Middling Management

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Software Valuation Math Check for 2023

M.C.Management

I think we’re all trying to figure out what our private stock options are worth, especially after the volatility that was 2022. That magical floating target somewhere between $0, the 409a valuation, and our wildest retirement dreams. There have been a few great recent signals in the public & late stage private markets that are beginning to give us an indication of where the trend is headed as we turn the page to 2023. And by trend, hopefully, we mean bottoming..

There Are Sick Unicorns Out There

M.C.Management

I used to work in downtown Palo Alto near the Hewlett Packard garage. The birthplace of Silicon Valley they called it! The beauty of it is it’s really not that impressive. It’s just a garage that could be plopped at the end of any driveway in America. Except now it’s surrounded by arguably the nicest suburb in America. Kind of because of what came out of that garage. The reason I bring it up is that there is a famous quote from one of the garage’s workers, titan David Packard, reflecting back on the meteoric growth of his time period where he said “more companies die of indigestion than starvation”.

Things Seem Bad. Fine! What’s Next?

M.C.Management

I had a couple posts teed up about how bad things have seemed with all these layoffs and a couple ways you should try to support your team in the midst of this torrent of negative news. Corporate restructurings, crypto bankruptcies and daily Twitter drama – the company and the content. But do you really need to read any more of that? I pulled my quill out a couple times but the ink ran dry. Frankly, like many of you I’m sure, I needed a couple weeks to rinse off the negativity. And then we ran face first into Thanksgiving.

To summarize, things are not great in tech land. You know this.

Would You Work for Elon Musk?

M.C.Management

Haven’t you heard? Twitter was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Taken private by an eccentric billionaire who builds rockets and electric vehicles in search of a new mountain to climb: restoring the town square of the Internet via social media content moderation. He may have fought it and tried to escape the deal multiple times through various tweetstorms, upper and lower court lawsuits. But here we are. Elon Musk owns Twitter.

How About We Pick This Up in Q1?

M.C.Management

Someone has said that to you these past couple weeks, haven’t they? Tech employees of all flavors are dying to push anything they can (not required by their OKRs) to 2023. I mean it’s been a hell of a year x 2+ between COVID and just about everything else in the news these days. Who isn’t dying to catapult their professional life into Q1 and leave ’22 behind?

Movement This Fall & Making Lists

M.C.Management

People are on the move this fall. Well, at least people that get reported on. John Curtius from Tiger Global and Matt Mazzeo from Coatue are leaving their venture brand names to start their own firms. It is the nature of things that VC personnel movement is reported in the tech news rather than operating leaders. Such is life.

Forecasting is All About Dependability

M.C.Management

We know things have gotten tight. I’m seeing reports that frankly didn’t come across my desk in the go go fun fun times. Like which customers are late on their bills. Revenue > Net Revenue > Payable reports. Everyone’s counting their pennies and rightfully so. Cash flow rules everything around…us.

Who are your best customers? The ones that pay! If you’re doing forecasting for Q4 or even 2023 it’s essential to have a dependability score of payment likelihood baked into any revenue assumptions. You can sort by history of late payments, payment terms, or funding amount / stage if your customers are startups.

Cutting Costs: 2022 Edition

M.C.Management

Everywhere you look, people be cutting costs. Google and Facebook are NOT “doing layoffs” but it feels like every other tech company under the sun is getting leaner. Companies are scrambling to maintain their current trajectory, meet investor expectations, or in other cases just stay alive.

Less examined is when companies say “we need to cut costs”…what exactly do they mean? And, as leaders, how can you understand your menu of options to better plan? When the plan comes down from on high, it’s good to be prepared!

Since I’ve Been Gone: Summer 2022

M.C.Management

Ah, how blissful to take the summer off from writing. Was it a quiet summer? Oh noo no no. We moved! Out of the Bay to Boston. Took some vacation. Got Covid on vacation. Had to put my head down and do a fair amount of work too. So yeah, like many of you I’m limping back into the swing of things.

You may have noticed the temperature has risen…and I’m not talking about the weather. All across the tech ecosystem the heat is on with teams “pushing harder” amid headwinds of slumping growth, plunging valuations, and an escalating sense of impending doom.

What else did I miss?

The Idea Recycle Ratio

M.C.Management

There is a natural lifecycle to the construction of successful startups. A bold new idea is incorporated into a company. Its rogue team of innovators bring the technology to market. They grow rapidly from favorable winds of shifting consumer behavior and market adoption. These tailwinds send them skyward before.. their rapid growth flattens into a more mature phase of consistent adoption.

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