Boards
Since many of you are in the midst of presenting your annual marketing budgets to your CEO, CFO, and board, I thought I'd write a quick post to remind people what board members actually care about when it comes to the marketing budget. I understand that, in the
CEO
The cleverest answer I've heard to the question "When would you sell your startup?" is, "When somebody offers me more than I think it's worth." It's clever alright, but it's not that helpful. It's a meta-answer
Leadership
"Phew, we sure have a lot of challenges right now," the frustrated CEO mused after completing a day at the annual planning offsite. "While my executive team is pretty solid day to day, they're too in-the-box. They're not creative. They never have any
Silicon Valley
“You’re fired,” said the general counsel (GC) of the public, multi-billion-dollar software company and I wasn't just happy, I was ecstatic. I’d known this company for a long time. I’d helped their VCs with diligence. I’d worked with them in the early days as
Leadership
I spoke a while back on go-to-market scaling at the 10X CEO Accelerate conference in Deer Valley to about eighty startup CEOs. I dropped a few references to popular business books into the material (e.g., Blue Ocean Strategy, Inside the Tornado, The Crux), as I often do, and discussed
Marketing
Silicon Valley marketing communications are, simply put, not the major league. By comparison to Washington, DC and political communications, we are AAA baseball [1]. In fact, to be less kind, if DC communications are the major league, you could argue that consumer marketing is AAA, and we in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
This is a quick post to highlight my recent appearance on the Data Radicals podcast (Apple, Spotify), hosted by Alation founder and CEO, Satyen Sangani. I've worked with Alation for a long time in varied capacities -- e.g., as an angel investor, advisor, director, interim executive, skit
Management
(Revised 8:56 am 3/19) Looks like I picked the wrong week to be off-grid in Argentina. When I came back on-grid last night, I quickly discovered that the world, or more precisely, my Silicon Valley business world, had basically exploded while I was flyfishing in Patagonia. A few
Predictions
Complete version, see note [1] for details. Yikes, I'm a few weeks later than usual and now slipping into February, so let’s jump right into our ninth annual predictions post before it's too late to publish. A quick reminder that I do these for fun
HR
Just a quick post to highlight my recent appearance on the AI and the Future of Work podcast hosted by my friend Dan Turchin. I joined Dan to discuss my work-in-process 2023 predictions post (which I really need to get finished in the next week). We start out by reviewing
Marketing
If you live in the country and see someone out walking a smaller dog, once in a while it will be dressed like this: That's called a coyote vest and it's pet body armor designed to prevent Bruiser from being taken by a coyote and/or
Management
You've decided you need to replace one of your executives. Hopefully, the executive already knows things aren't going great and that you've already had several conversations about performance. Hopefully, you've also already had several conversations with the board and they either are