About David Skok
David is a serial entrepreneur who founded a total of four companies, and did one turn-around. In 2001, he joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a VC investor. Successful exits as a VC include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, Apollo GraphQL, CloudBees, Namely, and Salsify.
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TwitterThe Science behind Viral Marketing
The Science behind Viral Marketing is a look at the key factors that drive growth in viral marketing. (Hint, the most important factor is not the one everyone expects.) It also looks at what is needed to get virality to …
Brainstorming for New Startup Ideas: A Framework to Spur Creative Thinking
If you are a serial entrepreneur starting to look for an idea for your next startup, you are likely to want a way to stimulate your brain to come up with as many good ideas as possible. This blog post …
Cash is King: 8 tips to Optimize Fundraising Strategy
Introduction
This post aims to help startup CEOs optimize their funding strategy by examining how investors value startups, and explaining how to avoid the common cash management pitfalls.…
Slides on Building a Sales & Marketing Machine
Here is the slide deck that I presented last night at the Boston Lean Startup Circle.
The slide deck describes how to build a Sales & Marketing Machine that is predictable, scalable, automated, well instrumented, and cost efficient.
…How Investors Validate Your Bookings Forecast
We have just gone through the time of year when startups present their 2011 plans to their boards for approval. In many ways, these meetings are very similar to the meetings we have with new startups that have projections for …
How MySQL solved their Sales & Marketing challenges
An interview with Lesley Young, who was the VP of worldwide Sales for MySQL, and then head of sales for the MySQL division within Oracle. Few products are as well known as the ubiquitous MySQL database. The company behind the …
Building a Sales and Marketing Machine Webinar
Slides and video on “Building a Sales and Marketing Machine”, with a discussion on how to optimize your sales & marketing funnel. Presented as a HubSpot Webinar last week together with Mike Volpe, the VP of Marketing at HubSpot.…
SaaS Business Models – Slide Deck
I presented the following set of slides to the Mass TLC group as the keynote for the “SaaS Business Model Update — Creating and Managing Revenues” event. The slides should be useful for anyone interested in learning about the key …
SaaS Economics – Part 2: Scaling the Business
This is the second part of a 2 part series that discusses the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS, or other subscription/recurring revenue businesses when they decide to scale their business by ramping sales and marketing. These kinds of …
SaaS Economics – Part 1: The SaaS Cash Flow Trough
This post provides SaaS entrepreneurs with an Excel spreadsheet model and graphs that show the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS, or other subscription/recurring revenue businesses that use a sales organization. These kinds of SaaS businesses face a cash …
Setting the Startup Accelerator Pedal
Startups frequently make one of two mistakes: spending too much money, or spending too little money. A key job of the CEO is knowing where to set the startup accelerator pedal. In a recent series of three blog posts published …
Customer Acquisition: Maximizing your Funnel
This blog post focuses on how B2B companies can optimize their customer acquisition funnels using a customer-centric methodology to analyze and remove blockage points.
Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with …
What drives great entrepreneurs
If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.”
I recently …
Lessons Learned from Dropbox and Xobni
Readers of this blog will likely really enjoy the following two presentations that discuss lessons learned by the founders of both DropBox and Xobni. There are lots of great lessons to be learned here.…
How Sales Complexity Impacts your Startup’s Viability
There is no question that success for the entrepreneur starts with a breakthrough (or at the very least great) product or service. Yet too often, entrepreneurs fall into the “field of dreams” mentality (in the words of Terence Mann, AKA …
