Topic
business
- What is a Tech Company?
Ben Thompson had an interesting piece recently thinking through what ingredients make up a "tech" company in today's market. The term has been used for a long time somewhat interchangeably with "startup" since the 200…
- The Magic of Recurring Revenue
Any business that makes money from the same customer more than once can be said to have "recurring revenue." But the term in the SaaS universe has a more specific flavor to it, thanks to the unique nature of the busin…
- Why Complexity Sells
Evolution has a mysterious and amazing way of driving relentlessly toward simplicity and specialization: Evolution figured outs its version of simplification. It (if you can imagine it talking) says, “Get all that use…
- On the Tumblr Sale
One of the big events in tech last week was that Verizon offloaded Tumblr to Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company most known for Wordpress. I had my main blog/website on Tumblr back when it first launched in 2007, whi…
- The Arc of Collaboration
In this essay, Kevin Kwok attempts to differentiate between productivity and collaboration, with a focus on how Slack has failed as yet to become the nervous system that combines these things. This take is one of the…
- Growth, Sales, and a New Era of B2B
This talk from a16z's Martin Casado covers how the market for B2B SaaS go-to-market is changing from sales-driven to a marketing-driven. We've been thinking a lot about this lately in the context of Fulcrum — how the…
- Managerial Leverage
Andy Grove is widely respected as an authority figure on business management. Best known for his work at Intel during the 1980s, his book High Output Management is regularly cited as one of the best in the genre of bu…
- On Retention
Earlier this year at SaaStr Annual, we spent 3 days with 20,000 people in the SaaS market, hearing about best practices from the best in the business, from all over the world. If I had to take away a single overarchin…
- Weekend Reading: Term Sheets, Customer Loyalty, and Epictetus
📑 Opening Up the Atlassian Term Sheet This is great to see from a company like Atlassian with “openness” as one of their core values. Their take is that the standard M&A process affords too few protections for the co…
- Andy Grove on Meetings
You hear the criticism all the time around the business world about meetings being useless, a waste of time, and filling up schedules unnecessarily. A different point of view on this topic comes from Andy Grove in his…
- Reaching the Early Majority
Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm is part of the tech company canon. It's been sitting on my shelf for years unread, but I've known the general nature of the problem it illuminates for years. We've even experienced…
- Weekend Reading: Rays on a Run, Apple's Pivot, and Mapping Grids
⚾️ The Rays are a Surrealist's Delight Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They've put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well a…
- Weekend Reading: Product Market Fit, Stripe's 5th Hub, and Downlink
🦸🏽♂️ How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his compan…
- New Things In New Ways, or Same Old Things In Old Ways?
This latest piece from Steven Sinofsky considers product strategy on 2 axes: What problem is being solved and How it is solved The spectrum he paints here runs from the most conservative (old things in old ways, "incr…
- Clippy: The Unauthorized Biography
One of my favorite tech figures, a16z's Steven Sinofsky, gives a history of "Clippy", the helpful anthropomorphic office supply from Microsoft Office. As the product leader of the Office group in the 90s, he gives som…
- Weekend Reading: Gene Wolfe, Zoom, and Inside Spatial Networks
📖 Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art Wolfe's work, particularly his Book of the New Sun "tetralogy", is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on h…
- Disney and the Future of TV
Disney recently announced details on their upcoming "Disney+" direct-to-consumer streaming service at their Investors Day — big news for everyone in the tech and media scene since Disney is one of very few content com…
- Weekend Reading: Running Maps, Thinking, and Remote Work
🏃🏻♂️ On the Go Map Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especia…
- Process Not Products
In his new book Loonshots, author Safi Bahcall uses the concept of phase transitions to analyze how companies work. When a substance changes phase, like water going from solid to liquid, the same exact substance is fo…
- The End of Friction
One of my favorite topics on Ben Thompson's Stratechery, and one that underpins much of his Aggregation Theory, is the role friction plays in economies and cultural forces. Most of the pros (and cons) of internet comp…
- Invisible Asymptotes
Another fantastic piece from Eugene Wei on what he terms "invisible asymptotes" — the invisible barriers companies collide with in growth: One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers.…
- Writing Docs at Amazon
Amazon is famous for its "No PowerPoint" policy for meetings, requiring that those calling meetings for any new idea, project, or effort write a narrative document to describe the ins-and-outs of what's on the table f…
- Pre-Announcing as a Strategy
If you're in any line of product management or product development, you'll be familiar with the argumentation process around defining the product launch. The concept of a "pre-announcement" is something as old as the…
- Counterintuitive Competitive Advantages
Investor Morgan Housel writes here about features that can, at face value, appear to be competitive advantages at one scale, while being destructive disadvantages at another. On being wiped out (local disadvantage) an…
- Modes of Control
I've nearly finished reading Andy Grove's High Output Management. Grove was the one of the founders and CEO of Intel, especially famous for his leadership of the company's shift from design and fabrication of memory t…
- Status as a Service
This post from Eugene Wei has been making the rounds in tech. It's a lengthy article dissecting how status is really the secret currency of success for social products — not individual utility or entertainment. He dra…
- Weekend Reading: Calculator, SaaS Metrics, and System Shock
💻 Open Sourcing Windows Calculator Seems silly, but this kind of thing is great for the open source movement. There’s still an enormous amount of tech out there built at big companies that creates little competitive…
- How Google Sets Goals
I’ve been thinking and reading more about OKRs and how I might be able to implement them effectively — both professionally and personally. The idea of having clearly defined goals over bounded timelines is something w…
- How Investors Think About Ideas
A good overview from YC’s Kevin Hale on how to break down startup ideas: The “solution looking for a problem” trap is all too easy to fall into, and to justify your way out of even if you fall prey to it. I love the a…
- Weekend Reading: Build or Buy, OKRs, and Employee Onboarding
🖥 When to Build and When to Buy: The Lure of Building Software This was one of my favorite reads this week, on the topic of “build vs. buy” in IT organizations. In SaaS, this is one of the most common conversations y…
- HQ2: Understanding What Happened
This piece from Barry Ritholtz does a good job breaking down the real background behind the Amazon NYC HQ issues, how they were attracted and why they bailed: The heart of the opposition to Amazon was how much the cit…
- SaaS Valuations Look Good
Some interesting data on the current state of public SaaS company performance: SaaS multiples look steady: of the 82 SaaS companies we follow, the average public SaaS business is trading at 10.03x revenue while the me…
- Getting to 1,000
I saw this tweet a couple of days back that I thought was interesting: What’s the most interesting or useful “how I did X” blog post you’ve read in the past year? 🤔 Examples:- How I made my first dollar- How we acqui…
- Keith Rabois on This Week in Startups
When I first heard about his company Opendoor (a real estate startup with the goal of creating faster liquidity for home sellers), I started following Keith Rabois. His Twitter account is a good follow. This discussio…
- Weekend Reading: Business Applications, Rays Prospects, and the Florida Panhandle
👨🏽💻 Okta Businesses @ Work 2019 Interesting data here in Okta’s annual report. It’s clear that the way customer’s buy SaaS is very different than the “single-vendor” purchasing preferences from years past. SaaS al…
- 16 Mini Lessons for Startup Founders
This is a good series of bite-sized videos with lessons on various components of sales strategy for startups. Peter Levine of a16z talks through things like channel definitions, marketing vs. sales spend, setting quot…
- Previewing SaaStr Annual 2019
I'm headed out to San Jose, CA next week for the SaaStr Annual conference. It'll be my third in a row; definitely one of the events I most look forward to nowadays. It always brings a great combo of interesting conten…
- Starting in Product Management
This is a brief series for those interested in getting into product management, in four parts. This first post is about how I got into this line of work and the beliefs I’ve formed over the years on the discipline. En…
- Weekend Reading: Shanghai, Basecamp, and DocuSaurus
🇨🇳 195-Gigapixel Photo of Shanghai Shot from the Oriental Pearl Tower, the picture shows enormous levels of detail composited from 8,700 source photos. Imagine this capability available commercially from microsatell…
- Everything Breaks
This is such a stellar piece from Michael Lopp. With a growing business, pains in process are utterly unavoidable, yet critical to be addressed. A couple of highlights — the first on the “rule of 3 and 10”, which is a…
- The End of the Beginning
An excellent talk from a16z’s Benedict Evans on what’s next for tech and the internet.
- Weekend Reading: CAC, Alexander Hamilton, and Flow
🛒 What is Customer Acquisition Cost? This is a great overview of the importance of CAC in a SaaS business. One of the enjoyable things about SaaS is how much you can modify and optimize what you’re doing by measuring…
- Weekend Reading: AV-Human Interaction, iPad Pro, and Buying Out Investors
🚙 How Self-Driving Cars Could Communicate with You Interesting work by Ford’s self-driving team on how robotic vehicles could signal intent to pedestrians. You normally think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber with AV tech. But…
- Right-sizing and Product Scoping
In product teams you’re continually faced with the challenge of scoping. When you build something directly for a customer, for a fee (consulting), the scoping process is explicit and has built-in constraints — custome…
- Fireflies and Algorithms
This is an interesting piece from OpenCorporates on tech disruption in corporate infrastructure: Companies are nothing more than legal constructs. They are artificial persons created by states or courts, and given the…
- All Hands 2018
Spatial Networks is past 50 employees now, with a sizable remote group scattered all over the country. Even though we’ve grown substantially in 2018, we’ve been able to scale our processes, tools, and org chart to mai…
- Weekend Reading: Geocomputation, Customers, and Linear Growth
🎛 Geocomputation with R I’ve had R on my list for a long time to dig deeper with. A while back I set myself up with RStudio and went through some [DataCamp]() stuff. This online book seems like excellent material in…
- The Electricity Metaphor
During this TED talk from 2003, Jeff Bezos compares the Internet revolution to the early years of electrification. Even 15 years ago he was already describing the core philosophy behind his future products, like Amazo…
- The Missing Communication Link
Slack grew huge on the idea that it would “replace email” and become the digital hub for your whole company. In some organizations (like ours), it certainly has, or has at least subsumed most all internal-only communi…
- Breakthrough and Follow-through
On a recent episode of the Knowledge Project podcast, Dr. Atul Gawande compared the relative importance “breakthrough” versus “follow through” innovation: ”We’ve been fantastic at breakthrough innovation, with no real…