Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: “how could I have possibly prepared for this? How could I know that half our customers would go out of business? How could I know that it would become impossible to raise money in the private markets? How could I…
Visit Site »Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization—Human Resources—should look like. The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want. In theory, they want a well-managed company with a…
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 »Summing it all up We’ve covered quite a bit of ground together since I started this series. Here’s the executive summary: There are simple steps you should take to lay the groundwork for international expansion from the moment you start your company. Before you launch internationally, you should have an explicit, well-articulated strategy. You should assign a qualified executive to…
Visit Site »A startup within a startup Doing a startup is really hard. No one in their right mind would consider doing two startups in parallel, would they? And yet that’s what going international is: a second startup inside your first one. And like any startup, it needs people and money to succeed. Two key questions Once…
Visit Site »OK, I’m going to date myself here. I graduated from college in the early 1980s and entered the professional workforce. Most of you wouldn’t recognize the office I worked in: phones sat on desks, were plugged into walls and were the only way you could communicate with workers not in the office. “Spreadsheets” were largely…
Visit Site »Today, my company Ning, where I serve as chairman and cofounder, is announcing that it has agreed to merge into Glam Media. In this post, I’d like to briefly explain the whats and whys, and to thank a lot of people who have worked very hard to get us to this point. Ning is my…
Visit Site »As data storage costs plummet, the world is storing data that would be impractical to keep just a few years ago. Think video camera feeds, web logs and GPS tracking information. We used to throw away or sample this data, but now we can store and explore it. In the network forensics market, for example,…
Visit Site »The first couple of years of Loudcloud provide a useful illustration of the challenges of rapid international expansion, even in the best-managed companies. The business had taken off like a rocketship from its founding in late 1999—revenue grew from $2M to $55M in a year. While that growth was exciting, it led to a very…
Visit Site »When you recruit an executive, you paint a beautiful picture of her future in your company. You describe in great depth and color how awesome it will be for her to accept your offer and how much better it will be for her than joining that other company. Then one day you realize you must…
Read »Twenty-five years ago, I funded my Stanford MBA by becoming a junkie—a spreadsheet junkie, that is. IBM had just acquired a high-flying Silicon Valley technology company called ROLM, and the IBM execs needed data and analysis to manage and track their progress against their business goals. As a young engineer just entering the business world,…
Visit Site »When we meet with entrepreneurs, the two key characteristics that we look for are brilliance and courage. In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence. The right decision is often obvious, but the pressure to make the wrong decision can be overwhelming. It…
Visit Site »Talk about a business with humble roots. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia met at the Rhode Island School of Design and became roommates in San Francisco in 2007. A prominent design conference was coming to town and the nearby hotels were sold out. Joe and Brian thought it might be both fun and lucrative to…
Visit Site »When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of the…
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 »