Dave Kellogg on Enterprise Software Startups
Imagine you’re walking down a beach and find a watch. You pick it up, inspect its intricate mechanism, admire how precisely all the pieces fit together, and conclude that something so complex and precisely engineered couldn’t possibly have arisen by chance: there must have been a
(Edited 8/5 with expectations for more changes coming.) I often tell founders to "test by doing," so in this post I'll be practicing what I preach. After nearly 20 years of publishing Kellblog for free, I'm introducing subscriptions. I'll start by
In an era where it seems that every conversation is being recorded, there should be a sign outside every board meeting that reads: “Your notetaker is not welcome here.” By “your notetaker,” I mean any AI notetaker. A personal one that follows you from meeting to
Investors have lots of good habits when it comes to metrics. Operators can copy many of them. One habit they shouldn't copy, however, is smoothing. Smoothing has a legitimate purpose. Investors are trying to understand businesses. They're looking for long-term trends and patterns, so they
Today I'm pleased to introduce the Kellblog Companion , a new way to explore Kellblog created by Saurav Chowdhury . It reorganizes decades of posts into a structured knowledge base that's easier to browse by topic, easier to search, and easier to use when you're trying
Founders, chief product officers (CPOs), and chief marketing officers (CMOs) spend a lot of time talking with and listening to customers. As they should. And, by and large, they do it well. But there's one common mistake that many smart, strong-willed, and vision-driven leaders make. Surprisingly,
We're in the middle of an AI boom. Capital is abundant, expectations are high, and nearly every company is trying to position itself as a winner in the coming transformation. Amid all the excitement, a basic challenge remains: separating what exists today from what might exist tomorrow. Customers,
I spend a lot of time thinking about go-to-market efficiency — how companies decide where to invest their marketing dollars, how they measure what's working, and how they improve over time. For years, much of marketing measurement has revolved around attribution — trying to determine which
We’ve decided, after 122 episodes, to put The Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus. Let me explain how I think about that decision. On October 20, 1974, the Grateful Dead played what was then billed as their final show before an indefinite hiatus. The band was burned out. The
The first time I read Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, I breathed a sigh of relief. Someone had finally written the positioning book that desperately needed to exist — and one that I had long suspected I might someday need to write myself. My reaction came not from the material
Saying you want a strategic discussion and walking into a board meeting with a 45-slide operations review deck is like saying you want to eat healthy and driving to Baskin Robbins. The intention and the action are in direct contradiction. And — hint — the action wins every time.
I think we are in the brute-force era of AI. By that I mean that progress is coming less from fundamentally new ideas and more from applying massive amounts of data and compute to existing architectures. Larger pretraining corpora, longer context windows, more GPUs — more of everything. And
A few years ago I wrote a post called The Decomposition of Marketing . The argument was that startup CEOs were increasingly breaking marketing apart — moving product marketing under product and moving demandgen under sales — in order to get strong leadership in both product marketing and demandgen without having
Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat . The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With , and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it
This post addresses the current socially acceptable use of AI in business, particularly with respect to board meetings and strategy