Imagine a world where advertisers invested trillions of dollars in online advertising, yet they couldn’t easily measure the performance of those dollars. Companies like Google and Facebook wouldn’t have grown into the juggernauts they are today. Why do advertisers flock to Google, Facebook, and increasingly Amazon? …

In sales, closing a deal is a celebratory moment with gong-ringing galore. To a salesperson, this is a pinnacle moment of the customer relationship. From an organizational point of view, a newly minted customer means the work is just getting started. …

Kubernetes is complicated so applications can be less so. Kubernetes (a.k.a. K8s) takes care of distributed systems and scaling configurations so that applications builders can focus on the applications they’re building instead of the systems on which they run. Borrowing an analogy from Kubernetes: The Documentary (yes, you should watch…

Since entering the world of unicorns and entrepreneurship 2.5 years ago, I’ve met with more than 700 companies, led a handful of investments (some | of which | are public), and attempted to invest in many more (spoiler alert: VCs compete). Venture capital is one of those fields where feedback…

Look closely. This line doesn’t represent the price of Bitcoin since yesterday morning, but rather the portion of employees who quit their job each month (Data: FRED; Chart: Axios Visuals). The New York Times reported that nearly 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in August 2021 — up from 4…

Just because you’re selling, it doesn’t mean they’re buying. One way to ensure you never get the order is failing to address all of the relevant stakeholders — executives, economic buyers, technical buyers, primary user personas (PUPs), etc. — with the right message at the right time. …

The days of “one-stop shops” are behind us as companies build, buy, and partner to bring more integrated solutions to the market. Sure, companies like Microsoft build their own “walled gardens,” but the reality is that teams partner with hundreds if not thousands of companies to enable their products to…

Growth is the common cure for many startups’ ails, and hiring salespeople is the most frequent antidote founders prescribe. The problem is most founders fail to explore the entire medicine cabinet for other remedies and, frankly, hiring salespeople is hard. Let’s explore the levers beyond hiring that accelerate growth. Your…

Congratulations! It’s time to hire your first salesperson. All salespeople are the same, right? Wrong. In the same way that a dermatologist wouldn’t do orthopedic surgery or a criminal prosecutor wouldn’t draft your Series A legal docs, salespeople have varying skill sets that are applicable depending on the product you’re…