Ben's Blog

JULY 20, 2011

When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of the quarter.

Hockey Stick 78

Hockey Stick Management Employee Retention 78

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Products can find sources of validation with impressive stats along a number of dimensions, such as high engagement, viral coefficient, or long-term retention. This wasn’t very impressive, but we had two things going for us: A hockey stick shaped growth curve.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

This is going to be BIG.

MARCH 30, 2015

Most internet opportunities were of modest scale – often worth pursuing – but not usually worth taking public. Because most internet business concepts were not capable of productively employing tens of millions of dollars of venture capital does not mean they were bad ideas." In other words, good ideas were oversold as big ideas.

Hockey Stick 60

Hockey Stick Valuation Startup Maryland 60

Up and Running

MARCH 11, 2015

Food, technology, bioscience, services, you need to know the metrics for your model. I’m going to share what the metrics are for a SAS business, which is software as a service, and that’s what we are here at LivePlan, so these are the things that we track on a daily basis. You want to explain those inflection points.

Technical Review 60

Technical Review Software Review Due Diligence Exit Strategy 60