An op-ed I wrote for VentureBeat:
Last week, Atlassian made a very smart move by acquiring Trello. While $425 million implies a high multiple (given Trello’s revenue run rate was around $10 million last year), I believe it positions Atlassian to become the next big enterprise software company. I project it will reach a $50 billion market cap in 10 years by taking over software for teams. Here are four reasons why:
An op-ed I wrote for TechCrunch:
Today’s B2B sales and marketing folks struggle with the overwhelming number of channels for finding and reaching new leads. The customer “funnel” continues to expand as buyers do more of their own research before raising their hand to connect with a sales rep. But imagine if you could make the funnel taller by identifying leads when they’re just browsing your site and haven’t yet filled out your “contact me” form, or leads who haven’t yet visited but are likely to be a good fit for your product? That’s hard to do with the primitive tools that are available for sales and marketers today, unless you bring together some very rare assets – which just so happen to all exist at LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the only company with fairly clean, accurate details on pretty much every contact that matters in the business world (unfortunately, most other data providers’ contact info contains 80% garbage, and they can’t really improve it without violating CAN-SPAM laws). LinkedIn also reflects the direction sales is heading with strong channels for thought leadership. Via LinkedIn, you can educate and advocate for your customers vs. just selling to them.
An op-ed I wrote for VentureBeat on why Salesforce launched Wave and the impact that will have on the analytics industry at large:
At Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Monday, Marc Benioff unveiled his company’s much anticipated Wave Analytics Cloud product. Marketed as “analytics for everyone” with a focus on mobility and slick visualizations inspired by video games, Wave aims to bring more analytics to decision makers more quickly.
Wave is great news for Salesforce’s massive customer base. Current customers will gain the ability to easily attain valuable insight via modern dashboards on any device, and to even execute advanced analytical operations on all types of business data. This business-intelligence (BI) approach, which appears to treat customer analytics (sales, customer support, and marketing) as a first-class citizen, is quite a departure from current horizontal BI tools like GoodData, Birst, and Tableau that focus more on performing analytics across a myriad of functions. This Salesforce Analytics Cloud is sure to deliver real business value by offering a platform that’s more specialized for customer needs, which makes sense since most use cases for BI are related to sales and customer analytics.
Why analytics is a great move for Salesforce
Anyone close to Salesforce knows that Analytics Cloud is a huge step beyond the company’s standard reporting capabilities, which have historically been rather limited. Until now, the system really just scratched the surface of a business’ sales data (try to report on something like your sales cycle lengths by lead source over time, and you’ll see what I mean). That said, it was smart of Salesforce to leave analytics up to its AppExchange partners in the beginning, because the company was busy building the SaaS world we all play in today, starting with its customer-relationship management platform. Tackling analytics at that time would have been like running two entirely different companies.
However, over the past couple years, the data needs of modern sales and marketing leaders have grown dramatically with the rise of big data. Customers are hungry for insight, and have been asking why Salesforce doesn’t offer seamless, built-in, advanced analytics. Most companies just don’t want to move data between multiple services, especially if they have rigorous security policies or huge data sets. In this data-driven environment, Salesforce’s customer satisfaction has become heavily dependent on partners it can’t control, making it increasingly important for the company to shift toward a hands-on approach to analytics and meet customers’ needs directly.
(Read More …)
A piece I wrote for The Next Web:
The first product manager (PM) is a crucial unicorn hire that no startup should compromise on. The reason is simple – your PM is responsible for managing your team’s most precious resource: time.
Unfortunately, nearly everyone seems to think they’d make a great PM (engineers, consultants, you name it), but the reality is that most folks just can’t hack it. I’ve worked with countless PMs at huge companies like Yahoo and Google, and over the past two months have interviewed over twenty PM candidates.
Out of all these folks, I’ve only encountered two PMs who actually do the job well … (read more).
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