Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

An Epitaph for Intrapreneurship

About twenty years ago, before I ran two startups as CEO and served as product-line general manager, I went through an intrapreneurship phase, where I was convinced that big companies should try to act like startups.  It was a fairly popular concept at the time.

Heck, we even decided to try the idea at Business Objects, launching a new analytical applications division called Ithena, with a mission to build CRM analytical applications on top of our platform.  We made a lot of mistakes with Ithena, which was the beginning of the end of my infatuation with the concept:

  • We staffed it with the wrong people.  Instead of hiring experts in CRM, we staffed it largely with experts in BI platforms.  Applications businesses are first and foremost about domain expertise.
  • They built the wrong thing.  Lacking CRM knowledge, they invested in building platform extensions that would be useful if one day you wanted to build a CRM analytical app.  From a procrastination viewpoint, it felt like a middle school dance.  Later, in Ithena’s wreckage, I found one of the prouder moments of my marketing career  — when I simply repositioned the product to what it was (versus what we wanted it to be), sales took off.
  • We blew the model.  They were both too close and too far.  They were in the same building, staffed largely with former parent-company employees, and they kept stock options in both the parent the spin-out.  It didn’t end up a new, different company.  It ended up a cool kids area within the existing one.
  • We created channel conflict with ourselves.  Exacerbated by the the thinness of the app, customers had trouble telling the app from the platform.  We’d have platform salesreps saying “just build the app yourself” and apps salesreps saying that you couldn’t.
  • They didn’t act like entrepreneurs.  They ran the place like big-company, process-oriented people, not scrappy entrepreneurs fighting for food to get through the week.  Favorite example:  they had hired a full-time director of salesops before they had any customers.  Great from an MBO achievement perspective (“check”).  But a full-time employee without any orders to book or sales to analyze?  Say what you will, but that would never happen at a startup.

As somebody who started out pretty enthralled with intrapreneurship, I ended up pretty jaded on it.

I was talking to a vendor about these topics the other day, and all these memories came back.  So I did quick bit of Googling to find out what happened to that intrapreneurship wave.  The answer is not much.

Entrepreneurship crushes intrapreneurship in Google Trends.  Just for fun, I added SPACs to see their relatively popularity.

Here’s my brief epitaph for intrapreneurship.  It didn’t work because:

  • Intrapreneurs are basically entrepreneurs without commitment.  And commitment, that burn the ships attitude, is key part of willing a startup into success.
  • The entry barriers to entrepreneurship, particularly in technology, are low.  It’s not that hard (provided you can dodge Silicon Valley’s sexism, ageism, and other undesirable -isms) for someone in love with an idea to quit their job, raise capital, and start a company.
  • The intrapreneurial venture is unable to prioritize its needs over those of the parent.  “As long as you’re living in my house, you’ll do things my way,” might work for parenting (and it doesn’t) but it definitely does not work for startup businesses.
  • With entrepreneurship one “yes” enables an idea, with intrapreneurship, one “no” can kill it.  What’s more, the sheer inertia in moving a decision through the hierarchy could kill an idea or cause a missed opportunity.
  • In terms of the ability to attract talent and raise capital, entrepreneurship beats intrapreneurship hands down.  Particularly today, where the IPO class of 2020 raised a mean of $350M prior to going public.

As one friend put it, it’s easy with intrapreneurship to end up with all the downsides of both models.  Better to be “all in” and redefine the new initiative into your corporate self image, or “all out” and spin it out as an independent entity.

I’m all for general mangers (GMs) acting as mini-CEOs, running products as a portfolio of businesses.  But that job, and it’s a hard one, is simply not the same as what entrepreneurs do in creating new ventures.  It’s not even close.

The intrapreneur is dead, long live the GM.

The Holy Grail of Enterprise Sales: Defining the Repeatable Sales Process

(This is the first in a three-part restructuring and build-out of the prior post.  See note [1] for details.)

The number one question go-to-market question in any enterprise software startup is:  “do you have a repeatable sales process?” or, in more contemporary Silicon Valley patois, “do you have a repeatable sales motion?”

It’s one of the key milestones in startup evolution, which proceed roughly like:

  • Do you have a concept?
  • Do you have a working product?
  • Do you have any customer traction (e.g., $1M in ARR)?
  • Have you established product-market fit?
  • Do you have a repeatable sales process?

Now, when pressed to define “repeatable sales process,” I suspect many of those asking might reply along the same lines as the US Supreme Court in defining pornography:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced… but I know it when I see it …”

That is, in my estimation, a lot of people throw the term around without defining it, so in the Kelloggian spirit of rigor, I thought I’d offer my definition:

A repeatable sales process means you have six things:

  1. Standard hiring profile
  2. Standard onboarding program
  3. Standard support ratios
  4. Standard patch
  5. Standard kit
  6. Standard sales methodology

All of which contribute to delivering a desirable, standard result.  Let’s take a deeper look at each:

  1. You hire salesreps with a standard hiring profile, including items such as years of experience, prior target employers or spaces, requisite skills, and personality assessments (e.g., DiSC, Hogan, CCAT).
  2. You give them a standard onboarding program, typically built by a dedicated director of sales productivity, using industry best practices, one to three weeks in length, and accompanied by ongoing clinics.
  3. You have standard support ratios (e.g., each rep gets 1/2 of a sales consultant, 1/3 of an SDR, and 1/6 of a sales manager).  As you grow, your sales model should also use ratios to staff more indirect forms of support such as alliances, salesops, and sales productivity.
  4. You have a standard patch (territory), and a method for creating one, where the rep can be successful.  This is typically a quantitative exercise done by salesops and ideally is accompanied by a patch-warming program [2] such that new reps don’t inherit cold patches.
  5. You have standard kit including tools such as collateral, presentations, demos, templates.  I strongly prefer fewer, better deliverables that reps actually know how to use to the more common deep piles of tools that make marketing feel productive, but that are misunderstood by sales and ineffective.
  6. You have a standard sales methodology that includes how you define and execute the sales process.  These include programs ranging from the boutique (e.g., Selling through Curiosity) to the mainstream (e.g., Force Management) to the classic (e.g., Customer-Centric Selling) and many more.  The purpose of these programs is two-fold:  to standardize language and process across the organization and to remind sales — in a technology feature-driven world — that customers buy products as solutions to problems, i.e., they buy 1/4″ holes, not 1/4″ bits.

And, most important, you can demonstrate that all of the above is delivering some desirable standard result, which will be the topic of the next post.

# # #

Notes

[1] I have a bad habit, which I’ve been slowly overcoming, to accidently put real meat on one topic into an aside of a post on a different one.  My favorite example:  it took me ~15 years to create a post on my marketing credo (marketing exists to make sales easier) despite mentioning it in passing in numerous posts.  After reading the prior post, I realized that I’d buried the definition of a repeatable sales model and the tests for having one into a post that was really about applying CMMI to the sales model.  Ergo, as my penance, as a service to future readers, and to help my SEO, I am decomposing that post into three parts and elaborating on it during the restructuring process.

[2] I think of patch-warming as field marketing for fallow patches.  Much as field marketing works to help existing reps in colder patches, why can’t we apply the same concepts to patches that will soon be occupied?  This is an important, yet often completely overlooked, aspect of reducing rep ramping time.

Book Review of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by UCLA Anderson professor Richard Rumelt is by far my favorite book on strategy.  In this post I’ll explain why I love this book, provide an overview of Rumelt’s core concepts, and offer a few thoughts on (and dare I say an enhancement to) his strategy framework.

Why I Love This Book
I love this book for two reasons.  First, he skillfully eviscerates all of the garbage that far too often passes for strategy in corporate America.  It’s borderline therapeutic to watch him tear down case after case of junk that is pitched by executives and consultants as strategy.  His four telltales:

  • Fluff.  Corporate doublespeak that,“uses ‘Sunday’ words and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking.”
  • Failure to face the challenge“Bad strategy fails to recognize of define the challenge.  If you can’t define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy.”
  • Mistaking goals for strategy.  Here at the center of the OKR universe, it’s common to find companies with lists of “statements of desire” rather than “plans for overcoming obstacles.” [1]
  • Bad strategic objectives“Strategic objectives are ‘bad’ when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.”

His dismemberment of bad strategy is so surgical and so deft that it alone is worth the price of the book.

The second thing I love about this book is focus.  As my high school Latin teacher, Mr. Maddaloni, always reminded us:  focus is singular [2].  Most companies — often due to the group consensus process used to create strategy — fail at rising to the challenge of picking and end up with multiple, strategic foci instead of a single, strategic focus [3].

This can reflect avoidance of a dead moose issue threatening the company or simply lead to a laundry list of incoherent and unattainable goals.  Either way, Rumelt’s approach sidesteps this problem by forcing the company to focus on a single issue.

The Core Concepts of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Per Rumelt, “good strategy is coherent action backed up by an argument, an effective mixture of thought and action with a basic underlying structure called the kernel.”

Excerpt:

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:

A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

This is brilliant in its simplicity and in its recognition that a huge part of strategy is an accurate and insightful simplification of the situation:  determining which elements are essential and boiling it down to a short, simple narrative as to “what’s going on”  and ergo what to do about it.

I use a trick to indirectly make this point when I’m in a strategy meeting.  At some point the discussion inevitably fades into, “argh, this is so complicated, there are so, so many things to consider” and room is lost to a sense of hopelessness.  I’ll then ask one of the participants, “can you tell me the story of the last company you worked at?”

You’ll usually hear something like this in response:

  • “We pushed too far up market without the product to support it.”
  • “We got caught in a squeeze between a high-end enterprise vendor and low-end velocity disrupter.”
  • “We got out-marketed by a company with more capital and a more aggressive team.”

I’ll then say, “why do you suppose it’s so easy for us to tell short, simple stories about our prior employers but nearly impossible to make one about us?  What do you think we’ll say in four years about this company?”  It’s the same idea as Rumelt’s — to force simplification of the story to its core narrative and to focus on one thing in the diagnosis.  We do it naturally when looking at the past.  In the present, we resist it like the plague.

I believe that 80% of strategy is the diagnosis — and sometimes the diagnosis simply can’t get made through a group process, but instead has to be decided by the CEO [4] [5].  The other half, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, is the guiding policy and coherent actions.

Thoughts on the Framework
While I love the fact that Rumelt forces executives to diagnose the single most important challenge facing the company — and avoid creating lists of many such challenges — doing so is quite difficult for both good and bad reasons.

The good reason is that it forces “table stakes” conversations, well, “off the table.”  If it’s a discussion about something that everyone in the industry must do (e.g., build quality product, train and scale sales), then it’s almost definitionally not the single most important challenge facing that company.  That’s good, because while those table stakes operations are undoubtedly hard work, they are not strategic.  Operating executives too often confuse the two.

The bad reason it’s difficult is that you might get it wrong.  And in this framework, where everything is tied to a diagnosis about the company’s single-most important challenge, if you get the diagnosis wrong, the whole strategy collapses along with it.

The hardest part I’ve found is balancing immediate vs. longer-term challenges.  For example, say it’s 2003 and you’re at CRM leader Siebel Systems.

  • Your most immediate challenge is likely your direct competition, PeopleSoft or Oracle who are much larger than you and providing broad suites.
  • Your biggest strategic challenge is your indirect competitor Salesforce.com, who is disrupting the business model with software as a service.

Perhaps one of my friends who worked at Siebel at the time can weigh in with an informed comment, but my guess is that Siebel (who was doing $1.4B in annual revenue) minimized Salesforce (who reported doing a mere $65M in its S-1) and, to the extent they would have used a framework like this, would have picked the wrong challenge and gotten the wrong strategy as a result.

Another potential criticism of this framework is that it tends to orient you to competitive threats in a Silicon Valley that would much rather talk about vision (and making the world a better place) than competition.  In my experience, there are few vendors who have the luxury of being totally vision-driven, those who claim otherwise are often practicing revisionism [6], and there’s nothing in the framework, per se, that says the central challenge has to be competition-related.  It could be about building the product, creating distribution channels, or landing your first ten customers.  The framework doesn’t dictate the nature of the challenge, it simply demands that you pick one.

My last thought on the framework is that it appears to be missing an element [7].  In order to make a guiding policy from a diagnosis it helps to have a set of beliefs (or assumptions) as the bridge in between, because these beliefs are neither an explicit part of the guiding policy nor necessarily documented in the diagnosis.

So my slightly revised format of the template is:

  • Diagnosis:  the single most important challenge faced by the company (whether immediate or strategic)
  • Beliefs:  a short list of key assumptions that bridge from the diagnosis to the guiding policy.
  • Guiding policy:  the overall approach to dealing with the challenge
  • Coherent actions:  a set of actions designed to carry out the guiding policy

Or, in English form, given the diagnosis and this set of beliefs, we have chosen this guiding policy which is to be carried out through this set of coherent actions.

Closing Thoughts
I’d say that while I love this book it might have been better titled Bad Strategy, Good Strategy because it’s stronger at tearing apart the garbage that masquerades as strategy than at helping you build good strategy yourself [8].  That said, if you can learn by example and through emulation of the many good strategy examples Rumelt provides, it should be enough to help you and your company not only avoid falling for garbage instead of strategy, but building a good strategy yourself.

I’ll end with the best news of all:  I wrote Rumelt to ask him a few questions and he told me that he’s working on a new book that should address some of my issues.  I can’t wait to read it.

# # #

Notes
[1] OKRs are great and I love OKRs.  But OKRs are for establishing clarity about goals, their unambiguous measurement, and (typically by omission) their priority.  OKRs should be implied by a strategy, but the existence of OKRs (particularly an overly long or incoherent set) does not imply the existence of strategy.

[2] The plural, of course, being foci.

[3] A common case of this is simply failing to make a strategy at all, instead saying (as I’ve actually heard at strategy meetings), “well we’re going to need two financial goals, two sales goals, two product goals, a marketing goal, a customer goal, an alliances goal, and a people goal, so there you go, that’s 10, so let’s just sit down and start making them.  I know the people goal (“attract, develop, and retain the best talent”) and customer goal (“delight our customers”) already, so there’s only 8 more to go.”

[4] I’m slightly twisting Rumelt’s example of a Condorcet Paradox which was really about strategy formulation, not diagnosis, but to the extent that people often gun jump in offering a diagnosis that leads to their desired strategy it still holds.  Adapting his example, the Services person wants a diagnosis that leads to Solutions, the design head wants a diagnosis that leads to Chips, and the systems person wants a diagnosis that leads to Boxes.  The paradox actually occurs not there, but in how each ranks the relative strategies.

[5] If everyone on the team can agree to it, I’d argue it’s almost definitionally a bad strategy.  In a good strategy choices are made, some areas are resources, others are starved, and some are discontinued.  The Chips person voting for Solutions would be, as the saying goes, like the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

[6] In conference talks and podcasts it’s far cooler to talk about being vision-driven than talking about competitive strategies; thus I have found the best companies talk little about the competition externally, but are fiercely competitive internally.

[7] Hat tip to my friend Raj Gossain for figuring this out.

[8] By this I mean that while the book provides examples of good strategy, and a simple framework for expressing it, I find the framework missing an important element (beliefs) and the book doesn’t even attempt to outline a process whereby an executive team can work together to devise a good strategy.

Stopping the Sales & Marketing Double Drowning

I earned my spending money in high school and partially paid for college by working as a lifeguard and water safety instructor. Working at a lovely suburban country club you don’t make a lot of saves. One day, working from the deep-end chair, I noticed two little kids hanging on a lane line. That was against the rules. I blew my whistle and shouted, “off!”

Still young enough to be obedient (i.e., under 11), the two kids let go of the line. The trouble was they couldn’t swim. Each grabbed the other and they sank to the bottom. “Oh my God,” I thought as I dove off the chair to make the save, “I just provoked a double drowning.”

While that was happily the last actual (and yes, averted) double drowning I have witnessed, I’ve seen a lot of metaphorical ones since. They involve adults, not kids. And it’s always the VP of Sales in a deadly embrace with the VP of Marketing. Sure, it may not be an exactly simultaneous death — sometimes they might leave a few months apart — but make no mistake, in the end they’re both gone and they drowned each other.

How To Recognize the Deadly Embrace

I believe the hardest job in software is the VP of Sales in an early-stage startup. Why? Because almost everything is unknown.

  • Is the product salable?
  • How much will people pay for it?
  • What’s a good lead?
  • Who should we call on?
  • What’s the ideal customer profile?
  • What should we say / message?
  • Who else is being evaluated?
  • What are their strengths/weaknesses?
  • What profile of rep should I hire?
  • How much can they be expected to sell?
  • What tools do they need?
  • Which use-cases should we sell to?
  • What “plays” should we run?

You might argue every startup less then $50M in ARR is still figuring out some of this. Yes, you get product-market fit in the single-digit millions (or not at all). But to get a truly repeatable, debugged sales model takes a lot longer.

This painful period presents a great opportunity for sales and marketing to blow each other up. It all begins with sales signing up for (or being coerced into) an unrealistic number. Then, there aren’t enough leads. Or, if there are, the leads are weak. Or the leads don’t become pipeline. Or pipeline doesn’t close.

At each step one side can easily blame the other.

Sales Says Marketing Says
There aren’t enough leads There are, but they’re all stuck with your “generation Z” SDRs
The SDRs are great, I hired them The SQL acceptance rate says they are passing garbage to sales.
The SQLs aren’t bad, there just aren’t enough of them Your reps are greasing the SDRs by accepting bad SQLs
We’re not getting 80% of pipeline from marketing We’re delivering our target of 70% and then some
But the pipeline is low quality, look at the poor close rate The close rate is poor because of your knuckleheaded sellers
Those knuckleheads all crushed it at my last company Your derail rate’s insane
Lots of deals in this space end up no-decision Maybe they derail because we don’t follow-up fast enough
Our message isn’t crisp or consistent Our messaging is fine, the analysts love it
We’re the greatest thing nobody’s ever heard of We’ve got a superior product that your team can’t sell
We’re being out-marketed! We’re being out-sold!

Once this ping-pong match starts, it’s hard to stop. People feel blamed. People get defensive. Anecdotal bloody shirts are waived in front of the organization — e.g., “marketing counted five grad students who visited the booth as MQLs!” or “we lost an opportunity at BigCo because our seller was late for the big meeting!”

With each claim and counter-claim sales and marketing tighten the deadly embrace. Often the struggling CRO is fired for missing too many quarters, guns still blazing as he/she dies. (Or even beyond the grave if they continue to trash the CMO post departure.) Sometimes the besieged CMO quits in anticipation of termination. Heck, I even had one quit after I explicitly told them “I know you’re under attack, but it’s unfair and I’ve got your back.”

Either way, in whatever order, they go down together. Each one mortally wounds the spirit, the confidence, or the pleasure-in-work of the other.

How to Break Out of It

Like real double drownings, it’s hard for one of the participants to do an escape maneuver. The good news is that it’s not hard to know there’s a problem because the mess is clearly visible to the entire organization. Everyone sees the double downing. Heck, employees’ spouses probably even know about it. However, only the CEO can stop it and — trust me — everyone’s waiting for them to do so.

The CEO has four basic options:

  • Take some pressure off. If the primary reason you’re missing plan is because the plan is too aggressive, go to the board and reduce the targets. (Yes, even if it means reducing some expense budget as well.) As Mike Moritz said to me when I started at MarkLogic: “make a plan that you can beat.” Tell them both that you’re taking off the pressure, them them why (because they’re not collaborating), and tell them that you’ve done your part and now it’s time for them to do theirs: collaborate non-defensively to solve problems.
  • Force them to work together. This the old “this shit needs to stop and I’m going to fire one of the two of you, maybe both, if you can’t work together” meeting. A derivation is to put both in a room and tell them not to leave until either they agree to work together or come out with a piece of paper with one name on it (i.e., the one who’s leaving). The key here for them to understand that you are sufficiently committed to ending the bullshit that you are willing to fire one or both of them to end it. In my experience this option tends not to work, I think because each secretly believes they will be the winner if you are forced to choose.
  • Fire one of the participants. This has the effect of rewarding the survivor as the victor. If done too late (before death but after the mortal wound — i.e., after the victor is far along in finding another job), it can still result in the loss of both. To the extent one person clearly picked the fight, my tendency is to want to reward the victim, not the aggressor — but that discounts the possibility the aggressor is either correct and/or more highly skilled. If they are both equally skilled and equally at fault, a rational alternative is to flip a coin and tell them: “I value you both, you are unable to work together, I think you’re equally to blame, so I’m going to flip a coin and fire one of you: heads or tails.” An alternative is to fire one and demote the other — that way it’s very clear to all involved that there was no winner. If fights have winners, you’re incenting fighting.
  • Fire both. I love this option. While it’s not always practical, boy does it send a strong message about collaboration to the rest of the organization: “if you fight, are asked to stop, and you don’t — you’re gone.” Put differently: “I’m not firing them for fighting, I’m firing them for insubordination because I told them not to fight.” Odds are you might lose both anyway so one could argue this is simply a proactive way of dealing with the inevitable.

One of the hardest things for executives is to maintain the balance between healthy cross-functional tension and accountability and unhealthy in-fighting and politics. It’s the CEO’s job to set the tone for collaboration in the company. While Larry Ellison and his disciples may love “two execs enter, one exec leaves” cage fights as a form of corporate Darwinism, most CEOs prefer a tone of professional collaboration. When that breaks down, weak CEOs get frustrated and complain about their executive team. Strong ones take definitive action to define what is and what isn’t acceptable behavior in the organization and put clear actions behind their words.

My Appearance on the Private Equity Funcast

Who else but my old friend Jim Milbery, a founding partner at ParkerGale, could come up with a podcast called the Private Equity Funcast, complete with its own jingle and with a Thunderbirds-inspired opening?

Jim and I worked together at Ingres back in the — well “pre-Chernobyl” as Jim likes to put it.   When we met, he was a pre-sales engineer and I was a technical support rep.  We’ve each spent over 25 years in enterprise software, in mixed roles that involve both technology and sales & marketing (S&M).  Jim went on to write a great book, Making the Technical Sale.  I went on to create Kellblog.  He’s spent most of his recent career in private equity (PE) land; I’ve spent most of mine in venture capital (VC) land.

With a little more time on my hands these days, I had the chance to re-connect with Jim so when I was in Chicago recently we sat down at ParkerGale’s “intergalactic headquarters” for a pretty broad-ranging conversation about a recent blog post I wrote (Things to Avoid in Selecting an Executive Job at a Startup) along with a lot of banter about the differences between PE-land and VC-land.

Unlike most podcasts, which tend to be either lectures or interviews, this was a real conversation and a fun one. While I’m not sure I like the misparsing potential of their chosen title, Things To Avoid in Selecting an Executive Job with Dave Kellogg, I’ll assume the best.  Topics we covered during the fifty-minute conversation:

  • The pros and cons of CEOs who want to get the band back together.
  • Pros and cons of hiring people who have only worked at big, successful companies and/or who have only sailed in fair weather.
  • The downsides of joining a company that immediately needs to raise money.
  • How CMOs should avoid the tendency to measure their importance by the size of their budget.
  • Should companies hire those who “stretch down” or those who “punch above their weight”?
  • The importance of key internal customer relationships (e.g., the number-one cause of death for the CMO is the CRO) and how that should affect the order of your hires when building a team.
  • Feature-addicted founders and product managers (PMs), technical debt, and the importance of “Trust Releases.”
  • Pivoting vs. “traveling” when it comes to startup strategy.
  • The concept of Bowling Alleys within Bowling Alleys, which we both seem to have invented in parallel.  (Freaky.)
  • The difference between knocking down adjacent markets (i.e., “bowling pins”) and pivots.
  • Corporate amnesia as companies grow and surprisingly fail at things they used to know how to do (e.g., they forget how to launch new products).
  • My concept of reps opening new markets with only a telephone, a machete, and a low quota.
  • My pet peeve #7: salespeople who say it’s impossible to sell into an industry where the founders managed already to land 3-5 customers.
  • The difference between, in Geoffrey Moore terms, gorillas and chimps.
  • How there are riches in the niches when it comes market focus.
  • How feature differentiation can end up a painful axe battle between vendors.
  • Thoughts on working for first-time, non-founder CEOs in both the PE and VC context.
  • The difference between approval and accountability, both in formulating and executing the plan.

Here are some other episodes of the Private Equity Funcast that I found interesting:

So my two favorite podcasts are now The Twenty Minute VC on the venture side and The Private Equity Funcast on the PE side.  Check them both out!

Thanks for having me on the show, Jim, and it was a pleasure speaking with you.