It did not take long for the daily rhythms of prosperity to establish themselves at Hungry Ghost Coffee Bar and Café, a recent arrival in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. The café bustles, and makes its money, in the morning, when commuters line up for a handcrafted caffeine charge on their way to the subway. Around  Continue Reading »

This week at Dreamforce, cloud applications businesses will come together to celebrate product announcements, impressive growth, partnerships and much more. That momentum is also reflected in all-time-high valuations, with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies trading at an average of 12 times last-twelve-months revenue. Unfortunately, high valuations come with equally high growth expectations. The expectation that you need  Continue Reading »

This is part 3 of a 3 part series. Read Part 2 Here. This is the final installment in a series of blogs about a set of five executive roundtables I facilitated at last week’s Dreamforce on the topic of Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption. In the first part of each session  Continue Reading »

This is part 2 of a 3 part series. Read Part 1 Here. In the previous post, I reported out on a series of executive roundtables, summarizing the participants’ prioritization of disruptive technologies based on their current impact on their industries and companies. In summary prioritized order, the technologies discussed were: Data Science Cloud Mobile  Continue Reading »

This is Part 1 of a 3 part series. Okay, it wasn’t exactly the World Series of Poker, but at Dreamforce this week I hosted five roundtables at Executive Summit with a total of 68 participants, all VIP guests of Salesforce. The topic was “Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption” (not accidentally the  Continue Reading »

Borders continue to shrink and global markets are increasingly open. But are Canadian startups siezing these unprecedented opportunities? Turns out, they might not be. In fact, most Canadian startups aren’t even doing enough in the US to maximize their success, some suggest. “A Canadian startup that refuses to take Silicon Valley seriously is naive,” said  Continue Reading »

At some point, a startup will exhaust the founders’ networks for recruiting/hiring purposes, and must turn to professional recruiters to fill key positions. When the position is a senior executive role, a professional recruiter often becomes even more necessary. One of the biggest challenges for a startup seeking to use a search firm is that  Continue Reading »

I was recently asked, “Aside from world peace and the elimination of poverty, if you had one wish, what would it be?” At first, I thought, “I would create more time!” But that would just get filled with all of the frenetic work that continually beckons to be done. Instead, I answered, “I would slow  Continue Reading »

We’re not talking politics here, people—we’re talking technology adoption. In any major technology adoption life cycle there are two trajectories of development, the first led by a complex systems model, the second by a volume operations model. Each passes through a series of five states, and to each state there is a peculiar market dynamic  Continue Reading »