IDEAS / POST Why F1 Fans Pay Thousands to Hear an Engine A Night in Brescia I was 27 years old, standing on a street in Brescia, Italy, in a sea of the most beautiful cars ever built. It was the starting point for the Mille Miglia, a much-storied rally for pre-war and early […]
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IDEAS / POST The Physical World Strikes Back For years, we’ve chased the holy grail in the cloud. Now, it would appear the pendulum is swinging back down to earth. And for hardware founders, positioning has never mattered more. That was the thesis of the Websummit panel featuring founder / investors Lu Zhang and
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IDEAS / POST Nike Doesn’t Win Because AI Likes It James Cadwallader’s company, Profound, helps 13% of the Fortune 500 understand and control how AI talks about their brands… the sharp end of AI search optimization. His talk at Websummit this year was mesmerizing. The audience leaned in. And every founder in the room
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IDEAS / POST Your Best Customers Love Your Product. That’s Why You’re Stalled. It was a full house at WebSummit. Not surprising, considering the panellists: Jess Kirkman, Global Head of Brand Creative at Mattel, and Danny Rensch, Co-Founder and Chief Chess Officer at Chess.com. And they were talking about insanely successful products everyone knows
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IDEAS / POST The Blind Spots Driving Stalled Growth in PE Portfolio Companies Private equity firms are good at spotting underperformance. What’s harder is understanding why some portfolio companies remain stuck, even after serious intervention. From the outside, a typical work in progress inspires confidence. Leadership has been adjusted, capital deployed, and improvements (courtesy of
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IDEAS / POST Why The Most Dangerous Portfolio Companies Look Like Rocket Ships In my latest Growth conversation with collaborator Lorraine McGregor and guest Frederic Vanduynslaeger, we unpacked a disturbing story: a $10 million ARR company that went on to lose $3.4 million in value during acquisition because of a deep-rooted psychological flaw. That flaw
The (Multi) Million Dollar Question: Are You Building All-Stars, or Superstars? Read More »
IDEAS / POST Lorraine McGregor and I had been working parallel tracks for years. She was helping companies unlock unrealized growth potential from operations and financial perspectives. I was doing the same, from the brand and narrative perspective. Both approaches delivered strong results. But when we compared what we’d been seeing in companies trying to
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IDEAS / POST In 1959, Volkswagen introduced the now-iconic Think Small campaign. While competitors focused on selling bigger cars with more features, Volkswagen leaned into simplicity, positioning the Beetle as the car that did exactly what people needed it to do, and did it well. In my experience, the lesson of VW (focus on a
Less Is Still More: A Lesson Startups Can’t Ignore Read More »
IDEAS / POST Noise is Only Part of The Problem AI is a confusing space, it’s true. You’ve no doubt heard about the MIT study citing 95% of businesses that aren’t seeing ROI from their AI investment. The study reveals most businesses are using AI for quick fixes and hacks, not ‘hard’ tasks like transforming
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IDEAS / POST I went on Tracy Borresan’s Crazy Stupid Marketing Show last week, to give her a bit of an insight into what a revenue architect does. I love doing shows like this, because it gives me an opportunity to unpack my story with a smart interviewer. More important, it enables me to gauge
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