UK vs US Tech: Can the Tortoise Ever Catch the Hare?

UK vs US Tech: Can the Tortoise Ever Catch the Hare?

October 3, 2019 No Comments

Digital tech in the UK is only a decade or so old as a full-blown industry. In contrast, the US tech industry is over seventy years old, dating from the first commercial activities of IBM, Burroughs, Univac and Intel in the 1950s and 60s, and the birth of the “independent” software sector in the U.S. over sixty years ago. Faced with this and other disadvantages, can today’s emerging digital tech companies in the UK ever beat or even equal the major US tech companies?

To torture a well-known metaphor, can the tortoise catch the hare in any meaningful dimension?

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Scaling Up is Hard to Do

Scaling Up is Hard to Do

July 16, 2019 1 Comment

Which is harder to pull off successfully, starting up a tech business, or scaling it? Since more than 90% pf startups fail to survive even two years, it might be the former. But at least startups have decades of best practices and a strong ecosystem of angels, incubators, accelerators, and VC firm to call on. Unfortunately, scaling up still seems to be a more perilous journey than it should be. One reason for this, I believe, is premature scaling.

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The Six Dimensions for Expanding Customer Engagement and TCV

The Six Dimensions for Expanding Customer Engagement and TCV

June 10, 2019 1 Comment

When corporate customers see compelling value in a given SaaS offering they are capable of increasing their adoption rapidly throughout their organization. In recent times this has happened with Box, Netsuite, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Splunk, Workday, and other vendors’ software. What I don’t see happening often enough is tech executives or sales teams adopting an intentional strategy to help their major customers to expand and deepen their utilization of the product or service in question.

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Visionaries are from Mars, Pragmatists are from Venus

Visionaries are from Mars, Pragmatists are from Venus

April 25, 2019 2 Comments

In Crossing the Chasm, author Geoffrey Moore exposed the crucial time gap that exists between how visionary customers buy versus how the majority of potential customers, pragmatists and then conservatives, decide to adopt. While the disruptive nature of technology-based innovation has evolved significantly in the almost three decades since, things don’t seem to have changed much in terms of human adoption behavior. In fact, in today’s extraordinarily competitive market for SaaS / cloud products and services and other technology innovations, it’s even more crucial to understand the difference and adjust your strategy accordingly.

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Nobody Cares About Your “Platform” Till They Know What Real Problems It Solves

Nobody Cares About Your “Platform” Till They Know What Real Problems It Solves

February 21, 2019 5 Comments

I’ve lost count of the number of new and established companies that promote their new “platforms” aggressively to prospects, customers, and third-party developers. Most often the initial reaction is muted, because no one knows whether or not they could or should use a platform until they’ve seen it in action, being leveraged to solve actual business or personal problems. So how should platform marketers proceed?

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Bad News! The VC2C Business Model is at Breaking Point

Bad News! The VC2C Business Model is at Breaking Point

February 11, 2019 2 Comments

For the past decade or so VC funding in startups and scaleups has been increasing dramatically in value and even average number of rounds per company, creating many highly-valued but still unprofitable unicorns along the way. Now that macro-economic growth is slowing, the model of extended VC funding to help companies build their consumer businesses seems to be heading for a reckoning, with hundreds of non-unicorns likely to experience serious difficulties.

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