I saw this piece of creative the other day for a tradeshow ad and loved it. Remember, Ted Codd invented the relational database in 1970 with his paper “A Relational Model for Shared Data Banks.” This PDF of the classic looks about as old as the ad. (Do PDFs age?) Enjoy!
Posted in Uncategorized
I had lunch last week with a senior executive at a major software vendor. I asked him how one of my former (non-MarkLogic) colleagues was doing. His reply:
“Not so well. Expectations were set very high because of his past experience and in the end he didn’t hire strong direct reports and build a strong organization. Worse yet, when he was challenged on the quality of those people, instead of accepting that there may have been problems, he defended them. And defending weak people is the beginning of the death cycle.”
The last sentence caught my attention because it’s a key decision that every manager must make. When your management comes to you and says “your people are weak,” I think you are faced with two choices.
You must be aware that by simply having this conversation that you are, de facto, in deep pucky because a key part of your job is to build a strong organization. Thus this is one of those conversations that you’re never supposed to have, much like one with your spouse on “what we’re going to do about your dalliance.”
As a contrarian and as someone who thinks he sets high people standards, my natural response is to pick the first option. But that is de facto perilous because if your management is telling you that your people are weak, then they have presumably already put some thought to it and made up their mind.
It’s basically paradoxical because defending your people opens you to the “worse yet” argument (as in, “and worse yet, poor Joe can’t even see the problem.”) But not defending people is to admit that they are weak and thus that you have failed to do your job in building a strong organization. See prior comment about this being a conversation you don’t want to have.
But, as a manager, you’re probably going to have it one day and the higher you are in your organization, the more likely this conversation is to arise. Why? Because the higher up you the more everything below you becomes an abstraction. Much of the abstraction rolls nicely into numbers such as sales, gross margin, and sales/head or profit/head. But the one thing that doesn’t is your direct reports.
So, given that this is a “have you stopped beating your wife” conversation, I’d argue the best thing you can do is to avoid it. How? Through a number of means:
Posted in Management
One of my colleagues forwarded me this deck, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which I thought I’d share. It’s based on this book (of the same name) written by BusinessWeek reporter Carmine Gallo.
My favorite points:
One of the advantages of children is that they keep you plugged into pop music. Hence, I’ve had the lyrics of Travie McCoy’s song Billionaire drilled into my head over the past several weeks.
I wanna be a billionaire, so freaking bad
Buy all of the things I never had
I wanna be on the cover of Forbes Magazine
Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen
As it turns out, Forbes thinks there 937 billionaires in the world, so if Travie’s wish ends up granted, he’ll be in the top 0.000014% of the population. With this as context, it did come as a surprise the other day when I stumbled into an advertising supplement in the August 30, 2010 issue of Forbes Magazine entitled So You Want To Be A Billionaire, sponsored by a wealth advisor named Hannah Grove. Part of the supplement’s pitch is to buy a book written by Grove’s partner Russ Alan Price, entitled The Family Office: Advising the Financial Elite, which fetches $150/copy.
While I doubt that any of the information presented is scientific — and I’ve not spent the $150 to find out — most of the time books like these seek to identify supposed patterns that separate the ultra-rich from the regular riff-raff one encounters day-to-day. Since they’re not scientific, the patterns are typically someone’s perception as to how the ultra-rich are different, other than the obvious “they seem to have a lot more money.”
Here are seven rules presented in the Forbes supplement. I don’t believe for a second that anyone is likely to place themselves in the top 0.000014% by following them, but I think seeing the perception an advisor to the ultra-rich (who, mind you, probably isn’t in that club himself) is interesting if not useful. The table aims to differentiate working professionals and the ultra-rich along several dimensions.
Commitment
Self-Interest
Line of Money
Connections
Payouts
Failure
Centered
In some ways the list is interesting — e.g., the attitude towards failure is in my opinion healthy, though I believe that most entrepreneurial people have it. Sometimes it’s almost tautological: saying the ultra-rich focus self-interest on making money is like saying champion athletes are focused on winning. Yes, that’s true: if you meet 10 professional athletes you will find they are very competitive people; so, however, were the 10,000 they beat out over the years on their fight to the top. That is, competitiveness was an enabling, not a differentiating trait.
Anyway, if you like this kind of information, a free teaser download is here and the full $150 book is here.
Posted in Uncategorized
I’ve always loved emergent strategies for many reasons:
Some of my favorite examples include:
While I’d say that MarkLogic’s focus on media was similarly emergent, my personal favorite emergent strategy was actually at BusinessObjects. When analytic applications were the rage, we created a unit to build a high-end CRM analytic application called Ithena. The trouble was we staffed the unit with platform people, not applications people. Since they had basically no idea how to build a CRM app, they kept building enablers, effectively building another layer of platform on top of BusinessObjects. (I kept saying “there’s no app in your app” but nobody wanted to hear it.) When positioned as a CRM analytic application, Ithena was a non-starter. When we repositioned it as BusinessObjects Application Foundation, a platform for building analytic apps, sales took off. By simply calling something what it was — instead of what we wanted it to be –we enabled a new, and quite successful product line.
To pick some more recent examples, I read an article about Groupon in Forbes a few weeks back. Groupon is conjunction of group and coupon and they provide daily deals in a large number of cities where you can, for example, get a massage worth $80 for $35 provided enough other people also take the deal. Groupon gets a cut of the total revenue (often 50%) and the merchant offering the deal gets either a bunch of new customers or the chance to unload some inventory. The company is on track to break $500M in revenue this year and raised its last round at a $1.35B valuation. While I confess I’d not heard of Groupon before the Forbes article, I now get the daily deal email and think it’s a great concept.
And Groupon is also an example of an emergent strategy that morphed several times along the way:
The [first] idea soon morphed into ThePoint.com, an online platform for petitioners to muster support for all sorts of causes. ThePoint launched in November 2007 and drew national press attention for its users’ zany campaigns. One amassed 1,000 people committed to donating millions of dollars toward solving Africa’s aids epidemic–on the condition that u2 front man Bono would retire from public life. Another corralled several thousand supporters of building a dome over Chicago to keep the city warm all year. The publicity helped lure $4.8 million in venture capital from the likes of Sand Hill Road’s NEA. “I figured it was just a matter of time before I had my $400 million company and got my big payout,” quips Mason.
But ThePoint didn’t attract enough eyeballs to live on advertising revenue. One of Mason’s lieutenants, Aaron With, proposed paying for popular Google search terms related to societal issues–such as “make weed legal.” Mason got traffic, just the wrong kind. Obnoxious fans of the band Insane Clown Posse, known as Juggalos, made ThePoint their online playground. As losses mounted in 2008, Mason trudged to With’s house to lay off his friend. “If I was a rational person, I probably would have quit right there,” says Mason.
One promising trend: Some of ThePoint’s most effective campaigns banded consumers together to gain buying power. Mason began featuring a blog that offered readers a different deal from various vendors every day. Having little to lose, his investors encouraged him to pursue the strategy. Groupon–then called Getyourgroupon.com–was born.
I went to a function last night where I heard the hilarious founder of Greendot, Steve Streit, talk about his company’s beginnings. The original idea was a e-commerce site where kids could buy junk online (e.g., http://www.isellcrap.com). This, in turn, begged the question how kids would pay for stuff online, which lead them to the idea of a payments service for kids, which in turn lead to Greendot which, as it turns out, is not focused on kids at all: it serves the 50M Americans who either don’t want or can’t get credit cards with prepaid reloadable Mastercard and Visa cards. His company went public earlier his year and is now worth $2B.
Posted in Strategy
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, blogger, and podcaster. I am an EIR at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to enterprise software, having more than ten years’ experience in each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director roles in companies from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over six years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues.
I love disruptive startups and and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, Gainsight, Hex, Logikcull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, Tableau, and Unaric.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru, Light, Scoro, TechWolf, and Vic.ai. I have previously served on boards including Alation, Aster Data, Granular, Nuxeo, Profisee, and SMA Technologies.
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