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HBS Professor Michael Porter created the Five Forces Framework in 1979 in a landmark book called Competitive Strategy. One of those forces, the threat of substitutes has intrigued me for quite a while because in the world of the Internet, the prevailing wisdom on switching costs argues they are trivial on the web. After all, how difficult is it to change from Google search to Bing search? This is the question Google wrestled with during its search share battle in the mid 00s.

In his book Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce went from Idea to Billion Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry, Marc Benioff shares the 111 plays he learned through Salesforce triumphant rise to the most valuable SaaS company in the world.

Play 15 is my favorite from the book. Benioff writes “position yourself either as the leader or against the leader in your industry.” Play 15 highilghts the most frequently forgotten of marketing’s four Ps, positioning. Positioning is easily forgotten because it’s the least tangible of the four. Price immediatly impacts revenue. Product, well, everyone has a point of view on product. Placement in today’s ecosystem means ad placements, most often. In performance marketing, the numbers speak for themselves.

Is there a common characteristic of successful freemium companies? Piotr asked this question earlier this week. This is the framework I’ve seen work well for freemium startups.

At its core, freemium is a novel marketing tactic that entices new users and ultimately potential customers to try a product and educate themselves about its benefits on their own. By shifting the education workload from a sales team to the customer, the cost of sales can decrease dramatically. So, freemium can be a huge strategic advantage in a competitive market because those companies that successfully implement freemium can scale faster and more efficiently than traditional sales-driven companies might.

What are the tradeoffs when considering different sales hiring plans and which is the right one for your startup? There are many different considerations in creating a sales hiring plan. Balancing them all can be tricky, but thinking through the trade-offs is important to scaling the business well.

First, let’s compare the financial impact of three different sales hiring strategies: six sales people hired at once, two sales people hired for each of three quarters and one sales person hired each month. In this hypothetical example, the sales people have a $350k annual quota, cost the startup $100k annually, and achieve their quota over six months with the following attainment percentages by month: 0%, 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%.

Last week, Redpoint held our annual Founder Day gathering. At the event, I listened to the stories of Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking jump from 120,000 feet, heard about the astonishing comeback of the US America’s Cup team and took part in a creativity workshop led by a Stanford Design School professor. In short, the event revolved around doubt.

BYOBI is an acronym I first heard on a telephone call with a VP of Technology at a large corporation. The word is almost unknown today, but I think that it will be one of the largest trends to impact data in the next five years.

BYOBI means Bring Your Own Business Intelligence. This VP of Technology was struggling to enable the sales people, marketers, engineers and others within his business to access the data they needed. The monolithic solution that they had adopted, (I can’t remember if it was MicroStrategy or Cognos or BusinessObjects), satisfied the needs of the one department that had catalyzed the purchasing decision many years ago. Several years on, his team had become inundated with custom data requests that the tools failed to answer and petitions to purchase new types of software. Unfortunately, his data architecture just wouldn’t allow him to respond to those needs. The image below is a simplified schematic of his architecture.

One of the single most effective tools SaaS companies can use in order to grow faster isn’t tweaking the product in a particular way or implementing an AB optimization framework or adopting new marketing tactic. Rather, it’s financial judo for structuring contracts and cash collection.

Cash is the lifeblood of startups. Cash empowers management teams to invest in all kinds of growth mechanisms. So, it’s no surprise that maximizing a company’s cash to invest in growth is a good thing.

At an Internet of Things conference last week, I took part in a panel in which we discussed the future of connected devices. Will simple products win or will complex products dominate in the IoT?, we were asked. I think the question misses the point and raises another problem about the Internet of Things more broadly. It’s not about Things. It’s about Services. Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service.

Simplicity and complexity are two sides of the same coin. Great products are simple on the surface, but devote tremendous energy under the surface to handle complexity on behalf of the user. Great products are like ducks. Ducks are calm above the water despite paddling furiously below it.

Fenwick’s report on the state of the venture market and I came across these three data points that summarise one facet of the market in Silicon Valley succinctly:

1. 11 venture backed companies raised funds at a valuation of over $1 billion in Q114, more than did so in all of 2013.
2. Hedge and mutual funds participated in 23 venture deals through mid-April, compared to 41 in all of 2013
3. Investment in later stage comprised 47% of all dollars invested in Q1, while Series A investment fell to a five quarter low at 15%.

The late stage venture market has been booming spectacularly in Silicon Valley. This source of capital enabling companies to remain private longer and become larger before an IPO or sale.