A good entrepreneurial CEO will automatically report on profitability

A good entrepreneurial CEO will automatically report on profitability, without request or prompting.

In fact, a good CEO is focused on the numbers, despite the drama involved in starting any new company. He or she will report the numbers to the investors, other executives, and in an “open books” company, to the whole staff, without really thinking about it.

They’re going to publish how much they’ve made at any particular point in time, how much they plan to make and how they plan to do it, especially if the plan has changed. And they’ll broadcast this intention over and over, until it becomes a reality. And if it isn’t painful sometimes, it isn’t real. (more…)

Questia Media acquired by Gale / Cengage Learning

It was announced today that Gale (part of Cengage Learning) had acquired Questia Media.

I co-founded Questia Media in 1998 with Troy Williams and Justus Baird. We started the company in a studio apartment on the south side of Houston, Texas.

All three of us had been students at Rice University in the mid 90’s, had gone on to other things, and then come back to Houston to found Questia in late ‘98.

I haven’t been involved in the company in a long time, but it is nice to finally see it sold to a strategic acquirer that provides online tools for education, rather than the string of  financial investors who have been involved in most of the company’s history.

We started the company with a vision to “democratize access to knowledge” by making access to a high quality academic library universal. This is literally how we described what we were doing. It was our reason for existence and we worked around the clock.

It wasn’t a picnic, but we had a high-minded mission that we thought we could realistically achieve, and it was exciting.
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Recent post I like from a marketing expert and friend: 5 Reasons your customers don’t listen to you

5 Reasons your customers don’t listen to you | The Invisible Marketing Blog

These are all right on target.

I always read this stuff and think, “Geez, I need to edit my websites…” That’s a definite sign of a useful post.

The shift to Rich Internet Applications is revolutionary… But it can be bad for deadlines.

The last 60 days have been eventful at Black Mesa Ventures and for our new GEOINTELIS online service. I haven’t had much time to blog.

We are in the middle of an industry-wide revolution in the delivery of software, moving from desktop and client/server delivery to web-based Rich Internet Applications (RIA) delivered from the cloud. And our decisions in the last 60 days put us firmly in the middle of the latest wave of that revolution.

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Great TechCrunch post on sales strategies in startups

Coming back to blogging after a little holiday break, I ran across this great post by Matt Bell of Azaleos:
$0 to $20 Million: Ten Hand-to-Hand Sales Tactics

There’s a lot of good stuff here and I’d encourage anyone developing a sales and marketing strategy for an enterprise software start up to read this. There are a ton of articles on software sales, but most of them don’t get the enterprise dynamics quite right. This one gets closer.

The items that stand out for me are items 5 and 6: Once you make an initial sale to an enterprise client, you do have to “move in” with the client and become essential to the operation. And, yes, selling new software takes a lot of “swagger.” Every start up organization needs that swagger in its enterprise sales staff.

The only important thing that I think gets consistently left out in many discussions of enterprise sales is the “project sponsor” dynamic, which we’ve found to be incredibly important. Your entire experience with a particular client is likely to be dependent on the strength or weakness of that relationship, and the rising or falling status of that sponsor within the organization. Your understanding of the organization, and their understanding of yours, comes through the lens of that sponsor. Tough, important stuff that deserves a post of its own.