I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, consultant, angel investor, and blogger focused on enterprise software startups. I am an executive-in-residence (EIR) at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon 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, FloQast, GainSight, Hex, Logikcull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru (cybersecurity training), Jiminny (conversation intelligence), and Scoro (work management).
I previously served on the boards of Alation (data intelligence), Aster Data (big data), Granular (agtech), Nuxeo (content services), Profisee (MDM), and SMA Technologies (workload automation).
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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Hi Dave, this is thought-provoking in different ways. In your slide for the function-led company whether it is product-led or sales-led, or people/narrative-led… at what stage companies figure out this function?
I see many founders have an average product gaining traction because they are sales-led (founders being in sales or marketing background plays a role), but they cannot sustain it because the product culture and product experience is not the focus. How easy it is for them to change the internal narrative from sales-led to product-led?
PS: I see Tomasz Tunguz too writing his latest post on the same alignment: https://tomtunguz.com/sales-marketing-slope-connected/
My argument is primarily that it’s dangerous to me anything but strategy-led. I’d say typical startups are either product-led or sales-led. Sometimes engineering-led. Usually it reflects the background of the founder so it’s not something you figure out, per se, it’s something that just happens. My belief is, if you’re typical, you’re product-led and the answer is NOT to become sales-led but to strategy-led. Yep, saw Tomasz’s stuff. Great minds :-)
Very nice article! I enjoyed a lot Reading it. Thanks for sharing.
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