Our experiment with Clubhouse continues. My partner in crime Dave Kellogg and I get to interview David Clarke, who is almost as good a golfer as another D Clarke, but not quite.
David does know a fair bit about enterprise software though, having co-founded Cape Clear Software, which was acquired by Workday in 2008. As Workday CTO, he was part of the leadership team that scaled Workday from early stage through IPO and beyond. David is from Dublin, the original Dublin, not the East Bay one, although he has been there on occasion. Today he is a digital advisor to the Irish Government. He advises and invests in technology startups personally and alongside Frontline Ventures, where he is an advisory partner.
I've known David since my Gartner days, and you are in for wisdom and wit.
- After a rambling introduction, we will start with the product management challenges of “customer focus”. What does that really mean? Every company (and every startup) claims to be that but surprisingly few actually behave that way.
- What are specific challenges of selling to and succeeding with very large enterprises when you are still a small vendor. “Yeah we won Walmart, now what?”
- What is a platform actually?
- What do architects do, and when do you need one?
- M&A: What’s your advice for start-ups when courting or being courted by bigger enterprise vendors.
- What are things you should do early in your product journey to help you scale later? what to do at $10m or $200M that you'll be really happy you did when you are $500M or a $1B.
- We may ask him for a book recommendation, or a golf swing tip.The last one I got from a pro was, “Don’t stand so close to the ball after you have hit It.”
Please come along, and bring your questions.
The session will be on Thursday 29th April at 8h00 Pacific time/ 17h00 German time. Link here.
The show will be recorded, and published as a podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast via apple podcast or it is
Here is the last episode. It should have been called episode 5, but who is counting?
BTW my second newsletter published yesterday, have a look.
