Culture
June 8, 2023
If you know anything about me or my leadership style, one thing is for certain: my strategies for being a CEO and a dad have some overlap. For both, I have the same five Taylor Swift puns ready to go on repeat (It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me), I will always try to capture Brené Brown’s empowering vulnerability, and I will always look to my family for inspiration.
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December 16, 2022
I get an email almost every day from other CEOs or CXOs that goes something like this: “What’s a good metric for… [Growth Rate / Net Revenue Retention / Gross Margin / ARR / Employee]?” Often the message provides no context on the leader’s business. They just want to know what “good” is. As a […]
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Just before Pulse, I shared my (slightly biased) opinion on why Pulse is the Best SaaS Event of the Year. And our time together at the Moscone Center proved that again ten times over. We laughed together. We suffered through far too many of my dad jokes and Taylor Swift references. We celebrated all the […]
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This article was originally published on Fast Company. My morning mental health best practices includes things to not check: My phone. My email. My stock portfolio. If you’ve accidentally done the latter lately, you know things are very different than they were a few months ago for SaaS stocks. While the next few quarters are […]
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August 24, 2022
This article was originally published on Fast Company. My first real job was as a Product Manager at a software company in 2002. I remember sitting in my tiny, windowless office and launching my Windows XP laptop for the first time. And I remember asking the PM in the office next door to help me […]
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June 25, 2022
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an annoyingly-positive optimist. But like every CEO, I’m also constantly paranoid. So two narratives are constantly battling away in my brain right now: “The market opportunity for SaaS has never been better.” “The stock market is down by how much?” After reading the 732nd memo from a VC […]
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April 30, 2022
Every company claims, “you’ll never work somewhere like here” and, “we have the best company Values.” And I’m sure they are all (mostly) true. But there’s something really special about working at Gainsight – although I may be a little bit biased. I love talking to people. If you casually Google my name, you’ll find […]
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January 13, 2022
TL; DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read): Gainsight acquired SaaS Community Software leader inSided! For the mundane version of this news, click here. And to see a video of Robin van Lieshout (CEO of inSided) and me sharing the news, with a bit of rapping embedded. What comes to mind when you think of community? Maybe […]
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December 23, 2021
[Caveat emptor: I write this to share gratitude, but I also recognize that I am very fortunate in so many ways; many people are struggling.] Like many people, I am a creature of routine and habit. I have the same lunch every day (plain oatmeal with blueberries). I try to go to bed by 10 […]
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April 29, 2021
What If There Were No CSMs? premium
Imagine gathering Customer Success executives together and having them open up about pain points, processes, and the future of CS. Recently, I did, and inevitably, one topic and the incessant accompanying question arose, which is: How do we measure the ROI of our Customer Success team? In a happy hour earlier this month, we dove […]
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December 9, 2020
Last week was a pretty good week. Scratch that, it was the best of my career. We announced a partnership with Vista Equity Partners, valuing Gainsight at $1.1 billion. As a result of that, pretty much everyone we’ve ever met at Gainsight reached out via email, text, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and probably Tik Tok (I’m […]
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October 16, 2020
You are standing in an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. And just like that, the keynote (err, I mean, game) is afoot! Two sentences and a blinking cursor was all it took to capture my imagination back when I first started leveling […]
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