I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, consultant, angel investor, and blogger focused on enterprise software startups.
I bring a unique perspective to startup challenges having 10 years’ experience at each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director levels across 10+ companies ranging in size from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of cloud EPM vendor Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs in a competitive market, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of NoSQL database provider MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over 6 years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. I started my career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.
I love disruption, startups, and Silicon Valley and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, Cyral, FloQast, GainSight, MongoDB, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
I currently sit on the boards of Alation (data intelligence), Profisee (master data management), Scoro (work management), and SMA Technologies (workload automation).
I previously sat on the boards of Granular (agtech, acquired by DuPont for $300M), Aster Data (big data, acquired by Teradata for $325M), and Nuxeo (content services, acquired by Hyland / Thoma Bravo).
I periodically speak to strategy and entrepreneurship classes at the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) and Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC).
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Not sure where I came across this one, but “Tactics without Strategy is the noise before Defeat”.
My favorite remains “No plan survives contact with the enemy,” which is usually misattributed. Looks like it’s an evolved paraphrase of von Moltke’s original: gory details at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder
One of my favs as well — similar to the Mike Tyson one in fact!
Just discovered your blog – love the posts! My fav quote on plans:
You need a plan so you know what you’re not doing
Absolutely, I make a not-on-list list as part of every plan.
Great list. Not sure it will ever crack the Top 25, but for those of us who remember the 80s, it’s hard not to remember the A-Team’s Hannibal Smith on planning, “I love it when a good plan comes together.”