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The role of CEO is so odd as it is, thinking through the implications of why a co-CEO situation might work is helpful and in this case, Jason Lemkin has mellowed a bit over the years on it. YMMV but it really depends on the situation at hand.
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Sam Altman took to the stage to announce new products and features available from OpenAI at the company’s first-ever developer conference. Here’s a long take that breaks down the talk and the key takeaways.
DataDog announced earnings that beat plans. In its earnings call, it mentions that it’s seeing signs that the cost-cutting activities that dominated the start of this year are plateauing, which hopefully acts as a signal of good news for tech.
Probably not. When hiring salespeople, dig into these points. Known brands are easier to sell, and enterprise SaaS is meaningfully different from SaaS built for smaller businesses. Only the very best salespeople can context switch between SaaS effectively.
Usage-based pricing seems to be rising in popularity. It’s a revenue model that scales value for both parties as a customer uses your product more. What metric you decide to pivot your pricing around is hard to land on. This metric is commonly called the “Value Metric”. Here’s a breakdown of metrics used by some top companies.
Reflections from a diverse set of 8 unicorn founders on things they might have done differently earlier on in building their businesses.
Personalized AI content for brands.
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Automatically qualify, route, and schedule inbound leads to supercharge your sales pipeline.
Software building on top of open-source LLMs, how defensible is that? A lot of AI, much like vertical SaaS, is a winner-take-most market. Investors and founders are racing to reach an inflection point that brings down their CAC and makes market capture increasingly easier.
Shutting down a company often comes with a grieving process, just like a breakup or the loss of a loved one. Give yourself time to process before jumping back into the startup fray – investors tend to watch out for clear rebounds.
Teams with high trust often function more efficiently. Trust requires a degree of transparency, but transparency can be unsettling without context. How you share information is just as important as what you share.
Managers and employees often play this bizarre game where they pretend the employee will be working at the company forever. That’s never the case and the company won’t be around forever either. Honest conversations about career ambitions will help with retention and trust building.
If you haven’t seen the news about OpenAI Dev Day yet, this thread gives a good estimation of what is now possible. It’s pretty mind-blowing.
Bill Gurley gave an impassioned talk at the All-In Summit a few weeks ago that has been held in high regard. Here to give the counterpoint, Steve Blank lays out why he thinks Gurley might have gotten it wrong. Gurley’s talk and Blank’s rebuttal are both well said.
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On the heels of OpenAI releasing functionality that decimated half of the GPT-wrapper companies, here is a contrarian view of the blind spots and weaknesses of OpenAI as this market continues to evolve.
Larger SaaS companies like HubSpot and Clari are making acquisitions to diversify their offerings during a period of low capital funding, increasing user expectations, and growing resentment for running operations on dozens of point solutions.
We’re almost 2 years into this “recession”, and at some point, we’re going to turn a corner. All of that belt-tightening and pain is going to switch and entrepreneurs need to be ready to make the switch to growth again. This is a great read on how to hopefully read the tea leaves and ride the next wave.
Here are 5 great things to think about before you start to look at Europe as a new revenue destination. Staying close to your customers and speaking their language (literally) help.
As interest rates rise and funding dries, boards and leadership everywhere are expecting their GTM teams to operate more efficiently. This article unpacks what this actually involves, from bringing your data and sales teams closer together to refining your ICP and target audience.
Excellent tips on how to upgrade your email nurturing once a prospective customer lands on your website, reads content, or creates an account. Make it personal and optimize for the action you want, not click-throughs.
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Your network becomes your de facto personal board of advisors. Having people who are a few steps ahead of you in the game you’re playing, who you can ask your dumb questions to, is exceptionally helpful. Ask yourself if you have these people, and if you don’t, go and find them.
We’ve all heard the phrase “measure twice, cut once” before. But does it hold true in the startup world, where we’re told to move fast and break things? There are certainly some big decision areas where prudence is needed: layoffs, signing multi-year big contracts, or making big investments. Plan, plan, and plan again.
A really transparent take on publishing your own book in this day and age. Will Larson takes you through his previous books and around the decisions and financials around publishing his latest one. If you’ve ever thought about publishing a book, this is a great primer.
People are everything. Without them, you don’t have a business. When cost-cutting, try to ensure you’re still cultivating an environment that people actually want to be a part of.
Pipedive had 5 co-founders and sold for $1.5bn, so it can work. However, that’s probably the exception and not the rule. Generally, anything with over 3 co-founders starts to get complicated, from both an equity and management perspective.
We’re on the cusp of another potential upswing but we don’t want to get out over our skis. Some really simple advice on how to continue hiring while still avoiding future layoffs.
Rex Woodbury breaks down how AI, creators, and scaled distribution tactics like virality and community-led growth are generating huge momentum across these vectors.
If you’re a consumer goods company trying to raise right now, it’s super hard. So far this year, U.S. investors put just over $130 million into companies at the intersection of e-commerce and consumer products. That’s a whopping 97% decline from the peak in 2021.
This podcast is with Bill Carr, someone who played a pivotal role in shaping Amazon’s digital music and video strategy over the course of 15 years. There are a ton of excellent takeaways, but a highlight for me was how to actually follow the “disagree and commit” principle.
We’ve already seen it with investors not willing to invest in companies that are just wrapping GPT but now it is even more clear. With the ability to query uploaded PDFs, a whole swath of startups just got wiped off the map.
Cautionary tales and sage advice for founders hiring their sales leaders. It’s about understanding the career game they’re looking to play, testing their knowledge of your product, and seeing if they’re going to attract sales talent to your company.
A quick read by Sean Byrnes about when to think about big vs. small teams. The short answer is that it depends, but he breaks it down in an easy-to-understand fashion.
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Surprise surprise, it’s growth. Even if your investors are compassionate, empathetic, and understanding, they still expect you to grow fast.
Google has made over 250 acquisitions. Facebook, Amazon, and Apple have over 100 each. Getting M&A right has been the difference between reasonably successful companies, and hyper-successful ones. But M&A is really hard. This article unpacks some of the elements of great acquisitions in this long read. Most of the case studies are late-stage companies, but the principles remain true if you’re an earlier-stage company looking to acquire.
This post explores the concept of "The Generational Business Trap." The discussion is around how companies, even successful ones, can fall into the trap of becoming a 'generational' business that fails to evolve with changing times and customer preferences. The key to longevity is continuously reinventing oneself, maintaining customer-centricity, and fostering an innovative culture. The post also provides examples and offers practical tips for avoiding this trap.
Being a CEO is a really hard job, but it has some rewards, like choosing who you work with and getting to really own something.
This is a pretty in-depth look at acquisitions from a couple of different perspectives and covers the good, bad, and ugly around how to make them stick and be successful.
Even with the uncertainty in the market these days, expectations show that software purchasing will increase by as much as 8% next year. What kind of impact will that have on quotas especially given the pain CFO’s have exerted over the last year?