confidence of High Win Rates
The other day I was meeting with the founder of a really cool SaaS start-up. Great logo customers, great early traction, plenty of capital, fun space. This founder pretty much had me until he told me the classic line, “And we win almost every deal.” >> If there’s any sign you aren’t pushing hard [...]
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.
Continuuity Launches Big Data Application Fabric–Warning: Buzzwords Abound
Coming out of stealth today at Strata and Hadoop World is Continuuity, a company that is looking to position itself within the PaaS landscape as it gives organizations the ability to build, deploy and scale big data apps. All of which sounds dangerously like buzzword heaven so it’s worth taking a look at what Continuuity [...]
TradeGecko–Cloud-Based SMB Inventory Launches
I’ve spent couple of decades dealing with the realities of a small business that sells physical goods. The functional requirements of these businesses are surprisingly broad but alas the budget tends to be small. I was interested then to hear from the founders of TradeGecko, a recently launched SaaS inventory
Workday is Growing 90% this Year. At $250m in ARR. So Wake Up: You Probably Need to Do A Lot, Lot Better.
The thing is, what you really have to ask yourself, if you are growing less than 100-150% YoY — all the way to $100m in ARR — is the market just too small? Or if not — am I just not well enough positioned in the market?
Why Zynga was Right to Buy OMGPop and Words With Friends, And What it Means for SaaS
Zynga just keeps getting hammered. The latest was on preannouncing a big miss for Q3, and an almost complete write-off of its $183m acquisition of OMGPop, the guys behind briefly ultrapopular Draw Something. Next up may well be a complete write-down of the $200m+ for Words with Friends. The OMGPop acquisition was called “catastrophic“, for example, [...]
It Takes at Least 7 Years in SaaS: Can You Do The Time?
I was recently at a dinner with a founder of a pretty successful web company, and he asked how long I had worked on EchoSign, and he nodded his head, and he said “Yeah same for me. It takes about 7 years”. People know SaaS takes longer than consumer web to scale. But it’s not [...]
To a Better Place: When is It Time as CEO/Founder to Move On?
Yesterday it was announced that Shai Agassi, one of the most successful software entrepreneurs/executives of all time, had left Better Place, his latest company and incredibly aggressive plan to make electrification of cars work via replaceable batteries, after 5+ long years. I never met him personally other than a handshake, but he was an electric [...]
Why Competition Is So Bitter in SaaS: Oligopolies and Dominant Strategy Equilibriums
Perhaps the oddest thing about the Apple-Google “go thermonuclear” strategy to SaaS guys is that it is so odd at all. Competition-to-the-almost-death seems the norm in SaaS. Just look at Larry Ellison or Marc Benioff. You can see the blood lust in their eyes, in every speech, in a way you never really saw/see in [...]
The Workday IPO and ‘F You Money
The other day, a VC asked me about a founder he was thinking of investing in. He asked me if this founder had, quote, ‘F You Money. {I learned how this was spelled when a Businessweek article this week used the term, btw}. I wasn’t really sure if he meant this as a negative, but [...]
With WalkMe Software Vendors Don’t Need to Sweat the UX
I spend a bunch of time working with software startups and am always amazed by how much time they spend sweating every little pixel of their site – much of the reason for this attention is an effort to hone the user experience (UX) to the point where even a
Thor Project Opens Up, Building the Cloud Foundry Ecosystem with the Community
The Iron Foundry Team are big advocates of open source software. We write code across all sorts of languages, just like many of the development shops out there do. Sometimes we’re heavy on the .NET, other times we’re all up in some Java, Ruby on Rails, spooling up a Node.js Application or something else. So …
