Maybe It’s More Important Your Co-Founders’ Weaknesses are Complementary To Yours
I think in the enterprise, in SaaS, it’s especially important you pick the right co-founders. It’s a 7-10 year journey, after all. In Consumer Internet, I guess so long as you hit it early, you can always get rid of Eduardo (as expensive as that may be), kick out the Sean Parkers, bring in the [...]
BATNA, And Oracle’s $811m Purchase of Eloqua
It may seem strange to see Oracle acquire Eloqua for $811m just a few months after their IPO. But it’s not strange at all. I am 95% sure talks at some level were going on for quite some time, long before the IPO. And 80% sure, a soft offer of less than $500m or [...]
How to Get From 1.0 Launch to Traction in SaaS
Building 1.0 products is tough. Creating something from nothing is hard, a relatively rare skillset. You need tenacity, creativity, amazing developers, a keen understanding of your market both today and 24-36 months out. … But in the end, it’s the easy part. Because if you have a talented enough team, you can building almost anything, [...]
Why Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) Is The Most Important Metric in SaaS
One thing that is great in SaaS, from a 20,000 foot perspective at least, is You Can See The Future. It’s the benefit of a recurring revenue stream in a B2B model. If you did $100k last month, and have grown 6% a month each month for the last 12 mos, I can pretty much [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Don’t Forget to Pay People Right – Or at Least as Much as You Can
I awoke to the news the other day that the Lakers passed on hiring Phil Jackson back, and instead, opted for Mike D’Antoni instead, apparently to save about $6m a year, a percent or so of equity, and a bunch of other conditions. Too much, apparently, to get The Best of the Best. And probably, [...]
What Really Happened at Apple Around the Maps Scandal
One of our readers sent us secretly recorded snippets of the full inside story of the Maps scandal at Apple. While we cannot disclose the identity of this tipster, we can confirm the story is 100% true and validated, at
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 [...]
The Future of Emergent Collaboration, “Smart” Platforms
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how collaborative platforms are going to evolve or the next few years. After starting my vendor review series I was really able to get much more insight into what vendors are thinking and where they are going. I was also able to look at what organizations [...]
Is Open Compute Ready for Prime Time?
I just returned from the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in NYC. It was an eye opening experience. I thought I would share my take aways plus talk about what I perceive as a core issue: can the Open Compute Project (OCP) grow beyond Facebook? By that, I mean there is a clear challenge right [...]
Favorite Robots
All this talk about Siri – is Siri a robot? Personally, I don’t think so. Siri is an impressive voice recognition engine with some very clever programming associated with it. The break thru in Siri really isn’t in what it does or says, that’s just programmatic, but rather what it understands. I think robots should be [...]
Announcing TalkingPointz
Welcome to my new site: TalkingPointz.com – the new home for PinDropSoup. It was four years ago this month that I started PinDropSoup as a telecom blog. A lot has changed. It was initially just a hobby, but the page views consistently grew. The blog created numerous opportunities for me, regular writing opportunities at major [...]
