
Why VCs Need Unicorns Just to Survive
One of the most tiring things for founders can be always being compared to Unicorns. Certainly sometimes it’s inspirational. I loved it when many of the founders I work with came out of the ’15 SaaStrAnnual saying they needed to grow faster, at a Zenefits-like level: But the reality is there are different ways to make […]

Your VP Sales Has a Sales Quota. Your VP Marketing Needs a Lead Quota. Period.
A ways back, we did an extremely popular post entitled, Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them. The basic idea was to help folks who haven’t hired a VP or Director of Marketing hire the right one for a […]

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 […]

A Real Life SaaS Case Study: Eloqua. Marketo. Pardot. There Are 3 Different Paths to Success, My Young Padwan.
I don’t know about you, but I really can’t stand case studies. They always seem either contrived (forcing contrasts in companies that aren’t really there) or else too hypothetical, because we know which way things really worked out in real life (Case Study: Company A had to decide whether to do action X or Y. […]