One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. The concept can...

What makes a good sales person, how to actually close that deal, and how to build a company that incentivizes your sales reps.

For consumer companies, often when the holy grail of product-market fit is achieved, the company takes off: magic happens, growth unlocks. Enterprise B2B companies face a different challenge. Sometimes, despite achievin...

What happens when the bottoms up, organic growth usually associated with consumer companies starts to go…. enterprise? Part of our continuing podcast series (you can listen to part one on user acquisition and part ...

For B2B2C business models, Rampell and Casado discuss growth lessons, the significance of sales expansion in enterprise contexts, and the when and how of building more than one product.

The purpose of category creation, argue the guests in this episode of the podcast, isn’t just about making a dent in the way companies work and changing what people do every day… it’s about setting the ...

Here’s what we know about open source: Developers are the new buyers. Community matters. And there will never be another Red Hat (i.e., a successful “open core” business model … nor do we necessarily thin...

Now that we know to price and plan early, price high — especially for category-creating or “pre-chasm” businesses — how do we handle freemium models?

“Raise prices.” Regular listeners of our podcast have heard this advice more than once. But why is this so key and yet so hard for many technical founders? And how should startups go about raising prices R...

Every so often, we meet founders with unusually strong conviction about solving systems problems. They’ve often lived through the pain of bad software, diagnosed the cause of their suffering, and made it their mission ...

Annealing:  A process that changes the properties of a material to make it more workable. It is a best practice to anneal metals before they are joined together. That way the pieces will stay aligned during the solderin...

In this conversation, which you can also find on the a16z YouTube channel, a16z Enterprise Deal Partner Jad Naous talks with Operating Partner Frank Chen about how decision-making is changing across organizations of all ...

“Crossing the chasm” is a popular concept for almost all new products/startups, and is a useful lens for entrepreneurs to view the theory of innovation. The concept was first coined in the popular book title of the ...

0/ Mastering bottoms up adoption *and* enterprise sales is really hard. Yet many of the fastest growing enterprise companies do. This thread explores some of the considerations and why juggling both motions is a lot more...

Perhaps the single greatest early challenge faced by founders in early markets is going from product to sales — specifically, a repeatable sales process. Occasionally, a product draws the market with such force tha...

0/ Traditional enterprise GTM strategies are being eaten from the bottom by bottom-up adoption (SaaS, open source, dev tooling) and from the top by services.

Nearly every early tech startup at some point gets enamored with the idea of partnering with another tech company. This is usually driven by the heady, very seductive idea that a partnership will accelerate credibility, ...

Services are a well-established way to helping a deployment be successful and help your startup become a strategic advisor to the target customer.