The first time I read Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, I breathed a sigh of relief. Someone had finally written the positioning book that desperately needed to exist — and one that I had long suspected I might someday need to write myself. My reaction came not from the material — which
Saying you want a strategic discussion and walking into a board meeting with a 45-slide operations review deck is like saying you want to eat healthy and driving to Baskin Robbins. The intention and the action are in direct contradiction. And — hint — the action wins every time. If you go
I think we are in the brute-force era of AI. By that I mean that progress is coming less from fundamentally new ideas and more from applying massive amounts of data and compute to existing architectures. Larger pretraining corpora, longer context windows, more GPUs — more of everything. And to be
A few years ago I wrote a post called The Decomposition of Marketing. The argument was that startup CEOs were increasingly breaking marketing apart — moving product marketing under product and moving demandgen under sales — in order to get strong leadership in both product marketing and demandgen without having to find
Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat. The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With, and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it
There's a question I've been mulling for a while now, and I think it's time to write it down: when is it okay to use generative AI in a given business context, and when does it cross a line? I'll focus on
I recently read The Magic Box Paradigm by Ezra Roizen. It's self-published, was first released in 2016 [1] , and you won't find it on most startup reading lists. The writing is uneven and inconsistent. The metaphors are weird. There are too many TLAs (three-letter acronyms). Nevertheless,
I'm a big fan of Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five marketing community he has built. While I have always liked the idea of peer-networking communities, I think they change from vitamin to painkiller in times of rapid change. Why? Because the playbooks haven't been written
When the auto industry was being decimated and jobs offshored to Japan, many of us instinctively reached for our college economics textbook and started thinking about fish and coconuts — the example Paul Samuelson used to explain David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in international trade. Well, if Japan is
Something fun happened today. A reader reached out who had been digging through my early-2000s and 2010s posts trying to understand the history of the software industry. That immediately got my attention because I love people who study history. It’s the best way to understand the present. And a
[This article was previously published in the Topline newsletter; see notes.] The idea was always that, once at scale, software companies could print money. With SaaS, revenue recurred. If you could buy a dollar of annual recurring revenue (ARR) for one, or even two, dollars, then why not buy a
I did this analysis last year and it became a popular post, so I figured I'd do the same retrospective today. Following are the ten most-read Kellblog posts in 2025, regardless of the year in which they were written -- and it includes some golden oldies. 1. What