Startups
David Politis’s Startup Founder Survival Guide packages fifty-plus hard-won lessons into a practical reference for founders. My review covers the advice I wish I’d written myself, where I push back, and why familiar wisdom deserves attention before you learn it the hard way.
Boards
Want a strategic board discussion? Don’t bring a 45-slide operations review. Your deck determines the meeting you’ll have, regardless of the stated agenda. Here’s how to design each segment and build slides that support the conversation you actually want.
AI
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
Entrepreneurship
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
AI
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
Enterprise
What were we reading as the enterprise software industry took shape? A stroll through the books that shaped Silicon Valley thinking on marketing, strategy, sales, and software — a reading list for understanding the present through the ideas of the past.
Growth
[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
Boards
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
Boards
The Hippocratic Oath is a well known oath of ethics taken by physicians. It requires them to swear, among other things, to do no harm in dealing with patients. While chatting with a VC the other day, it occurred to me that we should have a similar concept for startup
GTM
Today Dan Teodosiu, Thor Mitchell, and I hosted a Balderton webinar entitled Aligning Product and Go-To-Market (GTM) Using Customer Value Metrics. We are all executives in residence (EIRs) at Balderton -- Dan covers technology, Thor covers product, and I cover go-to-market -- and, in a display of cross-
Finance
"I have a map of the United States ... actual size. It says, Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile. I spent last summer folding it. I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it." -- Stephen Wright (comedian) Much as we build maps as models
Boards
While I could write the equivalent of 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover when it comes to variations on how to get fired as CEO, the purpose of this post is simply to discuss three things CEOs can say to their boards that will perk their ears and get them