Tape Sucks

Our first marketing slogan was "Tape Sucks, Move On." Not too subtle. (Location 192)

When you are a startup trying to sell a new product or service concept, you need a clear sense of where the money is coming from. Put differently, what is your intended customer not going to buy in order to make room for your product or service in his or her spending allocation? Who are you displacing and why? (Location 196)

A challenged product sector is obviously a much better starting point than attacking a category that is favorably regarded. When picking a fight, don't seek out the most formidable opponent. (Location 207)

This focus is hard to maintain: a startup is like a combat zone, a very confusing, unstable, fledgling enterprise where you are "pushing a rope" half the time. Big companies are stable by their own inertia: it is hard to get them to change. A startup is the polar opposite, which is both a strength and a weakness—it wants to change all the time and there is little to keep it in a groove. (Location 231)

It is remarkable how little our strategy changed from dollar zero to a billion in sales. The most important thing we did throughout the journey: resist the ever-present temptation to muck with the strategy. (Location 237)

Building and scaling an effective sales and marketing organization is painstaking work that takes years. Learning how to make a salesperson (a) effective and (b) economical, and then applying that to an increasing number of them requires a detailed, ongoing analysis of how that process works. You simply cannot invest intelligently in revenue generation if you do not understand how to ramp effectiveness and make the underlying economics work. It should be obvious that a sales force that loses money will only accelerate cash burn—in the absence of deep pockets, not a game to be played for very long. (Location 264)

Related to the affordability of a direct sales force, we took the view that the entire realm of marketing needed to be managed as a ramp for sales. Data Domain's VP of Marketing, Beth White ran marketing explicitly as a front-end to sales. We generated leads with marketing programs, and used inside sales staff to qualify leads and set meetings for outside (Location 276)

Yet, there comes a time when the venture must pivot from conserving resources to applying them rapidly, as fast as you know how to do effectively—when that cross-over time comes is not always obvious. The irony is that most ventures seem to spend too much early on, and not enough later on when they could grow faster and pay for it. The question becomes "can you grow faster?" And, if not, why not? That should be a good board meeting discussion. (Location 318)

The turning point comes when your sales activity is solidly paying for itself, and is clearly becoming more profitable with increasing volume. Now you have a virtual money machine and you want to start opening the floodgates. (Location 321)

Accounting is the bastardization of economics. It can be puzzling to see early stage ventures focusing on P&L profitability, as that mentality can choke off growth in a hurry. You should not care much about profits early on. Instead, you care about maximizing growth while maintaining sufficient cash balances to sustain it. (Location 365)

Looking for the perfect resume is a bit like a man looking for the perfect woman—when he finds her, it turns out she is looking for the perfect man, and he ain't it! Moral of the story: it is hard to land a candidate who meets your resume criteria, as you are not that good a catch yet yourself. (Location 392)

We looked for energy, pedigree, passion, ambition, intelligence, intensity, and desire for the job. We staffed many (if not most) of our executive and key managerial roles that way.   Our approach worked so well that we started to prefer this style of hiring, even later on when we could attract "resumes." In fact, it drove a vital ingredient of the Data Domain culture: everybody had something to prove. (Location 398)

The company is a ship that comes into port periodically to report on business. The board members come aboard for the meeting but trundle safely ashore afterward, while ship, captain, and crew go back out to sea, facing whatever is out there. We are the ones lashed to the mast; we will go down with the ship. The board holds interest in a whole fleet of ships, but we, the employees, just have the one we're on—it is profoundly not the same. (Location 528)

Our drive for a set of values in the organization came about gradually, as more people came into the company. We started writing them down and describing them:   Respect   Excellence   Customer   Integrity   Performance   Execution (Location 661)

We valued respect between managers and employees. We promoted many individual contributors to managers. We emphasized how awesome the responsibility is for other people's work lives. They don't "work for you"—we all work for the company. As a manager, you are there to help them succeed. We put you—the manager—in their service. (Location 695)

It is hard to build momentum on a poorly conceived chassis—the time to commit to unyielding quality focus is early, early, early. Short of a major pit stop, it is quite hard to retrofit the quality once you find yourself hurtling down the track. In hindsight, you see you actually had more bandwidth to do this sooner than later. (Location 726)

Customer satisfaction always affected our notion of "a win." A sales contract is not yet a complete win: the end zone is when we have implemented successfully and created a delighted customer. Not just some revenue, but another brick in the wall of building a company one thrilled customer at a time. Selling a deal was great, but we immediately felt the pressure of making sure that customer was successful. (Location 728)

Note: Yup need to actfivate the customer for fjtgure churn reductjon

We traveled alone, made few many-legged sales calls, and booked cheap flights and hotels: everybody tried to save a dime for the company. (Location 733)

Note: Makes sense dont need too many people overlapiing

Be a driver, which we need, not simply a passenger on the ship, which we cannot afford on this leg of the journey. Passengers are ballast, cargo, deadweight freight—they are a resource sink, yet they end up in the same destination as the drivers. That is not right. If you're not sure what you are, find out: do not be passive. Somebody once asked me how he or she would know whether they were a driver, and I answered, "you better find out before we do." In other words, be more demanding of yourself. Are you increasing the company's speed or not? (Location 794)

We had no Management-By-Objectives (MBO) goal setting, and wanted all executives paid on the same metric: growth of the business. We had hurdles on profitability, but the goal was growth, and growth only. No dilution of focus. (Location 798)

You can't know whether your strategy is any good until you are executing it well; therefore, you might as well shift focus from strategy to execution. Put differently, no strategy is better than its execution. When you get better at execution, the strategic issues will crystallize more as well. (Location 817)

Coming from bigger companies, I found the startup experience exhilarating and liberating. Like sailing a dinghy: direct feedback all the time, close to the metal. It's heady, like breathing pure oxygen. Many constraints but few limits. (Location 857)

On weekends I sometimes competed in middle-distance triathlons and marathons, and people wondered how I made time for that. The truth is, I needed it to maintain perspective and clarity of thought—physical health, yes, but even more so, mental health. You rarely get more focused, uninterrupted thinking time than when you are on a run or on a bike for hours on end. The sport also helped steel me mentally for business. (Location 859)