Category Archives: Web/Tech

Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners has a great post on SandHill.com with the Ten Laws for Being Saas-y. Required reading for anyone running a hosted software company or debating whether to jump on the software-as-a-service bandwagon. His ten laws (details on his post) are:

1. Your key business metrics are: CMRR (Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue) and Cash –  “Bookings” is for suckers.

2. It takes at least $300K of CMRR to climb the Sales Learning Curve – Stop at three sales reps until at least two of them are making $100K MRR quotas.

3. Separate your “hunters” and “farmers” – As soon as you’ve climbed the Sales Learning Curve, begin ramping your sales force by hiring renewal-oriented account managers. Keep the hunters moving, and let farmers tend to the crops.

4. It’s a whole new ecosystem – Channels are very hard for SaaS companies to build, so don’t base your plan on SIs and traditional ISVs. You will need to sell directly for a long time.

5. Stay local – Prove your business in North America first. Only after reaching $1M in CMRR should you consider hiring European sales and services execs behind customer demand. Save Asia for post-IPO.

6. One datacenter –  Invest early in backup and disaster recovery, but stick to one data center, at least until well after IPO.

7. Single instance, multi-tenant – Have only one version of the code in production. Really. “Just say no” to on-premise deployments.

8. By definition, your sales prospects are online – Savvy online marketing is a core competence (sometimes the only one) of every successful SaaS business.

9. Constantly trade off cash vs. growth – If you must replenish supplies while still crossing the desert, optimize your growth rate (sales rep recruitment and marketing spending) so that you maximize your recurring revenue run rate when you need to fundraise next.

10. Be prepared to cross the desert – SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front for a multi-year stream of revenue, so it demands enough investment capital to fund 4+ years of runway. Load up for the long trip and pace your consumption of calories!

My latest commentary for public radio’s "Marketplace" aired today. It is headlined, It’s a Transparent Society, So Get Naked.

Here’s a direct link to the audio. Here’s the page that has link to audio and the text. Text below:

Science-fiction author David Brin warned a decade ago that in the future, privacy would be impossible. Our best option would be to live in a "transparent society." Welcome to the future.

Teens and adults today are choosing to publicize where they live, what they believe in, what their friends are like. On the Internet, it’s easier than ever to disclose yourself. Yet we always hear the same thing from concerned parents and employers: What’s happening to privacy?!

It’s easy to dismiss today’s hyper-publicness as the doings of rash teenagers, or egomaniacal bloggers obsessed with their personal minutia — easy, and wrong. In fact, a rational cost-benefit analysis shows good reasons to live a naked life. That’s because there are benefits to transparency.                                                                                                     

Take increased social connectedness. Losing track of childhood friends used to signify adulthood. Now, every old friend is a Google search away. Soon, 50-somethings may still be in touch with their high-school friends. And by disclosing your passions online, you might even make new friends. I know I have. Openness brings people together.

Look, it’s true that transparency has its costs. Down the road, today’s teens may regret posting those drunk pictures and gratuitous blog entries. But since 97 percent of teens and tweens say they belong to a social network, everybody will have a screw-up or two from their adolescence.

This creates what some call "Mutually Assured Embarrassment": If you smear me with that post I wrote at age 15, I’ll spread photos of you sucking on a beer bong.

And transparency isn’t all-or-nothing. Today’s networks have detailed privacy settings you control. As blogger Jeff Jarvis has put it, "Publicness is good so long as we decide how public we want to be." Like it or not, the transparent society is here.

Most of my friends are out on the Web, where we tell the world who we are and what we think. Those who are still fully clothed shouldn’t be surprised if folks start asking, "What are you trying to hide?"

Cal Newport today referred to the comments on my blog and my "freakishly insightful readers". He’s not the first person to tell me this. I am consistently impressed by the caliber of the comments on this blog, and in the future I will highlight the best comments more often.

A few notable comments I’ve saved over the months appear below….Keep ’em coming…

Jackie Danicki on being a foodie:

First of all, most of the people I know who are really passionate and knowledgeable about fine food would rather eat dust than label themselves "foodies". When someone calls themselves a foodie, I often find that they want people to think that they have some special, sophisticated tastes and ideas; when confronted with someone who actually does, the charade becomes all too evident. (I’ve seen this a lot with supposed wine experts.)

You don’t have to be rich to appreciate food, because expensive restaurants are just one of the many places you can find good eats. Maybe your corner deli sells the best corned beef in the city, or the cheesemonger in the next neighborhood makes a damn fine wheel of your favorite cheese, or the nicest farmer at the weekly outdoor market brings you fresh fruit like nothing you’ve ever tasted. Good food is all around, if you look for it.

As for kids, I’m firmly of the view that they should eat no differently than their parents (with obvious exceptions for the sodium restrictions and similar dietary guidelines for the very early years). To paraphrase Nigella Lawson: If I shred good quality, fresh Parmesan over my pasta, why should I expect my child to eat sawdust-like stuff that comes from a plastic drum? It’s not like you’re dressing your kids in tutus and forcing them to speak French if you give them good food from an early age.

Most snobbery is, at its core, pretty dickless. I wouldn’t teach my children to be snobs. I’d be most proud if they could appreciate a stadium hot dog with the same sort of enthusiasm as they would the best chocolate in the world (from L’Artisan du Chocolat in London, believe it or not – beats anything in Belgium or Switzerland).

Don’t try to be a "foodie" because you feel social pressure. Just try to enjoy the food you eat because…well, it’s fun! No need to ruin it with the influence of self-described snobs.

Penelope Trunk on generational generalizations:

Every generation hates generalizations about itself. That doesn’t mean the generalizations are not true. It means generalizations about a group are obscuring to individuals, so individuals gripe about their uniqueness being obscured.

Cal Newport on parenting styles and producing high achievers:

I’ve seen a lot of different "recipes" for stand out achievement. One that seems common among affluent, college-educated young people seems to be an early exposure to getting praise for doing something unusual, which leads to the pursuit of the exceptional or different as being part of your self image. Combine this with a tolerant peer group and a few good breaks, and you have yourself a stand out.

Vince Williams on a man’s supposed "hard" and "soft" sides:

If female sources believe that poetry helps a man get in touch with his soft side, they should shout it from the rooftops.

I don’t believe a well-integrated human personality has a "hard’ side and a "soft" side that co-exist in opposition to each other.

In my opinion, thinking like that just perpetuates useless stereotypes.

I think a person should respond to situations in ‘hard’ ways or ‘soft’ ways, as the occasion demands, regardless of gender, just as in a balanced martial art.

Krishna Mony on what he can’t not do:

I just can’t let someone, worthy of my attention, get away with a weak, hypocritical argument on issues that I care about deeply, especially when it’s obvious that it’s hollow, comes unnaturally seeking not much more than momentary stardom.

It’s fun to watch the brave face (s)he is putting up betrayed by that salty smell of urine running down his/her leg.

Ah, the little things which make a big difference, such as error messages when a piece of software doesn’t work.

Andy Sack points out this error page Google gave him:

The bad news is that Google Docs has just encountered an error.

The good news is that you’ve helped us find a bug, which we are now looking into.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Awesome! Andy says he walks away feeling better about Google than before, even though the software didn’t work.

FeedBurner and PbWiki are two other web sites which have great copy on their product pages — it feels fun and personal to use those products.

Final exams and holiday cheer have left me no choice but to dump a host of great links on you without extensive comment. Followers of my del.ico.us feed have already seen these.

• How should we be thinking about urbanization – a host of responses from experts on the future of the city. I find the notion of a "city" fascinating. I’m still not quite sure what kind of place I want to live in long-term. Here’s one take on what someone loves about city life.
• An angel in the post office – a heart-warming story on "best of craigslist" about a girl who writes a letter to "God" and the an anonymous post office worker’s response.
• John Updike’s review of Ha Jin’s latest – I like the part where he picks apart the phrases and metaphors of Jin that don’t quite work.
• How do the right and left differ on economics? – A break-down from Greg Mankiw, an economist on the right.
• Communication-frequency guilt in a relationship – A thoughtful question from Julia Allison on whether every relationship reaches the "It-Feels-Really-Strange-Not-To-Check-In-Daily stage" – and whether she’s needy if she feels that way.
• Michael Kinsley on Immigration – I read whatever this guy writes, and he seems spot-on with this perspective on immigration. More people are anti-immigrant (not just immigration) than would let on.
• Personal essay on divorce and a haircut – A well-written, empathetic reflection piece from a guy who divorces his wife, and the emotions that go along with that.
• One minute lectures from Penn professors – Great mind grenades in under two minutes on video from Penn profs.
• Hotel maids don’t clean your glasses – Hidden camera video on how hotel maids do so little when they clean your room. Disgusting. You can’t think too much about the sanitary conditions of hotel rooms (just like you can’t think about sanitary nature of most fast food).
• NYT Magazine Ideas of 2007 – Stimulating as always.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the blogosphere on the race/IQ debate – will be working my way through those articles in the next couple weeks.