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"In the engineer-glorifying culture of Silicon Valley, salespeople are often an overlooked breed. But there's a man who's quietly built his legacy by mastering the art of selling business software. Meet Dave Rudnitsky, senior VP of enterprise sales at Insidesales.com, a software startup that was last valued at roughly $1.5 billion. Although he started in finance, Rudnitsky soon made the jump to sales and carved out an incredible 30-year career, helping grow some of the most groundbreaking tech companies, including Oracle, Netscape, and Salesforce early on - even earning a separate chapter about his prolific sales skills in Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's 2009 book, "Behind the Cloud." "If you're going to build the greatest product in the world, you're going to need the greatest engineers in the world. But if you can't execute on it, you're going to fail," Rudnitsky tells Business Insider. "And executing means selling." Finance to sales Rudnitsky first got into sales for a simple reason: money. In his first job out of college, with payroll software company ADP's finance team, Rudnitsky realized his peers in sales were getting paid a lot more than he was.  "At a minimum 3 times more," he recalls."

Excellent commentary describing how the Enterprise 2.0 IT sales cycle differs from legacy - enterprise 1.0.  A must read for anyone in the software industry!!!! excerpt: If you think Enterprise 1.0 has been retiring gracefully, handing power over to Enterprise 2.0 in a bloodless succession, you haven't talked to a sufficient number of adequately liquored-up people in the trenches. Or you've been forgetting to take your Dilbert vitamins. To understand how individual battles are playing out in these early days of the war for the soul of capitalism, you need to look at the IT sales cycle, where much of the action is concentrated. Why is it important to look at the sales cycle? Because that's where the mix of privately believed and publicly paraded visions collide. It's where salespeople make the tough decision: whether to pander to customers' (or their own) delusions to close a sale, or make a sincere effort to work with prospects to discover the defensible truths, whether or not they help close the sale. The enterprise IT sales cycle used to have a certain leisurely, ritual-like quality to it. Vendors would slowly discover the organization through networking, build up good relationships with the purchasing and IT organizations, and get to know the middle managers of the organization they were targeting. They'd study the organization chart and figure out the best lines of access to the level at which the decision they wanted could be made. Usually, this meant senior executive: VP or higher.

"Pilarinos is one of dozens of startup founders who have graduated from a two-year-old boot camp run by First Round, a venture-capital firm that focuses on early-stage tech startups. The two- to six-week program drills its cadets in important lessons that are part Sales 101, part human psychology seminar, and part tutorials on practical tasks like creating slide decks. The goal is to help startup founders, who may have spent months or years engrossed in arcane product details, sell their vision to the people with the money. And in a funding environment in which the easy money has dried up, the CEO boot camp, known as Pitch Assist, could become increasingly critical as startups fight to secure more financing. Going straight for the jugular The coaches at the boot camp, who are basically First Round partners, don't pull any punches. On the first day, CEOs are put on the spot and made to answer the burning questions investors will have - especially the tough questions for which the CEOs might not yet have answers. "Some of the questions are the sort of holes in the business," First Round partner Bill Trenchard said. "No company is perfect. There's always a weak point in the architecture." First Round First Round normally does only seed rounds of fund-raising. Pitch Assist helps those companies go on to raise their next round. Young CEOs aren't used to talking about those holes. No one starts a sales call by going over their weaknesses. When pitching investors, however, those weak points have to be addressed head-on in the presentation. "If you try to play games or try to hide things, any reasonable investor will notice," Brett Berson, First Round's vice president of platform, said. "And once you've lost that credibility, there's no coming back from that." Berson estimates that it takes about two hours of work to go through each question, but after that startup founders can step back and see the overall picture. The questions become the plot points - the m

"SAFE FINANCING DOCUMENTS The safe (simple agreement for future equity) is intended to replace convertible notes in most cases, and we think it addresses many of the problems with convertible notes while preserving their flexibility. In addition to being simpler and clearer, we intend the safe to remain fair to both investors and founders.During its development the safe was positively reviewed by many of the top startup investors. We believe it's a positive evolution of the convertible note and hope the startup community finds it an easier way to accomplish the same goals. Features of a safe: Unlike a convertible note, a safe is not a debt instrument. Debt instruments have maturity dates, are typically subject to certain regulations, create the threat of insolvency, and can include security interests and sometimes subordination agreements, all of which can have unintended negative consequences for startups. Because the money invested in a startup via a safe is not a loan, it will not accrue interest. This is particularly beneficial for startups, but also better embodies the intention of investors, who never meant to be lenders in the first place. As a flexible, one-document security without numerous terms to negotiate, a safe should save startups and investors money in legal fees and reduce the time spent negotiating the terms of the investment. Startups and investors will usually only have to negotiate one item: the valuation cap. Because a safe has no expiration or maturity date, there should be no time or money spent dealing with extending maturity dates, revising interest rates or the like. A safe still allows for high resolution fundraising. Startups can close with investors as soon as both parties are ready, instead of trying to coordinate a single close with all investors simultaneously. There are four versions of safe, corresponding to the four types of convertible note: Safe Primer Safe: Cap, no Discount Safe: Discount, no Cap Safe: Cap

"One standout in the cloud business is the company's "Office 365" product suite. Nadella took the old Office suite, which charged users every couple of years for a licence, and moved it to the cloud, where users now pay a monthly fee instead. Microsoft hasn't given a revenue breakdown for Office 365, but in the latest quarter, Microsoft said that revenue grew 63% on a constant currency basis over the same time last year. It also now has 22.2 million subscribers, up from 20.6 million subscribers in the previous quarter. Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler forecasts that the cloud version of Office 365 had annual sales trending to $6.5 billion in the most recent quarter. (Source: "Microsoft Office Shines in the Cloud, Azure Will Be Profitable, Says Bernstein," Barron's, April 8, 2016.) That's out of total commercial cloud revenue that Microsoft reported of $10.0 billion in annualized sales. (Source: Microsoft Corporation, op cit.) So Office 365 is growing like crazy, but that's not the only bright spot in Microsoft's cloud business. In the battle for cloud computing services, "Microsoft Azure" is second to Amazon.com, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) "Amazon Web Services" (AWS). However, Microsoft is starting to gain. While Azure has about 10% of the market to AWS's 30%, Azure is becoming bigger and bigger and it's bound to erode Amazon's lead. In the latest quarter, Azure grew 120% on a constant currency basis, which is almost double AWS's growth. (Source: "How Microsoft's Azure Is Giving Stiff Competition to Amazon's AWS," Yahoo! Finance, April 8, 2016.) Again, Microsoft didn't break down revenue for Azure but according to Bernstein's Moerdler, Azure's annual sales run rate is about $1.8 billion. (Source: Barron's, op cit.)"

"Vas Natarajan, partner at Accel: "I wonder if we'll look back at 2016 as the year Microsoft laid the tracks for a huge victory in the cloud wars. There's a major flank happening here in bits and pieces - and many of those pieces began to fit together this year: Office 365 becoming the de facto cloud productivity package for enterprise workers; The acquisition of LinkedIn as a foundational data asset for a pending assault in sales and marketing SaaS; Azure becoming a credible, cost effective IaaS/developer platform with meaningful enterprise sales/support/solutions; MSFT's accelerating support of open platforms & open source; Continued investment in the oft-dismissed .NET developer crowd with their Xamarin purchase; and Fervent, organizational-wide support of Satya and his vision for serving a mobile, cloud, data-enabled world. This doesn't even consider the massive incumbency advantages MSFT already has given their years of selling to the enterprise." "

To no one's surprise, Microsoft isn't turning much of a profit from its phone business. According to its latest quarterly report, the company saw a dip of mobile revenue by as much as 46 percent. It sold 2.3 million Lumias over the past three months, which is a 73 percent drop from this time last year. Sadly, this is an ongoing trend; last quarter, it reported a phone sales drop by as much as 54 percent. Still, the company is making money. Revenue was $20.5 billion while net profit was $3.8 billion. Microsoft also saw growth from its Surface segment, which grew by $1.1 billion over the past three months. That's up 61 percent year-over-year. The company credited the surge in Surface sales to the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book, but there's no word in its report exactly how many of those tablet computers it sold. Windows OEM revenue dipped by only 2 percent, which outperforms the PC market.

"When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant's cloud business. And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft's Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company-and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals. But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google's Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS's $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it's even a distant third behind Azure's $1.1 billion in estimated sales. Starting today, Mar. 23, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google's cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene's first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond. Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google's container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google's Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. "NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction we've gotten," he said."

"Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica

"When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple Inc. last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant's cloud business. And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Corp.'s Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company-and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals. But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google's Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS's $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it's even a distant third behind Azure's $1.1 billion in estimated sales. This week, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, starting Wednesday in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google's cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene's first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond. Searching for a cloud coup Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google's container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google's Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. "NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction

But nobody is saying that the output of this technology can't be combined with the output of facial recognition technology to let them monitor you individually AND track your emotions. Fortunately, others are fighting back with knowledge and tech to block facial recognition. http://goo.gl/JMQM2W

"Google on Tuesday extended the duration and scope of an aggressive program meant to lure customers to Google Apps from rival cloud-based office productivity products, primarily Microsoft Office 365. The subsidiary of Alphabet introduced in October the incentive, which allowed midsize businesses locked in contracts with other vendors to use Google Apps at no cost until those contracts expired. The offer officially ended April 14. But pleased with its success, Google decided to maintain the incentive until the end of 2016, while also making it easier for smaller companies to qualify, wrote Neil Delaney, sales director for Google Apps for Work, in a company blog."

"Here's something funny. While most complain that WebRTC isn't suitable for the enterprise, it is probably the next best thing happening to enterprises. And it is all because we're in the midst of a digital transformation. WebRTC is a five-year-old technology, so it is rather new to the scene. At its core, WebRTC enables adding real-time voice and video communications to any website without the need to download a thing. Need to get a customer on a quick support call? Just send him a URL. The naysayers dismiss WebRTC because it still isn't available on Safari or Internet Explorer. While that is true, it is changing. Support already exist in the new Microsoft Edge browser with reassuring rumors about Apple and Safari's plans towards WebRTC. Ubiquitous WebRTC support everywhere is on the horizon. Which brings me to enterprises. Enterprises today are going through a digital transformation. In each and every vertical, businesses are being redefined by having the information that runs through the enterprise turned into digital assets that are then used to drive business processes and analytics. This takes shape in many different ways: enabling customers to use self-service channels instead of using human operated contact centers, using big data and data lake projects to deduce insights and personalize services, streamlining sales processes through marketing automation, etc."

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon

"Google has been incrementally making its workplace products more and more functional - all, it seems, with one goal in mind. It would like to eat Microsoft Office 365's lunch. When it first launched Google Apps (now called Google for Work), the best feature was the cost. The products were free to use, although there was little in the way of service or advanced business functionality. But that's been changing. More companies are piggybacking on Google for Work's foundation to launch their own products and, as these products mature, continue to invest and expand them. One of the latest examples is ProsperWorks, the developer of Simple CRM for Google Apps.   "

"Considering Salesforce is sitting on top of $1.9 billion in cash, the amount they spent on venture capital is still pretty small. The $145 million cash they invested last quarter is only a fraction of the $731 million it generated in operating cash flow, too. But the fact that Salesforce is increasingly looking for ways to find the next future growth engine through these investments sends a positive sign to the market, Stifel's Rodericks says, especially as Salesforce becomes a more mature company. "They're sitting on a ton of money on their balance sheet, so to a certain degree, investors would like to see them make these strategic investments in companies around this space," Roderick said. And that could potentially lead to more acquisitions, he noted, as Salesforce Ventures has been more active on the buy side too lately. It acquired sales intelligence software RelateIQ for $390 million last year, after spending $2.5 billion on marketing software ExactTarget two years ago. "This certainly gives them more visibility in the companies that they might look at as partners or potential acquisitions down the road," he said. We should be able to get to find out more about it on Thursday, when Salesforce reports its second quarter earnings. Analyst estimates are pretty much in line with Salesforce's forecasts at $1.6 billion in revenue for an EPS of $0.18."

"The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."

"SaaS/subscription businesses are much more complex than traditional businesses, and SaaS performance cannot be measured in the same way as traditional businesses are measured. Based on a talk given at the SaaStr Annual Conference in San Francisco, this slide deck offers a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business, and how these can be used to drive SaaS success. This presentation includes information on: An intro to SaaS metrics Unit economics LTV and churn: An in-depth look Variable pricing axes Months to recover CAC The primary unit of growth: Sales Understanding public SaaS companies"

"Six years ago, we surveyed our employees with the goal of determining the optimal place for each of them to work in terms of maximum efficiency and productivity. What we quickly determined was that no one wanted to work in the office. Workers Can't Concentrate in the Office When asked to identify the best place to get work done - specifically work that requires maximum concentration and creativity, such as designing a web page, programming new functionality for software, developing a financial report or writing a sales proposal - not a single member of our 34-member team chose the office. Rather, they selected: An extra room at their home Their favorite coffee shop A train or airplane Our finding wasn't an anomaly. In a much larger study based on 2,600 interviews, FlexJobs concluded that 76 percent of workers prefer to avoid the office when they have important work to do."

"It's not easy tracking the girth of public cloud providers amid run rates, as-a-service sales projections, and a lack of transparency. Here's how AWS stacks up against Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google, and Oracle." Good comparison with stats