Kellblog covers topics related to starting, managing, leading, and scaling enterprise software startups. My favorite topics include strategy, marketing, sales, SaaS metrics, and management. I also provide commentary on Silicon Valley, venture capital, and the business of software.
We’re announcing today that I’m joining the board of directors of Profisee, a leader in master data management (MDM). I’m doing so for several reasons, mostly reflecting my belief that successful technology companies are about three things: the people, the space, and the product.
I like the people at both an investor and management level. I’m old friends with a partner at ParkerGale, the private equity (PE) firm backing Profisee, and I quite like the people at ParkerGale, the culture they’ve created, their approach to working with companies, and of course the lead partner on Profisee, Kristina Heinze.
The management team, led by veteran CEO and SAP alumnus Len Finkle, is stocked with domain experts from larger companies including SAP, Oracle, Hyperion, and Informatica. What’s more, Gartner VP and analyst Bill O’Kane recently joined the company. Bill covered the space at Gartner for over 8 years and has personally led MDM initiatives at companies including MetLife, CA Technologies, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley. It’s hard to read Bill’s decision to join the team as anything but a big endorsement of the company, its leadership, and its strategy.
These people are the experts. And instead of working at a company where MDM is an element of an element of a suite that no one really cares about anymore, they are working at a focused market leader that worries about MDM — and only MDM – all day, every day. Such focus is powerful.
I like the MDM space for several reasons:
It’s a little obscure. Many people can’t remember if MDM stands for metadata management or master data management (it’s the latter). It’s under-penetrated; relatively few companies who can benefit from MDM use it. Historically the market has been driven by “reluctant spend” to comply with regulatory requirements. Megavendors don’t seem to care much about MDM anymore, with IBM losing market share and Oracle effectively exiting the market. It’s the perfect place for a focused specialist to build a team of people who are passionate about the space and build a market-leading company.
It’s substantial. It’s a $1B market today growing at 5%. You can build a nice company stealing share if you need to, but I think there’s an even bigger opportunity.
It’s teed up to grow. On the operational side, I think that single source of truth, digital transformation, and compliance initiatives will drive the market. On the analytical side, if there’s one thing 20+ years in and around business intelligence (BI) has taught me, it’s GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If you think the GIGO rule was important in traditional BI, I’d argue it’s about ten times more important in an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) world. Garbage data in, garbage model and garbage predictions out. Data quality is the Achilles’ heel of modern analytics.
It has the breadth to cover a wide swath of MDM domains and use-cases.
It provides a scalable platform with a broad range of MDM-related functionality, as opposed to a patchwork solution set built through acquisition.
It’s easy to use and makes solving complex problems simple.
It’s designed for rapid implementation, so it’s less costly to implement and faster to get in production which is great for both committed MDM users and — particularly important in an under-penetrated market – those wanting to give MDM a try.
I look forward to working with Len, Kristina, and the team to help take Profisee to the next level, and beyond.
Now, before signing off, let me comment on how I see Profisee relative to my existing board seat at Alation. Alation defined the catalog space, has an impressive list of enterprise customers, raised a $50M round earlier this year, and has generally been killing it. If you don’t know the data space well you might see these companies as competitive; in reality, they are complementary and I think it’s synergistic for me to work with both.
Data catalogs help you locate data and understand the overall data set. For example, with a data catalog you can find all of the systems and data sets where you have customer data across operational applications (e.g., CRM, ERP, FP&A) and analytical systems (e.g., data warehouses, data lakes).
MDM helps you rationalize the data across your operational and analytical systems. At its core, MDM solves the problem of IBM being entered in your company’s CRM system as “Intl Business Machines,” in your ERP system as “International Business Machines,” and in your planning system as “IBM Corp,” to give a simple example. Among other approaches, MDM introduces the concept of a golden record which provides a single source of truth of how, in this example, the customer should be named.
In short, data catalogs help you find the right data and MDM ensures the data is clean when you find it. You pretty obviously need both.
So, you’re thinking of taking a job at a startup, but are nervous about the risk, perhaps having trouble telling one from another, and unsure about knowing what’s really important in startup success. In this post, I’ll share what I consider to be a great checklist for CXO and VP-level positions, which we’ll try to adapt a bit to be useful for all positions.
1. Great core/founding team. Startups are about people. We live in a founder-friendly VC era. Thus, there is a good chance one or all of the founding team will be around, and in influential positions, for a long time. If you’re CXO/VP-level, make sure you spend time with this team during your interviews [1] and make sure you think they are “good people” who you trust and who you’d want to work with for a long time [2]. You might well be doing so.
2. Strong investors. In venture capital (VC) land, you should view investors as long-term partners in value creation. Their investments give them contractual rights (e.g., board seats) and you can assume they will be around for a long time [3]. Companies need two things from their investors: advice (e.g., the wisdom acquired from having built a dozen companies before) and money. While good advice is always important, money is absolutely critical in today’s startup environment where a hot category can quickly evolve into a financial arms race to see which company can “buy” the most customers the fastest [4].
While I won’t do a tiering of Silicon Valley VCs here, you want to see investors with both deep pockets who can fund the company through thick (e.g., an arms race) and thin (e.g., inside rounds) and strong reputations such that other VCs are willing and eager to invest behind them in future rounds [5].
3. Newer company/technology. I’ll give you the hint now that this is basically a list of key factors ranked by difficulty-to-change in decreasing order. So the third hardest-to-change key factor is technology. If you’re considering going to work at a twelve-year-old startup [6], understand that it’s very likely built on twelve-year-old technology premised on a twelve-plus-year-old architecture. While the sales-and-marketing types will emphasize “its proven-ness” you will want to know how much technical debt there is associated with this old architecture.
Great startups are lead by strong technologists who ensure that technical debt is continuously addressed and retired via, e.g., trust releases. Bad startups are feature addicts who pile feature upon feature atop a deteriorating architecture, creating an Augean Stables of technical debt. But even in good startups, routine debt-retirement doesn’t prevent the need for periodic re-architecture. The best way to avoid an architectural mess of either type is to go to a newer startup, led by strong technologists, where the product is most probably built atop a modern architecture and where they definitionally cannot have accumulated a mass of technical debt [7].
4. Clean cap table. I once took a job at a company where a VC friend of mine said, “they have a good business, but a bad cap table.” Since I didn’t entirely understand what he meant at the time, I took the job anyway — but, wow, do I wish I’d spent more time trying to understand the phrase “bad cap table.”
A capitalization table (aka “cap table”) is simply a list of investors, the type and amount of shares they hold, shares held by founders, shares allocated to the stock option pool, warrants held by suppliers and/or debtholders, and along with information about any debt the company has acquired. So, strictly speaking, how could this table be inherently good or bad? It just “is.” Nope. There are good cap tables and bad cap tables and here’s a partial list of things that can make a cap table bad in the eyes of a future investor.
Upstream investors who they don’t know and/or don’t want to work with. That is, who holds the shares matters.
Ownership division that gives either the founders or employees too few shares. Most VCs have the right to retain their percentage ownership going forward so if the company is already 60% owned by VC1 after the Series A and 20% owned by VC2 after the Series B, the new investor may believe that there simply isn’t enough to go around. Strong VCs truly believe in founder and employee ownership and if there isn’t enough of it, they may walk from a deal.
ARR not commensurate with total funding. Say a company has consumed $50M in capital but has only $5M in ARR to show for it. Barring cases with exceptional product development entry barriers, that’s not a great ratio and most likely the result of a pivot, where the company started out on hypothesis A and then moved to hypothesis B. From the new investor’s perspective, the company spent (and wasted) $30M on hypothesis A before switching to hypothesis B and thus has invested only $20M in its current business. While some new investors might invest anyway, others would want some sort of recapitalization to reflect the business reality before investing.
Parasites, such as departed founders or incubators. Founders A and B, aren’t going to be that excited over the long term for making money for founder C while she is off doing a new startup. And why would a future VC want to make money for founder C, when she has already left the company [8]? These are problems that need to be addressed from the viewpoint of a new investor.
Network effects among investors. If VC1 owns 40% and VC2 owns 20% and VC2 works almost exclusively with VC1, then you can assume VC1 has control of the company. This may not be a deal killer, but it may make a new investor wary.
Undesirable structure. While VCs almost always buy preferred shares (as opposed to the common shares typically held by founders and employees), the specific preferences can vary. New VC investors typically don’t like structure that gives preferred shares unusual preferences over the common because they worry it can demotivate employees and founders. Such structure includes participating preferences, multiple liquidation preferences, and redemption rights.
And that’s only a partial list. At the CXO level, I think you have the right to ask about the cap table, but it’s much harder for job titles below that. So I understand that you won’t always be able to access this information, but here’s what you can do: (1) look at Crunchbase for financial history to try and identify some of these problems yourself, and (2) try to find a VC friend and get his/her opinion on the company. VCs, particularly those at the bigger firms, are remarkably well informed and look at lots of deals, so they can usually give you an inkling about potential problems.
5. Strong market opportunity. I’ve always done best when the need for the product was obvious. Best example: Business Objects in the 1990s — data warehouses were being built and it was obvious that there were no good tools to access them. Business Objects eventually sold for nearly $7B. Best counter-example: MarkLogic in the 2000s — several years after Gartner wrote a note called XML DBMS: The Market That Never Was. That nearly twenty-year-old company is still not liquid, though through exceptional execution it has built a nice business despite strong headwinds; but there was nothing either obvious or easy about it. In my other direct experience, the markets for Ingres (RDBMS), Salesforce.com, and Host Analytics (cloud EPM) were obvious. The market for Versant (ODBMS) was not.
Another test you can apply to the market is the Market Attractiveness Matrix, which positions the type of buyer vs. the need for the product. Selling SFA to sales, e.g., would be in the most attractive category while selling soft productivity improvement tools to HR would be in the least.
Finally, I also like markets where the pricing is tied to something that inherently goes up each year (e.g., number of salespeople, size of stored documents, potentially usage) as opposed to things that don’t (e.g., number of HR or FP&A people, which increases — but in a more logarithmic fashion).
6. Strongest competitor in the market. The problem with obvious market opportunities, of course, is that they attract multiple competitors. Thus, if you are going to enter a competitive market you want to ensure the company you’re joining is the leader in either the overall market or a specific segment of it. Given the increasing returns of market leadership, it is quite difficult to take away first place from a leader without they themselves faltering. Given that hope is not a strategy [9], unless a runner-up has a credible and clear plan to be first in something [10], you should avoid working at runner-up vendors. See the note below for thoughts on how this relates to Blue Ocean Strategy [11].
7. Known problems that you know how to fix. I’ve worked at epic companies (e.g., Business Objects, Salesforce) and I’ve worked at strugglers that nearly clipped the tree-tops on cash (e.g., Versant) and I can assure you that all companies have problems. That’s not the question. The questions are (1) do they get what really matters right (see previous criteria) and (2) are the things that they get wrong both relatively easy to fix and do you know how to fix them?
Any CXO- or VP-level executive has a set of strengths that they bring to their domain and the question is less “how good are you” than “does the company need what you bring?” For example, you wouldn’t want a sales-and-marketing CEO — no matter how good — running a company that needs a product turnaround. The key here is to realistically match what the company (or functional department) needs relative to what you can bring. If you’re not a CXO- or VP-level executive, you can still apply the same test — does the company’s overall and functional leadership bring what the company needs for its next level of evolution?
8. Cultural compatibility. Sometimes you will find a great organization that meets all these criteria but, for some reason, you feel that you don’t fit in. If that happens, I’d not pursue the opportunity because you are likely to both be miserable on a daily basis and not succeed. Culture runs deep in both people and in companies and when it’s a not a fit, it’s very hard to fake it. My favorite, well-documented example of this was Dan Lyons at HubSpot, detailed in his book Disrupted. HubSpot is a great company and I’m pretty sure Dan is a great guy, but wow there was a poor fit [12]. My advice here is to go with your gut and if something feels off even when everything else is on, you should listen to it.
I know it’s very hard to find companies that meet all of these criteria, but if and when you find one, I’d jump in with both feet. In other cases, you may need to make trade-offs, but make sure you understand them so you can go in eyes wide open.
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Notes
[1] A lack of desire to spend time with you during the recruiting process should be seen as a yellow/red flag — either about you as a candidate or their perceived importance of the position.
[2] In this context, “a long time” means 5-10 years. The mean age of high-growth SaaS IPO companies in last year’s IPO class was 14 years.
[3] While “shareholder rotations” are possible (e.g., where firm B buys out firms A’s position) they are pretty rare and typically only happen in older companies (e.g., 10 years+).
[4] In my opinion, VC a few decades back looked more like, “let’s each back 5 companies with $20M and let the best operators win” whereas today it looks more like, “let’s capitalize early and heavily on the increasing-returns effects of market leadership and stuff (i.e., foie-gras) our startups with money, knowing that the market winners will likely be those who have raised the most cash.” Note that while there is debate about whether this strategy yields the best returns (see foie gras link), there is less debate about whether this generates large companies in the market-leader pack.
[5] As one later stage investor told me: “we prefer to work with syndicates with whom we’ve worked before” suggesting larger firms with more deals are preferable upstream and “if it ends up not working out, we’d much rather be in the deal with a highly respected firm like Sequoia, Accel, Lightspeed, or A16Z than a firm no one has ever heard of.” Your upstream investors have a big impact on who is willing to invest downstream.
[6] Quip: what do you call a twelve-year-old startup? Answer: a small business. (Unless, of course, it’s high-growth and within striking distance of an IPO.)
[7] I would argue, generally, that newer startups tend to be built with newer business model assumptions as well. So picking a newer company tends to ensure both modern architecture and contemporary thought on the business model. For example, it’s hard to find a five-year-old enterprise software company built on an on-premises, perpetual license business model.
[8] Or, if an incubator makes itself a virtual cofounder in terms of common stock holdings in return for its incubation services.
[9] i.e., hoping the other company screws up.
[10] Either a segment or a segment that they believe will grow larger than today’s overall market.
[11] I feel obliged to mention that not all non-obvious market opportunities are bad. As a big fan of Blue Ocean Strategy, I’d argue that the best market opportunities are semi-obvious — i.e., obvious enough that once you dig deeper and understand the story that they are attractive, but not so obvious that they attract a dozen ocean-reddening competitors. Of recent enterprise software companies, I’d say Anaplan is the best example of Blue Ocean Strategy via its (emergent) strategy to take classic financial planning technology (hypercubes) and focus on sales planning in its early years.
[12] Note that I am not saying HubSpot is a perfect company and we can argue at great length (or more likely, quite briefly) about the strengths and weaknesses in typical Silicon Valley cultures. And that’s all interesting academic debate about how things should be. What I am saying is that when it comes to you, personally, for a job, why make yourself miserable by joining an organization where you know up-front that you don’t fit in?
Harry’s interview was broad-ranging, covering a number of topics including:
Financing lessons I’ve learned during prior bubble periods and, perhaps more importantly, bubble bursts.
The three basic types of exits available today: strategic acquirer, old-school private equity (PE) squeeze play, and new-school PE growth and/or platform play.
A process view of exiting a company via a PE-led sales process, including discussion of the confidential information memorandum (CIM), indications of interest (IOIs), management meetings, overlaying strategic acquirers into the process, and the somewhat non-obvious final selection criteria.
The Soundcloud version, available via any browser is here. The iTunes version is here. Regardless of whether you are interested in the topics featured in this episode, I highly recommend Harry’s podcast and listen to it myself during my walking and/or driving time.
Business-to-business (B2B) high technology markets are all about the market and only less so about the technology. This is primarily driven by corporate buyer conservatism — corporate buyers hate to make mistakes in purchasing technology and, if you’re going to make one, it’s far better to be in the herd with everyone else, collectively fooled, than to be out on your own having picked a runner-up or obscure vendor because you thought they were “better.” Hence, high-technology markets have strong increasing returns on market leadership. I learned this live, in the trenches, way back in the day at Ingres.
Uh, Dave, please stop for a second. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming out to visit us here at BigCo today. Before you begin your presentation, we wanted you to know that if you simply convince us that Ingres is as good as Oracle that we’re going to chose Oracle. In fact, I think you’re going to need to convince us that Ingres is 30% to 40% better than Oracle before we’d realistically consider buying from your company. You may now go ahead with your presentation.
Much as I hated it on that day, what a great position for Oracle to be in! Somehow, before the product evaluation cage-fight had even begun, Oracle walked into the cage with a 40% advantage — brought to them by their corporate marketing department, and which was all about market leadership.
Why do corporate buyers care so much about buying from market leaders?
Less project risk. If everyone else is buying X, it must be good enough, certainly, to get the job done.
Less embarrassment risk. If the project does fail and you’re using the leading vendor, it’s much less embarrassing than if you’re on an obscure runner-up. (“Well, I guess they fooled us all.”) [1]
Bigger technology ecosystem. In theory, market leaders have the most connectors to other systems and the most pre-integrated complementary technologies.
Bigger skillset ecosystem. Trying to find someone with 2+ years of experience with, e.g., Host Analytics or Adaptive Insights is way easier than trying to find someone with 2+ years of experience with Budgeta or Jedox. More market share means more users means you can find more skilled employees and more skilled partners.
Potential to go faster. Particularly for systems with low purchase and low switching costs, there’s a temptation to bypass an evaluation altogether and just get going. Think: “it’s the leader, it’s $35K/year, and it’s not that hard to change — heck, let’s just try it.”
Thus, relatively small differences in perceived or actual market leadership early on can generate a series of increasing returns through which the leading vendor wins more deals because it’s the leader, becomes relatively larger and thus an even more clear leader, then wins yet a higher percentage of deals, and so on. Life for the leader is good, as the rich get richer. For the others, life is a series of deals fighting from behind and, as they said in Glenngarry Glenn Ross, second prize really is a set of steak knives.
This is why smart vendors in greenfield markets fight for the market leadership position as if their corporate lives depended on it. Sometimes, in this game of high-stakes, winner-takes-all poker companies cross boundaries to create a perception of success and leadership that isn’t there. [2]
When run correctly — and legally — the goal of the market leader play (MLP) is to create a halo effect around the company. So how do you run the market leader play? It comes down to four areas:
Fundraising. Get the biggest name investors [3], raise the most capital, make the most noise about the capital you’ve raised, and use the money to make a few big-name hires, all in an effort to make it clear that Sand Hill Road has thoroughly evaluated the company and its technology and chosen you to be the leader.
Public relations and corporate awareness. Spend a nice chunk of that capital on public relations [4]. Have the CEO speak at the conferences and be quoted or by-line articles in the right tech blogs. Better yet, hire a ghost-writer to author a book for the CEO as part of positioning him/her as a thought leader in the space. If applicable, market your company’s culture (which is hopefully already documented in a one-hundred slide deck). Spend big bucks to hold the biggest user conference in the space (which of course cannot be labeled as a user conferenced but instead an industry event with its own branding). Use billboards to make sure the Digerati and other, lesser denizens of Silicon Valley know your company’s name. Think: shock and awe for any lesser competitor.
Growth. Spend a ton of that capital to hire the biggest sales force, wisely first building out a world-class onboarding and enablement program, and then scaling as aggressively as you can. In enterprise software new sales = number of reps * some-constant, so let’s make sure the number of reps is growing as fast, and perhaps a little faster, than it wisely should be. Build out channels to increase the reach of your fast-growing sales force and don’t be cheap, during a market-share grab, about how you pay them. In the end, Rule of 40 aside, hotness in Silicon Valley is really about one thing: growth. So get hot by buying the most customers most quickly. [5]
Strategic relationships. Develop strategic relationships with other leading and/or cool companies on the theory that leaders work with leaders. These relationships can vary from a simple co-marketing arrangement (e.g., Host Analytics and Floqast) to strategic investments (e.g., Salesforce Ventures invests in Alation) to white label re-sale deals (e.g., NetSuite’s resales of Adaptive Insights as NetSuite Planning), and many others. But the key is to have the most and best strategic relationships in the category.
Denial of differentiation. While you should always look forward [6] when it comes to external communications, when it comes to competitive analysis keep a keen eye looking backward at your smaller competitors. When they see you running the market leader play, they will try various moves to differentiate themselves and you must immediately deny all such attempts at differentiation by immediately blocking them. Back in the day, Oracle did this spectacularly well — Ingres would exhaust itself pumping out new/differentiated product (e.g., Ingres/Star) only to have Oracle immediately announce a blocking product either as a pure futures announcement (e.g., Oracle 8 object handling) or a current product launch with only the thinnest technical support (e.g., Oracle/Star). Either way, the goal is for the mind of the buyer to think “well the leading vendor now does that (or shortly will), too.” Denying differentiation gives the customer no compelling reason to buy from a non-leader and exhausts the runners-up in increasing futile and esoteric attempts at differentiation.
So that, in a nutshell, is how creating a leader is done. But what if, in a five-vendor race, you’re not teed up to be the leader. You haven’t raised the most capital. You’re not the biggest or growing the fastest. Then what are you supposed to do to combat this seemingly air-tight play?
Responding to the Market Leadership Play
I think there are three primary strategic responses to the market leadership play.
Out-do. If you are in the position to simply out-do the flashy competitor, then do it. Enter the VC arms raise — but like any arms race you must play to win. [7] Raise more capital than they do, build your sales force faster, get even better strategic relationships and simply out-do them. Think: “yes, they were on a roll for a while but we are clearly the leader now.” Cloudera did this to Hortonworks.
Two-horse race. If you can’t win via out-do, but have a strong ability to keep up [8], then reframe the situation into a two-horse race. Think: “no, vendor X is not the leader, this market is clearly a two-horse race.” While most B2B technology markets converge to one leader, sometimes they converge to two (e.g., Business Objects and Cognos). Much as in a two-rider breakaway from the peloton, number 1 and 2 can actually work together to distance themselves from the rest. It requires a certain cooperation (or acceptance) from both vendors to do this strategy, but if you’re chasing someone playing the leadership play you can exhaust their attempts to exhaust you by keeping up at every breakaway attempt.
Segment leadership. If you can’t out-do and you can’t keep up (making the market a two-horse race) then have two options: be a runner-up in the mainstream market or a be a leader in a segment of it. If you stay a runner-up in the mainstream market you have the chance of being acquired if the leader rebuffs acquisition attempts. However, more often than not, when it comes to strategic M&A leaders like to acquire leaders — so a runner-up-but-get-acquired strategy is likely to backfire as you watch the leader, after rebuffing a few takeover attempts, get acquired at a 10x+ multiple. You might argue that the acquisition of the leader creates a hole in the market which you can then fill (as acquired companies certainly do often disappear within larger acquirers), but (unless you get lucky) that process is likely to take years to unfold. The other choice is to do an audit of your customers, your product usage, and your skills and focus back on a product or vertical segment to build sustainable leadership there. While this doesn’t preserve horizontal M&A optionality as well as being a runner-up, it does allow you to build sustained differentiation against the leader in your wheelhouse.
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Notes
[1] Or, more tritely, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” back in the day (communicated indirectly via ads like this), which might easily translate to “no one ever got fired for buying Oracle” today.
[2] Personally, I feel that companies that I’ve competed against such as MicroStrategy, FAST Search & Transfer, and Autonomy at various points in their history all pushed too hard in order to create an aura of success and leadership. In all three cases, litigation followed and, in a few cases, C-level executives even went to jail.
[3] Who sometimes have in-house marketing departments to help you run the play.
[4] In accordance with my rule that behind every “marketing genius” is a big marketing budget. You might argue, in fact, that allocating such a budget the first step of the genius.
[5] And build a strong customer success and professional services team to get those customers happy so they renew. Ending ARR growth is not just about adding new sales to the bucket, it’s about keeping what’s in the bucket renewing.
[6] That is, never “look back” by mentioning the name of a smaller competitor — as with Lot’s Wife, you might well end up a pillar of salt.
[7] If you’re not committed to raising a $100M round after they raise a $75M round in response to your $50M round, then you shouldn’t be in an arms race. Quoting The Verdict, “we’re not paid to do our best, we’re paid to win.” So don’t a pick fight where you can’t.
[8] This could be signalled by responding to the archrival’s $50M round with a $50M round, as opposed to a $75M.
When it comes to evaluating a startup’s performance, I think there are two key, orthogonal questions that need to be examined:
Is the company delivering growth?
Is management in control of your business?
Growth is the primary driver of value creation in a software startup. I’m not going to quantify what is good vs. bad growth here – it’s a function of too many other variables (e.g., state of market, stage of startup). For a seed stage company 100% growth (e.g., from $200K to $400K in ARR) is not particularly good, whereas 40% growth off $150M is quite strong. So, the first question is — given the company’s size and situation — is it delivering good growth?
The second question is whether management is in control of the business. I evaluate that in two ways: how often does the company miss its quarterly operating plan targets and how often does the company miss its early-quarter (e.g., week 3) forecast for sales, expenses, and cash burn?
You can combine these two dimensions into a quadrant.
Let’s take a look at companies in each of these quadrants, describe the situation they’re in, and offer some thoughts on what to do.
Moribund Startups
Companies that are moribund are literally on death’s door because they are not creating value through growth and, worse yet, not even in control of their business. They make annual plans that are too aggressive and continually miss the targets set within them. Worse yet, they also miss quarterly forecasts, forecasting sales of 100 units in week 3, 80 units in week 12, and delivering sales of only 50 units when the quarter is done. This erodes the board’s faith in management’s execution and makes it impossible for the company to manage expenses and cash. Remember Sequoia founder Don Valentine’s famous quote:
“All companies go out of business for the same reason. They run out of money.” — Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital
While there may be many reasons why a moribund company is not growing, the first priority needs to getting back in control of the business: setting realistic annual operating plans, achieving them, and having reliable early-quarter (e.g., week 3) forecasts for sales, expense, and cash burn. I think in their desperation to grow too many moribund startups fail to realize that getting back in control should be done before trying to rejuvenate growth and thus die doing neither.
Put differently, if you’re going to end up delivering sub-par growth, at least forecast it realistically so you will still be in control of your business and thus in a far better position to either turnaround operations or pivot to a better strategic place. Without control you have nothing, which is what your business will soon be worth if you don’t regain it.
Stuck Startups
Stuck companies face a different set of problems. The good news is that they are in control of the business: they make and hit their plans, they come in at or above their forecasts. Thus, they can manage their business without the risk of suddenly running out of cash. The bad news is that they’re not delivering sufficient growth and ergo not creating value for the shareholders (e.g., investors, founders, and employees). Stuck companies need to figure out, quickly, why they’re not growing and how to re-ignite growth.
Possible reasons for stalled growth include:
Lack of product-market fit. The company has never established that it solves a problem in the market that people are willing to pay (an amount compatible with your business model) to solve. You may have built something that nobody wants at all, or something that people are not simply willing to pay for. This situation might call for a “pivot” to an adjacent market.
Poor sales & marketing (S&M) execution. While plenty of startups have weak S&M organizations, a lot of deeper problems get blamed by startup boards on S&M. Why? Because most boards/investors want to believe that S&M is to blame for company performance problems because S&M issues are easier to fix than the alternatives: just fire the VP of Sales and/or Marketing and try again. After all, which would you rather be told by doctor? That your low-grade fever and weakness is due to the flu or leukemia? The risk is that through willful misdiagnosis you keep churning S&M executives without fixing (or even focusing on) a deeper underlying problem. [1]
Weak competitive positioning. Through some combination of your product and product marketing, customers routinely short-list you as a contender, but buy from someone else. Think: “we seem to be everyone’s favorite second choice.” This can be driven by anything from poor product marketing to genuine product shortcomings to purely corporate factors (e.g., such as believing you have a fine product, but that your company will not be a winner in the market).
Stuck companies need to figure out, with as much honesty as possible with themselves, their customers, and their prospects, why they are stuck and then take appropriate steps to fix the underlying causes. In my opinion, the hard part isn’t the fixes – they’re pretty obvious once you admit the problems. The hard part is getting to the unpleasant truth of why the company is stuck in the first place. [2]
Unbridled Startups
Like Phaeton driving his father’s chariot [3], the unbridled startup is growing fast, but out of control, and thus risks getting too close to the Sun and burning up or simply smashing into the ground. Unbridled startups typically are delivering big growth numbers – but often those big numbers are below the even bigger numbers in their aggressive annual operating plan. The execs dismiss the plan as irrelevant and tell the board to look at growth and market share. The board looks at the cash burn, noting that the management team — despite delivering amazing growth — is often still under plan on sales and over plan on expenses, generating cash burn that’s much larger than planned.
If the growth stops, these companies burn up, because they are addicted to high cash burn and can suddenly find themselves in the position of not being able to raise money. So to keep the perpetual motion machine going, they’ll do almost anything to keep growing. That might include:
Raising money on an unattainable plan
Raising money on undesirable terms [4] that hurt earlier investors and potentially really hurt the common stock
Spending heavily on customer acquisition and potentially hiding that in other areas (e.g., big professional services losses)
Remember that once the Halo is lost, it’s virtually impossible to get back so companies and executives will do almost anything to keep it going. In some cases, they end up crossing lines that get the business in potentially serious trouble. [5]
Unbridled companies need to bring in “adult supervision,” but fear doing so because they worry that the professional managers they’ll bring in from larger companies may kill the growth, driven by the company’s aggressive, entrepreneurial founders. Thus, the board ends up in something of a waiting game: how long do we bet on the founding/early team to keep driving crazy growth – even if it’s unbridled – before we bring in more seasoned and professional managers? The smart part about this is realizing the odds of replacing the early team without hurting growth are low, so sometimes waiting really is the best strategy. In this case, the board is thinking, “OK let’s give this [crazy] CEO one more year” but poised to terminate him/her if growth slows.
The transition can be successfully pulled off – it’s just hard and risky. I’d argue MongoDB did this well in 2014. But I’d argue that Anaplan did it not-so-well in 2016, with a fairly painful transition after parting ways with a very growth-oriented CEO, leaving the top job open for nearly 9 months [6].
So, the real question for unbridled companies is when to bridle them and how to do so without killing the golden goose of growth.
Star Startups
There’s not much to say about star startups other than if you’re working at one, don’t quit. They’re hard to find. They’re great places to learn. And it’s sometimes easy to forget you’re working at a star. I remember when I joined Business Objects. The company had just gone public the prior year [7], so I had the chance to really dig into their situation by reading the S-1. “This place is perfect,” I thought, “20-something consecutive quarters of profitable growth, something like only $4M in VC raised, market share leadership, a fundamental patented technology, and a great team — I’m critical as heck and I can’t find a single thing wrong with this place. This is going to be my first job at a perfect company.”
That’s when I learned that while Business Objects was indeed a star, it was far from a perfect company. It’s where I learned that there are no perfect companies. There are always problems. The difference between great and average companies is not that great companies have fewer problems: it’s that great companies get what matters right. Which then begs the question: what matters?
(Which is an excellent topic for any startup strategy offsite.)
# # #
Notes
[1] One trick I use is to assume that, by default, we’re average in all regards. If we’re hiring the same profiles, using the same comp plans, setting the same quotas, doing the same onboarding, providing the same kit, then we really should be average: it’s the most likely outcome. Then, I look for evidence to find areas where we might be above or below. This is quite different from a vigilante board deciding “we have a bad sales organization” because of a few misses (or a personal style mismatch) and wanting to immediately replace the VP of sales. I try to slow the mob by pointing out all the ways in which we are normal and then ask for evidence of areas where we are not. This helps reduce the chance of firing a perfectly good VP of sales when the underlying problem is product, pricing, or competition.
[2] And that’s why they make high-priced consultants – a shameless plug for my new Dave Kellogg Consulting business.
[6] Yes, you can argue it’s been a successful IPO since then, so the transition didn’t hurt things and perhaps eventually had to happen. But I’m also pretty sure if you asked the insiders, they would have preferred that the transition went down differently and more smoothly.
[7] I was employee number 266 and the company was already public. My, how times were different back then.
I’ve been making a few presentations lately, so I thought I’d share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week at the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series.
This one’s kind of a romp — it starts with some background on Kellblog (in response to some specific up-front questions they had), takes a brief look back at the “good old days” of on-premises software, introduces my leaky bucket concept of a SaaS company, and then discusses why I need to know only two things to value your SaaS company: the water level of your bucket and how fast it’s increasing.
It kind of runs backwards building into the conclusion that a great SaaS company needs four things.
An efficient sales model. SaaS companies effectively buy customers, so you need to figure out how to do it efficiently.
A customer-centric culture. Once you’ve acquired a customer your whole culture should be focused on keeping them. (It’s usually far cheaper than finding a new one to back-fill.)
A product that gets the job done. I like Clayton Christensen’s notion that customers “hire products to do jobs for them.” Do yours? How can you do it better?
Few founder/CEOs come from a marketing background; most come from product, many from engineering, and some from sales, service, or consulting. But few — ironically even in martech companies — grew up in the marketing department and consider marketing home.
When you combine this lack of experience with the the tendency that some marketing leaders and agencies have to deliberately obfuscate marketing, it’s no wonder that most founder/CEOs are somewhat uncomfortable with it.
But what’s a founder/CEO to do about this critical blind spot? Do you let your CMO and his/her hench-agencies box you out of the marketing department? No, you can’t. “Marketing,” as David Packard once famously said, “is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
I recommend solving this problem in two ways:
One part hiring: only hire marketing leaders who are transparent and educational, not those who try to hide behind a dark curtain of agencies, wizardry, and obfuscation. Remember the Einstein quote: “if you truly understand something you can explain it to a six-year old.”
One part self-education. Don’t fear marketing, learn about it. A little bit of fundamental knowledge will take you a long way and build your confidence in marketing conversations.
The problem is where to begin? Marketing is a broad discipline and there are tens of thousands of books — most of them crap — written about it. In this post, I’m going to list the three books that every founder/CEO should read about marketing.
I have a bias for classics here because I think founder/CEO types want foundational knowledge on which to build. Here they are:
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Marketers frequently use the word “positioning” and after reading this classic, you’ll know exactly what they mean [1]. While it was originally published in 1981, it still reads well today. This is all about the battle for the mind, which is the book’s subtitle.
Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. Ogilvy was the founder of marketing powerhouse agency Ogilvy and Mather and was the king of Madison Avenue back in the era of Mad Men. Published in 1963, this book definitely shows signs of age, but the core content is timeless. It covers everything from research to copy-writing and is probably, all in, my single favorite book on marketing. [2]
Crossing the Chasmby Geoffrey Moore. The textbook classic Silicon Valley book on strategy. Many people refer to the chasm without evidently having even read the book, so please don’t be one of them. Published in 1991, it’s the newest of the books on my list, and happily Moore has revised it to keep the examples fresh along the way.
If I had to pick only one book, rather than suggesting original classics I’d revert to a summary, Kotler on Marketing, an overview written by Philip Kotler [3], author of one of the most popular marketing college textbooks, Marketing Management. [4]
If reading any of the above three books leaves you hungry for more (and if I were permitted to recommend just a few follow-up books), I’d offer:
As a follow-up to Positioning, I’d recommend The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing also by Al Ries and Jack Trout and also written in the same accessible style. This book would place second in the “if I only had one book to recommend” category and while less comprehensive than Kotler it is certainly far more accessible.
As a follow-up to Ogilvy on Advertising, and for those who want to get closer to marketing execution (e.g., reviewing content), I’d recommend The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert Bly. Most founder/CEOs are clear and logical writers who can get somewhat bamboozled by their marketing teams into approving gibberish copy. This book will give you a firmer footing in having conversations about web copy, press releases, and marketing campaigns.
As a follow-up to Crossing the Chasm, I’d recommend Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, an excellent primer on strategy with case studies of great successes and failures and Blue Ocean Strategy, a great book on how to create uncontested market space and not simply compete in endless slug-fests against numerous competitors — which is particularly relevant in the current era of over-populated and over-funded startups. [5]
As founder/CEO you run the whole company. But, for good reason, you might sometimes be hesitant to dive into marketing. Moreover, some marketeers like it that way and may try to box you out of the marketing department. Read these three books and you’ll have the tools you need to confidently engage in, and add value to, important marketing conversations at your company.
[2] Right from the second sentence, Ogilvy gets to the point: “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.” Love that guy.
[3] Of 4 P’s fame. Kotler’s 4 P’s defined the marketing mix: product, place, price, and promotion.
[4] Kotler on Marketing is deliberately not a summarized version of his classic, 700-page textbook, but alas it’s still written by someone who has produced numerous textbooks and nevertheless has a textbook feel. It’s comprehensive but dry — especially by comparison to the others on this list.
[5] I can’t conclude any post on marketing thoughts and thinkers without a reference to one of the great marketing essays of all time, Marketing Myopia, by Theodore Levitt. It’s old (published in 1963) and somewhat academic, but very well written and contains many pithy nuggets expressed as only Levitt could.
I’m Dave Kellogg, technology executive, investor, independent director, adviser, and blogger. I’m also a hiker, oenophile, and fly fisher.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of cloud enterprise performance management vendor Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs in a highly competitive market, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce and CEO at NoSQL database provider MarkLogic. Before that, I was CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B. 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 ClearedIn, FloQast, GainSight, Lecida, MongoDB, Recorded Future, Tableau and TopOPPs. I currently sit on the boards of Alation (data catalogs) and Nuxeo (content management) and previously sat on the boards of agtech leader Granular (acquired by DuPont for $300M) and big data leader Aster Data (acquired by Teradata for $325M).
I periodically speak to strategy and entrepreneurship classes at the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) and Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC).
