Salesforce: The unifying message is ‘customer first’
In November 2008, I attended Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference for the first time along with 9,000 of the company’s customers and partners. The sense of camaraderie among attendees, many of whom were early adopters of the cloud and software-as-a-service religion, was eye-opening. Along with CEO Marc Benioff’s evangelical fervor for the cloud, the catchy “No […]
The Top 10 Mistakes Made in Hiring Your First Sales Team
I know we’ve hit a number of these points individually before on SaaStr, but after getting the question again and again, I thought it would be worthwhile to assemble a Top 10 List on mistakes made in hiring your first sales team. Because it seems like so many of us just make these mistakes again, […]
Aaron Levie of Box: “If We Just Sold to Silos-in-the-Enterprise, We’d Only Be a $25,000,000 Business”
Missed the 2015 SaaStr Annual? We’ve got your back. We’ll do a series where we publish both the videos and full transcripts of all the sessions. First up is Aaron Levie of Box, where we had a wide-ranging, 45 minute deep dive on how Box scaled from $0 to $250m in ARR. As you’re reading […]
Building the Cult of You
You may have noticed LinkedIn recently made its largest acquisition so far, of Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. If you haven’t heard of Lynda.com, it’s a SaaS / subscription service for training and e-learning. One thing to note is who its co-founder is: Lynda Weinman. The Wall Street Journal called her “the mother of the Internet.” […]
5 Tips To Make The Journey More Fun
Really, there’s nothing I’ve done in my life that is harder than being a founder CEO. Nothing. It’s 100x harder than being a VP. Even if the actual work is easier. It’s 100x harder than being a VC. Even if delivering top returns as a VC is maybe even harder than as a founder. But I […]
5 Tips to Grow 10-20% Faster Than Plan in ’15
It’s time to do a series of posts on SaaSt to sort of … kick your arse a bit. What I mean by that, is that no matter how well you are doing post-Initial Traction in SaaS … you can almost always do at least 10-15% better. Pretty much almost always. Because there’s almost always more […]
If You’re Going to Do a SaaS Start-Up … You Have to Give it 24 Months
It seems like everyone wants to be a SaaS founder these days. I meet with great VPs of Sales and Product in particular who are Ready. It’s time. To go out on their own. Start their own SaaS company. Awesome. I get it. I’d like to recruit you to be a VP at one of […]
All These Enterprise IPOs: Why It’s Just Getting Good. Why These are The Best of Times for SaaS.
Reading the tech press you might get the sense that The Enterprise is something they are sort of forced to write about because it’s having a good run. We had a great Consumer run, a nice set of Multi-Billion Dollar deals around Social Networking, a WhatsApp/Snapchat fad around mobile messaging, an Alibaba, Instacart, Fab-ulous e-commerce […]
APIs Are Bridging the Mobile App Gap
Almost overnight, it seems, our lives came to revolve around social networks: We scan our Facebook feeds for updates from our families and relevant news, use Twitter to follow friends and celebrities, and pin the latest fashions or home-improvement ideas via Pinterest. Behind it all is the desire to drive engagement, to stay connected with […]
The Simple Reason Why There Will be 10-20 Great CRM IPOs in the Next Few Years
I wrote a while back about Room at The Bottom, and how once a space gets big enough (~$100m) or so … the biggest guys end up abandoning many of the smallest customers and segments in their space. Which once a space is at, say $100m in market size, can open up a $10m hole […]
Cloud, DevOps and Herding Cats
The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is that year that enterprise IT finally “rolls up the sleeves” and gets serious about cloud adoption. But what does this really mean? Basically we’re seeing the era of cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts in the enterprise drawing to close, especially around IaaS and to a certain extent PaaS. CIOs […]
Dreamforce 2013: Three startups to watch
As someone focused on enterprise innovation, particularly related to activities by the CIO and CMO, I pay close attention to startups. While large or established organizations bring scale and process to enterprise technology, startups are where to find people pushing the boundaries of what is possible, interesting, and useful. For that reason, I visited with […]
Dreamforce1 – The Context of Salesforce1
You cannot deal with modern problems using antiquated systems. – Ramon Baez, Senior VP & CIO, HP @RamonfBaez, cited here by @valaafshar I have been to every Dreamforce, and I plan on going to every future one, so long as I remain of sound body and mind. It’s not just…
Space Invasion @ Dreamforce
Last year I made a bit of fun of Oracle, picking on the symbolism in their closed, walled conference setup vs. the open festival-like environment at Salesforce.com’s competing event. Here’s a little pictorial reminder: Dreamforce did not even feel like a conference, rather a Festival – Woodstock, Mardi Gras, SXSW – your pick. Fun. Contrast that to Oracle’s […]
Can an 8-Person StartUp Sell to a CIO? Yes — If You Understand The Social Contract.
Recently Erick Schonfeld was kind enough to invite me to the DEMO conference to both serve as an Enterprise panel judge, and also to join a panel with 3 esteemed CIOs on how to Sell to Enterprise CIOs. I was the Start-Up Guy on the Panel. You can see the whole session below, with the […]
