Top all-time · #2403
Kellblog
Personal blog · kellblog.combusinessstartupscareer
Kellblog is a personal blog at kellblog.com about business, startups and career. Since 2010, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 134 times, most often “Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Dave Kellogg on starting, leading, and scaling enterprise software startups: strategy, financing, go-to-market, sales, marketing, and metrics
Most-linked posts?
- Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-10-31
- It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source: Thoughts on the Hortonworks S-13 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-18
- Design Your Organization for the Conflicts You Want to Hear About2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-20
- CAC Payback Period: the Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-04-11
- The Box S-1, Delayed IPO, and the Genius of Tien Zuo2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-15
- Ultimate SaaS Metric: Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-07-30
- Sales is from Mars and Engineering is from Venus2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-08-16
- Strategy as a Series of Beliefs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-13
- Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-10
What Hacker News says?
> they can’t turn a profit, and for any hope to turn profit they need this continual growth at a loss, and at some point the investors dump the bag on the public getting a return in a bubble they created and let the public fund the losses. Could you provide some data to show that companies which, at IPO, have any cumulative loss or a very large cumulative loss (as a percentage of valuation or offering size), perform…
Comment linking /2016/03/17/cac-payback-period-the-most-misunderstood-saas-metric/
on “Slack S-1”Submitted Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015) as a story · 545 points
HN discussionAs well as Red Hat has done, they are dwarfed by many other companies. This post about open source compressing the market size by 10x made a lot of sense, and was also a little depressing. http://kellblog.com/2014/11/18/it-aint-easy-making-money-in-...
Comment linking /2014/11/18/it-aint-easy-making-money-in-open-source-thoughts-on-the-hortonworks-s-1/
on “Why Docker and CoreOS’ split was predictable”Submitted Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt as a story · 180 points
HN discussionSome incisive analysis here: http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hu...
Comment linking /2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/
on “The secret to a higher salary is to ask for nothing at all”Submitted It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source: Thoughts on the Hortonworks S-1 as a story · 77 points
HN discussion- The lower-level the category the more customers want support on it. - The more you can commoditize the layers below you, the more the market likes it. Red Hat does this for servers. - The lower-level the category the more the market actually “wants” it standardized in order to minimize entropy. This is why low-level infrastructure categories become natural monopolies or oligopolies. source: https://kellblog.com/20…
Comment linking /2014/11/18/it-aint-easy-making-money-in-open-source-thoughts-on-the-hortonworks-s-1/
on “Before sale to IBM for billions, Red Hat started in cofounder's closet”Submitted Ingres: Can You Ever Go Back? (2006) as a story · 52 points
HN discussionYou can take a look at "Insight Ventures Periodic Tables of SaaS Sales and Marketing Metrics" [1]. - [1] http://kellblog.com/2014/01/21/insight-ventures-periodic-tab...
Comment linking /2014/01/21/insight-ventures-periodic-tables-of-saas-sales-and-marketing-metrics/
on “New Relic files S-1 for IPO”Submitted A Look at the Box S-1 as a story · 43 points
HN discussionThere was useful high-level content in this video, but anyone who is serious about building for the enterprise should definitely study other enterprise SaaS companies. Box's financials, on the surface, are comparatively unimpressive and some of them even raise questions about the company's long-term viability[1][2]. Some folks argue that Box is in better shape than it might appear to be in[3], but this is based on a…
Comment linking /2014/05/15/the-box-s-1-delayed-ipo-and-the-genius-of-tien-zuo/
on “Lecture 12: Building for the Enterprise”Submitted What it means to be a manager, director, or VP as a story · 19 points
HN discussionA good article, but the thing I liked most about it was following the link to discover Dave Kellogg's superb blog post, Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt: http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hu... which, among many other points written up in an entertaining manner, gives the better summary of how investors look at the difference between service and product companies: >That last point [about wheth…
Comment linking /2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/
on “Some companies are best off without VC”Submitted Career Development: What It Really Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP as a story · 14 points
HN discussionDon't believe the reviews. I was considering a position there, and did some research into the company culture (because everything else about them just seemed impossibly awesome, with the exception of pay). Apparently, they had a fairly low review rating about a year ago which was hurting recruiting efforts, so company leadership "asked" employees to write reviews and a bunch of 5-star reviews popped out in a very sh…
Comment linking /2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/
on “Palantir raises $680M”Submitted Veterans vs. Up-and-Comers in Startups | Kellblog as a story · 12 points
HN discussionNot that much controversy over that. HHS said most of the same this morning...I (and many folks) disagree with the premise that MarkLogic had anything to do with it. If the exact same processes and analysis were applied to a LAMP stack or an Oracle Exa-stack, the results would have likely been the same. I think the public news about the firewall sizing (4G instead of 50G) supports my claim. So far, there have been t…
Comment linking /2013/12/01/the-pillorying-of-marklogic-why-selling-disruptive-technology-to-the-government-is-hard-and-risky/
on “Inside the race to rescue a health site, and Obama”Submitted Open Source Business Models, Revisited | Kellblog as a story · 10 points
HN discussionTheir main products are oriented towards integrating structured and unstructured data from lots of different data sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_... Other articles on the company make it more clear that the reason why they need so many "forward-deployed engineers" are because they heavily customize the installed software for each customer, i.e. you have to do a lot of custom wor…
Comment linking /2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/
on “Palantir: The War on Terror's Secret Weapon”Submitted How to Run a Sales Kickoff as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted CEO Is Not a Part-Time Job as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Independently Wealthy Salesperson as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Please God, Don't Run Your Own Race as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Five Rules for Competing with Giants | Kellblog as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Look at the Zendesk S-1 (IPO) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Critical Thinkers vs. Critics as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dave Kellogg's Greatest Hits - CEO Software Blogger as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Marketing Is Too Important to Be Left to the Marketing Department as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Introducing a New SaaS Metric: The Hype Factor as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted SaaS Stocks: How Much Punishment Is in Store? as a story · 3 points
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