In part I, I talked about how up-front investment in a high-caliber strategic business development function helped to save Loudcloud when an existential crisis hit in 2002. But the value of strategic business development didn’t end there. In fact, it was only beginning. Opsware V1: Single product, single customer The EDS transaction closed in mid-August, and…
Visit Site »Businesses don’t grow themselves. One of the most important jobs of a CEO is to aggressively define and pursue a growth agenda for his or her business. Why is this important? Growth typically improves a company’s competitive position and provides increased scale and leverage, and investors clearly value growth. The pursuit of growth continues to…
Visit Site »This series of posts starts off with a short quiz for the startup CEO: Q: Who’s responsible for developing your product? A: That’s easy—Engineering! Q: Who in your company is responsible for selling your product? A: That’s easy, too—Sales! Q: Who in your company has primary responsibility for: Mapping and networking your ecosystem? Building long-term relationships and driving deals…
Visit Site »Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product. Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were…
Visit Site »Call it the enterprise startup conundrum: how do you earn legitimacy if no one will give you an opportunity to become legitimate? The enterprise world is different from the consumer world: barriers to entry are higher, switching costs away from incumbents are bigger, and the risks for failure (for both buyers and sellers) are greater.…
Visit Site »In the first part of this series I discussed the importance of laying the groundwork for a global company up-front. In this part, I’ll talk about developing an explicit strategy to guide your international expansion. What’s your international strategy? International expansion can happen almost by accident—if you’re a consumer Internet company, you get offered a…
Visit Site »In browsing Quora recently, I was struck, but not surprised, by how many people sought advice on how to expand a startup internationally. Not surprised, because for many young companies international expansion ranks with M&A as something that’s easy in concept, but difficult to execute well. (See the many Quora responses, including my own, to Why…
Visit Site »One of the most difficult decisions that a CEO ever makes is whether or not to sell her company. Logically, determining whether selling a company will be better in the long term than continuing to run it stand-alone involves a huge number of factors, most of which are speculative or unknown. And if you are…