Kellblog covers topics related to starting, leading, and scaling enterprise software startups including strategy, marketing, positioning, messaging, management, go-to-market, SaaS metrics, and venture capital financing.
Just a quick post to publish the slides from the talk I gave today at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona on the top 5 mistakes in scale-up. Thanks so much to everyone who attended, stuck around for the AMA session afterwards, and gave me feedback or asked me questions at the conference.
If you have trouble accessing these, please let me know and I can try to switch file sharing platforms. I like Slideshare for the embed capability, but I’m told they now paywall off my stuff and I haven’t fully researched how and if I can fix that. Leave a comment if you have troubles so I’ll know to go look.
I loved the PPT. Actually, do you have more material around point 2 that you made? Or a recording?
I’d love to read a whole book about staffing $0-10m vs $10m-$100m.
Tangential to tech, a company I am working with current is in the first phase, and I’ve noticed I’m struggling after bringing on too many ‘scale it’ people on the marketing team, rather than ‘work it out’ people.
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, 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).
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
Hey Dave, any chance the session was recorded?
Yes it was and I’ll try to get a video link up soon. Took some vacation after the event.
Hi Dave,
I loved the PPT. Actually, do you have more material around point 2 that you made? Or a recording?
I’d love to read a whole book about staffing $0-10m vs $10m-$100m.
Tangential to tech, a company I am working with current is in the first phase, and I’ve noticed I’m struggling after bringing on too many ‘scale it’ people on the marketing team, rather than ‘work it out’ people.
This presentation hits on some of it.
https://kellblog.com/2020/11/07/unlearning-as-you-scale-presentation-from-a-vc-portfolio-ceo-summit/
Great article Dave! Great reminders to have handy! Should turn this into a poster.