I was chatting with an engineer friend of mine the other day who founded a payment processing startup about ten years ago. These days he mainly codes, but he was a founder, back in 2010–2011. His startup still has one remaining paying customer, a good local pizza place, because he really disliked selling the product.

Most of the startups that I see fail don’t make it because they do not achieve product-market fit. …

One of the reasons I’ve written these resource pages on my website is for startups that are either not located in the Bay Area, so it would be difficult for them to work with me in person, or perhaps they work in a vertical market where I lack expertise, so I might not be the best person to advise them.

Many of the founders that I work with initially contact me about sales issues, but eventually, they begin asking me about fundraising, either in the form of “when should I fundraise?,” “how much should I raise?,” “how should I set my valuation?” …

The other night, for reasons unknown to me, I had a memory of Scanner Dan, one of Madison, Wisconsin’s most famous street people. To those unfamiliar with Madison, Scanner Dan is a bearded fellow who, at least but between the years 1995 and 1999, spent a lot of time at the bottom of State Street, Madison’s Pedestrian mall, listening to his “scanner” walkie/talkie, and uttering comments at various female college students walking by. I never really saw him say anything super-lewd or obscene, but, in hindsight, I doubt any of these young women actually wanted to chat with him all that much. Once in a while he’d mutter about his “girlfriend” Meredith, who I’m guessing may have been a UW-Madison sorority girl who bought him lunch a few times in the mid-1990s. …

I’ve been on vacation for the last week, and since I’ve been down in Palm Springs for the last three days, I’ve caught up on the Washington Post ($1 on my Kindle for 6 months, not a bad deal). The post published a piece this morning, The Screen Age, on what it’s like to be 13 years old in 2016. Essentially, what it’s like to be part of Generation Z.

Katherine, the 13-year-old eighth grader profiled in the Post article, spends much of her day — 6 hours, according to the latest stats — on her iPhone, which she received in the fifth grade. She goes back and forth from Fitbit to Instagram to Snapchat. …

I first became acquainted with Tim Sanders’ books about 5 years ago. I first read Love Is The Killer App while running my own company, Metz Consulting, and it really inspired me to form a culture based on treating clients and employees the way I would want to be treated — with kindness, respect, and a healthy sense of challenge.

A few years later I read Sanders’ book on gratitude and confidence, Today We Are Rich, and really enjoyed it. His time at Yahoo and Broadcast.com (reporting to Mark Cuban), was the first period of immense challenges for larger companies on the Internet, and Sanders was a part of the teams that overcame some of the most massive sales and operations challenges of the Internet’s first big wave. If you’re wondering why sales execs with $1M+ run rates read Sanders’ books, it’s because his strategies not only make you a better sales professional, but they make it such that your colleagues and customers enjoy working with you even more. …

I’ve worked in sales for most of my career, and most of the calendars that I’ve used have been totally stinko. I began using the earliest smartphones in 2003 — remember the taco phone — and even the earliest smartphone calendars I used were not that great.

The one that I really liked, Tempo, got acquired by Salesforce about a year ago, and I haven’t heard anything from it since. So, I downloaded Sunrise, a Microsoft product. But now it looks like Microsoft is going to sunset Sunrise, by merging it into Outlook (pun intended) after paying $100M for it.

So what’s a sales VP to do, in order to get CRM integration, and not be late for sales meetings? …

4 Lessons Learned: The Atlassian F-1 and Predictable Revenue Vs. The Flywheel Sales Model

I talk to a lot of startup sales VPs.

In the last year, I’ve begun advising 3 more startups than I previously had. My “day job” is as a VP of Sales at a ag-tech company, and I run a sales conference and emcee a marketing conference.

For the last 10 years, Aaron “Air” Ross’ book Predictable Revenue, has been the boilerplate sales model for practically every SaaS company that I’ve come across. When the RingCentral S-1 came out about three years ago, I pored over the entire document for hours, trying to suss out every single customer metric I could — average revenue per user, account size, churn, etc. …

Music I’ve Caught (& Missed) This October

It’s been a really long while since I’ve written a music blog post. In fact, it’s been so long that my Amazon aStore for out-of-print music is practically obsolete. Most of that music is now back in print on Spotify or Apple Music.

Since I’ve taken the plunge on a family membership of Apple Music in the last month — a great deal if you’re buying it for 6 people — my musical tastes have expanded a bit. With Halloween coming up, each selection leans towards the ethereal or slightly spooky.

1. The Bones of What You Believe — CHVRCHES — I don’t know how I missed this one two years ago. Great electro-pop sort of like Kate Bush meets Passion Pit, but far less annoying than either one. …