One of my responsibilities at Toast is to lead the internal teams responsible for enabling each of our Customer Success (CS) new hires. Given that we are hiring 50+ CS people a month – a majority of whom are in one of three roles – this is a key function for Toast as those employees will be the “names and faces” of Toast to our customers, interacting with them on a daily basis and will have a true impact on…
I started at the Boston-based restaurant technology platform company/rocketship Toast, Inc., this month and was met with an initial surprise – one of the first things my boss told me was to not try to accomplish anything substantial any thing in the first 30 days!! As a dyed-in-the-wool member of the GSD team, I was a bit uncomfortable initially. What do you mean don’t do anything? Didn’t you hire me to get stuff done? As we explored what she meant,…
In a discussion I had with a CEO recently, he asked me about how I would build culture of the team, and the organization. “What’s your vision for what great culture should be, and how do we attain that?” In my Linked In profile, I state my business values immediately – “Put the Customer first. Deliver excellence. Value your people. Do what you say. Together we succeed.” These values are how I manage my work life and I hold my…
Renewals is a primary SaaS metric for good reason – it means your customer is continuing to recognize value from your product and service and is willing to continue to pay for it. Most understand that it is expensive to obtain a new customer – lead acquisition, sales expenses, and time and opportunity costs add up quickly. And after your team/company has done the expensive work of acquiring a customer, you certainly don’t want to waste that time and effort. That’s…
Having been through 4 different venture-backed, high-growth situations, there are a large number of lessons that I have learned (sometimes the hard way!). Here are five of them, in no particular order. Be disciplined in your hiring – Just about everyone acknowledges that hiring is the most important thing that you can do as a leader. One of the keys to success I have found is to make sure your internal team is coordinated and clear on their responsibilities, hiring…
Because I thought it was an appropriate lens through which to view my experiences throughout my tech career. Over the course of my adventures through the Boston technology scene, I have had an amazing opportunity to be part of four separate liquidity events – two IPOs (Brightcove and Eprise), and two buyouts (Endeca by Oracle, and most recently, Applause by Vista Equity Partners). At each of these, I have joined as employee somewhere between 75 to 125, and helped them grow…
I have been to lots of conferences – some good, some bad, most mindnumbingly long – but none great. That is until I went to Drift‘s Hypergrowth ’17 conference last week. Scheduled the day before Hubspot’s huge Inbound conference, Drift’s Hypergrowth17 conference attracted over 1,400 people – a pretty remarkable number given it was the first year of the conference. What made it fantastic was it’s balance. Sure, the conference had a Marketing theme – after all that is what…