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In “Why Winning Streaks End”, Rosabeth Kantar, a professor at HBS, explains the key to maintaining momentum in any company is maintaining the discipline of every day processes. Similarly, Atul Gawande’s book Better echoes this idea. For surgeons, the best way to keep patients safe and healthy is ticking through a checklist before each surgery.

As I’ve watched a handful of startups grow, the pattern I see emerging from most of them is their ability to persistently transform chaos into process. And then continuously improve the way they do things.

I’ll never forget the first time I was assigned a sales quota. I was six months into a sales role at Google in which I on-boarded and managed the accounts of social networks running AdSense ads. Our key metric was customer satisfaction and retention. After a few months, I was starting to get into a groove. And then, our team was assigned a new manager who put the team on a quota, sending me into a tailspin.

For Google, seasonality is an important factor in forecasting quarterly revenue growth. In the advertising business, Q4 is always the strongest, followed by Q1. Q2 is the weakest. In Google’s latest financial year, the difference between the weakest and strongest quarters was 22%: $14.4B in Q4 and $11.8B in Q2.

I wondered if the same were true for SaaS companies. Should SaaS startup forecasts account for differences in underlying customer purchasing habits? While not subject to the consumer buying holiday cycle like advertising based companies, SaaS salespeople might be impacted by the vacation schedules of their customers or some other factors I couldn’t anticipate.

Yesterday, I walked the sprawling floor of the Consumer Electronics Show. These are the six key themes/trends I noted.

The Coming of Era of Drones - I saw barrel-rolling quad-copters and parkouring wheeled robots dancing in synchrony to hiphop music. It was awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. If you watch the video, I think you’ll agree the mechanisms to control drones are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Setting aside regulatory questions, there seem to be fewer and fewer barriers to large scale drone deployments in the very near future.

Tien is the founder and CEO of Zuora [1], and was formerly CMO and CSO at Salesforce. He is a brilliant marketer and created the notion of the three doors to SaaS success. He spoke about this innovation at a recent CMO summit; the video is here.

If you visit Zuora’s website, you’ll see Zuora’s three doors along the top of the page: Subscription Economy, Why Zuora & How It Works. Those are the three most important navigation links on the page.

In the last 35 years, the tech industry has exploded in size from $62B in total market cap to more than $9.7T today, as the chart above shows. In that time, the tech industry has birthed some behemoths. In 2013, Apple became the largest publicly traded company, the first time a technology company held that distinction.

Despite the number of massive companies built over the past three decades, these tech giants represent an increasingly small amount of the total value in the technology sector. In 1981, the top ten technology companies represented 95% of the global IT market cap. Today, that share has fallen to 26% and the ratio continues to fall, a very positive trend. This fragmentation is an indicator of how much opportunity exists for startups to seize. If the tech industry were consolidating it would indicate the very largest tech companies were leveraging their market power to win share.

Earlier this week, Zappos declared they will abandon traditional management structure for holacracy, a management ethos that eschews pyramids and hierarchy in favor of self-organizing groups, called holons. It’s not a structure without management, but one of distributed authority and management. Below is a schematic describing holacracy at a high level.

Holacracy has been adopted by a handful of other companies including David Allen’s company, the blogging platform Medium and some non-profits. Valve and 37Signals also seem to have adopted some of these ideas too. But Zappos may be the biggest company to adopt this management style yet. I’m excited to see how the transition goes because Tony Hsieh’s success could start a broad management movement.

Like many others, during my work day I fall into the firefighting trap, a time mis-allocation problem that leaves me focusing on urgent, but not necessarily important tasks. Firefighting is addictive because it’s fast-paced, nonstop and fun.

But firefighting is exhausting and leaves me feeling as if I haven’t made progress toward my goals. In addition, firefighting inhibits effective time allocation. A week can pass and I find that the non-urgent but important projects like preparing for a board meeting and researching a new sector like Bitcoin have been starved for time. Or I look up and realize I’ve been spending most of my time on urgent but not-important things, like returning huge volumes of email.

“It’s something I thought I’d never do,” one founder told me yesterday. He had hired a recruiter to help him grow his team. But at some point in time, most quickly growing startups will need help forming their teams.

We kicked off searches at two Redpoint companies in earlier this year in addition to several last year and I’ve been taking notes on each of the processes. One of my partners, Tim Haley, was a top recruiter in the valley for many years and having his experience and expertise has been invaluable. These are my notes:

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