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At its core, a startup’s advantage in the market is the speed created by focus. When a team is well orchestrated, they can accomplish amazing things. Creating an environment that fosters communication best is therefore an essential part of startup management. But how best to do it? Founders have to balance span-of-control with span-of-managerial-responsibility.

In an article this week’s New Yorker, Amazon’s founder/CEO Jeff Bezos is quoted on the subject with a contrarian point of view:

When I first started programming at a startup, I were proud even snobbish about the language we used: Java. I derided JavaScript. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

JavaScript has become the dominant language of the web. Every browser, PC and mobile, understands Javascript. It is a lingua franca among computers. Some hardware even speaks JavaScript.

Because of its universality, JavaScript’s growth has compounded. The chart above shows the number of code repositories by language on GitHub, as analyzed by RedMonk. JavaScript’s share has tripled in 5 years and the number of job requisitions seeking Javascript has grown in parallel.

How much cash does a tech venture-backed company burn through before IPO? The median 2013 VC-backed tech IPO burned $33M and the average company burned $76M. The chart above shows the net income/burn rate of 2013 tech IPO by years since founding.

Four categories of companies jump out in the chart: the profit leaders, the middle-of-the-pack, the negative hockey stick, and the go-for-broke. The profit leaders, Veeva(VEEV) and RetailMeNot(SALE), have generated tremendous profits from the outset. The middle-of-the-pack companies, including Rally(RALY) and Tableau(DATA), burn no more than $25M annually. Some like Chegg(CHGG), RingCentral(RNG), Marketo(MKTO) and FireEye(FEYE) show reverse hockey-sticks - their burn is increasing at an increasing rate. And the go-for-broke contingent of WorkDay(WDAY), Twitter(TWTR), Gogo(GOGO), Violin(VMEM) and SilverSpring(SSNI) have exceeded the $100M burned in one year mark.

If you’re building a startup, content marketing is a powerful tool to build a brand, develop customer relationships, and develop a a hiring pipeline. Blogging requires diligence and a few tricks to build a following.

I’ve been writing for about 3 years and I’ve analyzed a few hundred of my posts to better understand what makes for effective content marketing. These are my lessons learned:

1. I have 48 seconds to get my message across in this post. No pretty images, no increase or decrease in word count, no amount of retweets or favorites will convince the reader to linger.
2. Giving any indication to the reader that they are about to read a long post is death. Paragraph headings are the best indication of that a post will be long and these posts have 20% higher bounce rates, when a user immediately hits the back button after landing on page.
3. The reader doesn’t care about images. Images don’t impact any metric I tracked: page views, time on site, retweets, favorites, or bounce rate. Images may attract users to click when they are browsing, but anyone who lands directly on a blog post is ambivalent about them.
4. If the reader likes what they read, they will poke around the site some more. The relationship between time on page and time on site is very strong. Writing good content matters and surfacing related material pays off.
5. Social proof works and its huge. Social drives about 45% of visitors to the blog. Importantly, there is no degradation in traffic quality from social networks. Visitors who arrive at the blog through retweets spend the same amount of time and have similar bounce rates to other visitors.

In short, when you start your content marketing strategy, be brief, get to the point and write great stuff. The rest will take care of itself.

In response to yesterday’s post on management design patterns, many readers asked for examples of best practices. So I’m going to write about the management best practices I have been taught and I have observed in startups. This is the first post of that series. The first management technique is called Situational Management, one that my wife, a terrific manager at Google, taught me.

A manager’s most important function in a startup is to motivate employees to accomplish the business’s goal. Each employee’s motivation to work will vary with time, which means a manager’s style and goals should respond to those changes. The same management style doesn’t work across all employees, nor can one management style be applied to an employee over their career. In other words, effective management depends on the situation. At the highest level, there are four basic situations:

Earlier this week, I chatted with a friend of mine who has founded an incredibly successful business, which he and his co-founder have been scaling impressively. I asked him about his biggest learning over the past few years. He said before having started his company and having built the team, he perceived management as a Band-Aid, as a fix for something wrong in the organizational design, communication or day-to-day operations of the company. Over time, he has come to believe that manangement is the only way of growing his startup.

At the bottom of this blog, there’s an inocuous sharing bar with links to share this post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, HackerNews and subscribe by email and RSS. 1.5% of visitors click on one of these buttons. Despite the similarity of the buttons and the clicks, the value they generate as sharing tools varies dramatically.

The chart above shows data from the widget on this blog for the past 30 days, comparing the number of clicks on each button and the traffic that results from that channel. Three traffic generation behaviors emerge from this chart which I call the charts (HackerNews), the networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and the 1-to-1s (Email, RSS).

Steven Blank wrote yesterday about a novel way of depicting a startup’s competitive landscape in a pitch deck, called a petal diagram. While the petal diagram is a great way of describing an ecosystem or a go-to-market strategy, I don’t think it’s a great way to show a competitive landscape because petal diagrams don’t communicate the startup’s unique way of competing in the market.

The ideal competition slide accomplishes at least one but up to four goals. First, the competition slide communicates the startup’s worldview of their ecosystem, relays the key axes of differentiation in the market and summarizes the startup’s advantages. Second, the competition slide demarcates the other key players in the ecosystem, established and emerging, and how each of them fit within the worldview. Third, the slide conveys the dynamics within the ecosystem: who is partnered with whom; which incumbents are looking to partner/acquire vs go it alone, etc. Fourth, the competition slide should shows the current market opportunity and if needed adjacent market opportunities that justify a venture scale outcome.

Constrained by a limited budget while seeking to grow as quickly as possible, startup founders must decide how to balance growing their engineering teams with their sales & marketing teams. To help inform those decisions, I’ve benchmarked the relative sizes of the sales and engineering teams of the 36 publicly-traded SaaS companies from founding to IPO, typically 7 years later.

In almost every industry, startups and venture capital included, content marketing has become an essential tool for growth. Over the past four years, I’ve developed infrastructure, analyses and processes to help this blog grow from just a few visitors per month to nearly a hundred thousand today, achieved a Twitter follower quarterly growth rate of 20% and built a mailing list of close to one thousand readers. In this post, I’ve detailed are the strategies, software and techniques I use. This is the architecture diagram for the blog.