Throughout my career as a CEO and earlier, when I was in Product Management, and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), I managed to gain significant value and also greatly amplify our company success by working closely with industry analysts. Building and managing these relationships is an art, more than science, and requires consistent effort.

I am surprised how many startups and even larger companies fail to leverage leading analysts and miss out on tremendous benefits and opportunities. It is not a topic often written about and a helpful “how-to” guide is long overdue!

First... Why Listen?

1. Learn from my experience: I have managed to…

If you are bullish on your company’s growth this year, you need to carefully assess your overall go-to-market strategy. Are you still reliant on traditional marketing approaches for lead generation and sales? If so, your strategy is dated and growth will likely be an uphill slog with low conversion and a high CAC.

According to research conducted by OpenView Partners, 98% of MQL’s never even convert. As a go-to-market advisor for Investors and CEOs, I have the chance to meet many companies whose leadership teams pour hard-earned cash flow or venture capital into sales and marketing-led efforts — such as…

A decade ago, log management was commonly used to capture and retain events for compliance and security use cases. As adversaries and their TTP’s grew more sophisticated, simple logging evolved into security information and event management (SIEM) and the power of rule-driven correlation made it possible to turn raw event data into potentially valuable intelligence. Albeit challenging to implement and make everything work properly, the ability to find the so-called “needle in the haystack” and identify attacks in progress was a huge step forward.

Today, SIEM’s still exist, and the market is largely led by Splunk and IBM Q-Radar. Many…

Competing head-to-head in business can be an expensive, cutthroat, and often frustrating effort yielding diminishing returns. Throughout my 25-year experience in Enterprise and SaaS software startups, I have observed countless companies try to pull ahead by “out-innovating”, adding new functionality, or offering cheaper solutions. When this happens, companies tend to converge along the same competitive dimensions and become overly focused on beating one another, and lose sight of the customer. This is a losing battle for vendors, investors, and pretty much everyone involved.

Three times in my career I have been fortunate to be part of a team where we…

I have been a 2-time CEO and 2-time COO hired to help technical founders realize commercial success. I am lucky to have been a part of some great teams in my career. During that time, those same teams have realized over $5B in successful software company exits. Those successes were the result of two things: great people and solutions with what is known as ‘product-market fit’. When one, or especially both are missing, success is less likely, if even possible at all.

Not achieving true product-market fit is not only something that plagues early-stage companies, but I have also witnessed…

Throughout my several decades-long career in the software industry, I have encountered scores of companies that have had great ideas, but never achieved success. They checked all the boxes: they hired a talented team, built great products, established a global presence — yet they were not nearly as successful as they could be. Why not? The complex mix of strategy, messages, products, and overall execution, known as their ‘go-to-market strategy, just wasn’t right. That is one of the primary reasons that over 90% of startups ultimately fail. Unfortunately, just one flaw with a company’s go-to-market can make success seem like…

Set clear goals, communicate in real-time, and other advice for keeping far-flung teams on the same page.

Maintaining a healthy, productive, and fast-moving team that’s located all over the globe can be a real challenge. In my company, much of our work spans multiple offices, with nine different time zones on three continents.

I’ve learned first-hand that to successfully manage a distributed workforce, it’s less about managing offices and much more about managing people, their priorities, and the work they do. …

This is the story of a small, innovative SaaS startup that fought above its weight class, built a meaningful relationship with several multi-billion dollar industry leaders, made millions of dollars, and achieved a spot on center stage.

Yep, that startup is a company I led as the CEO for over 5 years called Redbooth, and we made task and project management software for teams.

But, those successes didn’t happen by accident. How did we do it? In a nutshell, we followed three simple rules. …