sutton020

Yesterday I posted a brief review of Mikkel’s excellent book “Startupland” . For me, the book is also a good opportunity for some reflections and to share some thoughts in relation to Zendesk’s journey. The first date When I stumbled on Zendesk in 2008 I knew absolutely nothing about enterprise software, B2B or SaaS. I had always been a consumer Internet guy, having founded comparison shopping engine DealPilot.com back in 1997 and personalized homepage Pageflakes in 2005. If Zendesk’s website hadn’t been so beautiful and if the product hadn’t been so easy to try and use, Zendesk would never have caught my attention (and I wouldn’t be writing this post now). The nice little buddha, the logo/brand and the tone of voice of the site also helped, massively. Interestingly, if I had been an enterprise software investor, Zendesk probably wouldn’t have caught my attention either, since the website didn’t look like a typical enterprise software website at all. Today the “consumerization of the ...

As some of you may know, my friend  Mikkel , founder and CEO of  Zendesk , wrote a book. It’s called “Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business” and  you can learn more about it here . The hardcover version will be released in about two weeks, but the  Kindle version just became available on Amazon  and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a draft a few weeks ago. The book is a well-written and very personal look back at Zendesk’s amazing success story, which began in a loft in Copenhagen and culminated in the company’s Wall Street IPO earlier this year. It’s both autobiography and “tips & tricks" guide: First and foremost it’s a suspenseful chronicle of the journey of Mikkel and his co-founders Alex and Morten that lets you witness some of the many ups and downs which startupland has in store for entrepreneurs, but it also contains a lot of actionable advice for other founders. It’s an entertaining read, too, and ...

By now you’re probably sick of my infamous animal analogies . Sorry. But I just love them and want to resort to them one more time. :) Namely, what I want to talk about are deers that can morph into elephants, or more generally, smaller animals that can morph into bigger animals. (1)  In other words, I want to talk about account expansions, which are the result of a successful “land and expand” strategy. The premise of this strategy is that it’s usually easier to get a minor commitment from a customer first and then work your way up towards a larger ACV, rather than trying to get a large deal from the get-go. There are different ways how SaaS companies have successfully employed land-and-expand strategies:   Yammer is a classic example. Typically a small team in a company starts to use Yammer for internal communication. Then they add more and more people, usage might spills over to other teams or departments, and eventually Yammer’s sales team can come in and ups...

It seems like my recent post about five ways to build a $100 million business  resonated very well with a lot of people . I also got some really good comments and suggestions, and so I'd like to follow-up with another post on the topic. Introducing: the Brontosaurus! A reader by the name of  " Vonsydow" commented  that another way to get to $100 million is by having 100 customers, each paying you $1 million per year, and mentioned Veeva as an example. True! Veeva's ACV is around $780,000 . That's almost an order of magnitude higher than the $100,000 ACV of the "elephants" category, so it's a different kind of animal. I'd suggest that we call Veeva's customers Brontosaurus (or Apatosaurus , which seems to be the correct name) but I'm open to other suggestions by people who know more about biology (or paleontology) than me. Interestingly, it seems like there are only two Brontosaurus hunters in the SaaS world, Veeva and Workday *. What does...

Inspired by Ben Horowitz’ excellent “Good product managers, bad product managers” post and Stefan Smalla’s “Good leader, bad leader” masterpiece I’ve tried to put together my thoughts on what I think makes a great venture capital investor. Thanks go to my colleagues at Point Nine Capital for their invaluable feedback, in particular Michael, Mathias and Rodrigo, who reviewed an early draft of this post and provided lots of great comments. This post represents our current thinking, which may evolve our time, and some parts are still work in progress. Feedback and discussion with other VCs and entrepreneurs is very welcome. We’re fully aware that we don’t always live up to the ideal of the “good VC” described below , but as Stefan Smalla said in response to a comment on his leadership manifesto: “Nobody is exactly like that, but it's good to move towards that ambition. Inch by inch.” A good VC does everything she possibly can to support her portfolio companies A good VC i...