The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 111 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kellogg: A 90% confidence sales forecast allows missing once every 2.5 years
“And when I give the forecast to the board, I want to give a 90% confidence interval. So I'm giving them the lower bound of a 90% confidence interval. Now people hate that. And if people get scared when you use those words, I have advice. Just say you get to mi…”
Kellogg: Board members recalculating metrics indicates broken trust in management
“I have one of my MBA is recalculate everything. And I'm like, this is a symptom of a very serious problem, right? We don't trust the management team to present the correct numbers. We don't correct them to do the trust them to do the right formulas.”
Kellogg: Missing ARR while pipeline metrics look good signals measurement failure
“If the top two important numbers are not being achieved and you can't see why in all the other numbers, I can't diagnose what the problem is, but I can tell you have a problem and it does happen from time to time.”
Kellogg: Only CFO and RevOps knowing metrics signals organizational innumeracy
“The symptom is very simple. You go to a board meeting or QBR or management meeting, and the only two people who ever asked numbers, answer numbers questions are the CFO and the head of rev ops.”
Kellogg: High growth increases enterprise SaaS CAC due to ramping resources
“That's going to drive your CAC up because CAC is a function of growth rate in enterprise software because you're carrying unproductive slash ramping resources, right?”
Kellogg: SaaS Benchmarks Should Be Segmented by Company Aspiration
“I actually think the best way to segment them is by aspiration. That, that if we could, and nobody offers these yet, but I want you to just consider this concept that we should segment benchmarks by aspiration, which is if I want to sell for 18 times EBITDA in…”
Kellogg: Competitor Used One-Dollar Renewals to Manipulate Churn Metrics
“I competed against the company that did one dollar renewals. And they would juice their churn rate so they could offset their SAS metrics.”
Kellogg: Establishing SaaS metric foundations takes quarters, not 30 days
“Even layer one has taken me with certain companies I work with quarters. And I walk in every time I have this kind of entrepreneurial blind spot going, this is going to be easy. Me, head of FP&A, CFO, we'll get this nailed in 30 days, 60 days. Every time I do …”
Kellogg: SaaS metrics cannot be calculated from nature-based P&Ls
“They produce a nature-based PNL, not a function-based PNL, and you can't do SAS metrics off a nature-based PNL.”
Kellogg: Standardized reporting templates build trust by preventing data cherry-picking
“Templates build trust. Why? Because there's no cherry picking, and the most common form of misleading is cherry picking.”
Kellogg: Startups should aim to raise capital every two years
“If you step back and take a more kind of macro view on it, you should try to raise money about every two years.”
Kellogg: Divide competitor funding rounds by 8 to 10 to estimate burn
“You know, one interesting thing about this phenomenon is you can often take the size of somebody's round and divide it by eight to 10 and get a pretty good approximation of their burn rate.”
Kellogg: Large Horizontal Categories Inevitably Face Massive VC Spending Arms Races
“The perverse thing about this is, the better your category, the more likely that is to happen. If you're selling some very Focused vertical SaaS app, you're unlikely to find a spending arms race, right? But if you're in some horizontal platform category, peopl…”
Kellogg: A CEO's Reluctance to Meet Direct Reports Signals Serious Problems
“That's how you lose interest in meeting with a direct report, and I view the non-desire to meet with one as a huge warning sign that you should inspect.”
Kellogg: Idle VC board members will pattern-match startup CEOs to death
“And one of the things VCs do is pattern match, and if you don't channel their energy, you are likely to be pattern matched to death.”
Dave Kellogg: Board misalignment is the leading cause of CEO termination
“The number one cause of CEO death is misalignment with the board.”
Kellogg: Process-Driven Hires Quickly Quit Startups Under $10M ARR
“And the people who got you from zero to 10 are almost by definition figure it outers, right? If a scale it upper joined your company at zero million dollars, they probably quit pretty quickly.”
Kellogg: Diversification is an investor's job, not a startup's goal
“Investors get diversification by investing in 20 of you. You don't have to be diversified, right? Diversification is their problem, not your problem.”
Kellogg: Mitigate tech debt with independent architects and periodic trust releases
“The way to avoid it is three things. One, Well, really two things. Hire and empower strong architects. Too few companies have an independent architect, not the VP of engineering, who keeps an eye on technical debt and the architecture. Critical role to have on…”
Kellogg: Startups Expanding to the US Should Segment Vertically by Geography
“The U.S. Has geography and vertical industry, right, they're correlated. Like, if you're focused on pharma, you go to New Jersey, finance New York City, entertainment LA, and sometimes for a company, I actually recommend, even if you don't have to be verticall…”
Kellogg: Consulted for a startup that missed targets despite 100x pipeline coverage
“I literally did a consulting gig with a company that had 100 X pipeline coverage. Can you imagine? So their pipeline was a hundred times bigger, and they still missed their numbers. So, so think about that. And the answer is they don't have what I call pipelin…”
Kellogg: Free Bundled Services Destroy SaaS Partner Ecosystems
“If I bundle in free services into my subscription, I suck the air out of the room for the partners, right? Who's going to want to work with me? Because you give it away for free.”
Kellogg: VCs targeting billion-dollar returns will block hundred-million-dollar sales
“You don't want to raise money from a VC who wants you to be a billion dollars, and you want to sell it a hundred million. I've had friends who wanted to sell it a hundred million. VCs wouldn't let them, right? Because they'll say, no, we're blocking the sale b…”
Kellogg: Monday.com spends 5x more on sales and marketing than R&D
“Monday.com, the Work OS, aren't they kind of a PLG company, product-led growth? Doesn't the product kind of sell itself? Well, they spend five times as much on sales and marketing as they do in R&D.”
Kellogg: Unformed categories require value selling; established ones need differentiation
“If the category hasn't formed yet, you're probably in a why-buy-one mode. Hey, I know there's this thing you never heard of. Let me tell you why you should buy one. If there is a category, and there's five vendors in it, and there's a magic quadrant, you're pr…”
Kellogg: Technology pioneer references fail to persuade pragmatic enterprise buyers
“People want references who remind them of themselves. So, this is a large part of the whole Crossing the Chasm book, is you can't take a, you know, technology pioneer and reference them against a pragmatist. It doesn't work.”
Kellogg: Strategic alliances drive 10-30% of pipeline and close faster
“Alliances, which can easily account for 10 to 30% of your pipeline, usually that closes faster and with a higher rate”
Kellogg: SaaS companies should conduct quarterly third-party win-loss analyses
“The way to solve that is two things. One, quarterly win-loss analysis at your QBR, right, hire a third-party firm, To analyze wins and losses, to bring reality back into the room, and second, this is done far less often, but I think even more important, a win-…”
Kellogg: Tech messaging requires adding 'how different' to the 5Ws and 2Hs
“They teach journalists in journalism school that for any story it's about five W plus two H, right? Who, what, where, when, why are the five W's? How and how much are the two H's? I add a Third H for how different, because in tech, differentiation matters so m…”
Kellogg: Product messaging should be black-and-white on offense, gray on defense
“And I like messaging to be black and white, particularly when we're on offense, we want to be black and white. Only we have this. When we're on defense, we want gray. Right? Well, you have consolidation. Well, they have consolidation. You don't. Well, actually…”
Kellogg: Use multi-level ternary trees to structure complex, memorable messaging
“So this is the key to building simple, memorable messaging. I still, I launched Business Objects version six in 1996. I still remember the messaging. P-D-E. Why? Because it's in a ternary tree, right? So I firmly, firmly recommend using ternary trees to struct…”
Kellogg: Chief Marketing Officers typically last 1.5 to 2.5 years
“CMOs last one and a half, two, two and a half years. You're gonna be hiring one soon, whether you just hired one or not.”
Kellogg: Net dollar retention measures customer base health better than churn
“Net dollar retention, which I think is actually a more effective way to get at what churn is trying to measure.”
Kellogg: Ending ARR and growth rate suffice for rough SaaS valuation
“In fact, if you only had two numbers to give you the value of a SAS company, it would be ending ARR and growth rate. I could then tell you roughly what that company is worth kind of a first order valuation.”
Kellogg: Expansion ARR should represent 20% to 40% of new ARR
“To me when it's less than 20%, maybe you're not exploiting your expansion opportunity much, as much as you should be. When it's over 40% maybe you're not getting as much new logo as you should be, right? So, so I personally like it running in the twenties and …”
Kellogg: SaaS CAC ratio averages 1.3; over 3.0 becomes uninvestable
“So I like the CAC ratio very important SAS metric, you know, typically runs around 1.3, you know, below 1.3 is getting to be quite good. Below one is really good. Best I've ever seen was .4. Anything between 1.5 and two people start to scratch their eyebrows a…”
Kellogg: Operators prefer unbundled metrics over CAC payback to isolate issues
“VCs in general kind of like all-in-one metrics because they're trying to make an investment decision. I always feel like operators don't love these metrics as much because if it's too high, I don't know which side of it is broken, right? If my CAC payback peri…”
Kellogg: PE firms recalculate all SaaS metrics from raw data
“In the VC side, frankly, I don't see as much recalculation, but when you meet PE people, they will literally take all your financials and just recalculate everything. You know, you're going to say your churn is, you know, only 10%. They're like, well, we'll fi…”
Kellogg: ASC 606 flattens price ramping into straight-line GAAP revenue
“It will drive on an ARR basis, epic net dollar retention, but on a revenue basis, ASC. So six will flatten it out. It will see right through this trick and you will just end up with a 120 K per year in gap revenue.”
Kellogg: Private SaaS companies will start tracking Remaining Performance Obligations
“I think the next metric we're going to see private companies start to look at is now kind of second billing in public companies, RPO remaining performance obligation.”
Employees who excel at one startup phase may fail in the next
“Some people are good at different phases of the company. That, that's a reality we must deal with, and just because someone was a right member of the team last year, doesn't mean they're a right member of the team next year.”
Asking a board what to do next quarter gets a CEO fired
“First, you're working for a committee, not a person, and second, if you ever went to that committee going, gosh, I wonder what we should do next quarter, right? They would look at you and say, I think you should help us find a new CEO, right? Because you're su…”
Dave Kellogg: CEOs must separate company vision from operating strategy
“We need to separate kind of vision, which is kind of an end state goal for the company, from strategy, which is kind of a systematic path to get there.”
Choosing top-tier venture firms over unknown equivalents eases future fundraising
“All other things being equal in a financing round, you can have somebody who's very nice and very smart from a no-name firm, or somebody who is equivalent from a big-name firm, your future fundraising will be much easier if you pick the second person.”
Startups should aim to raise venture funding approximately every two years
“If you step back and take a more kind of macro view on it, you should try to raise money about every two years.”