Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
How an experienced CRO builds a revenue engine Georgian Partners (reading time: 7 minutes)
The Chief Revenue Officer has become a mainstay role for a SaaS company that wants to scale. In this post, Georgian Partners provides an excellent deep dive into what the role is. I enjoyed two key concepts. Executive alignment being the first. This is something that we’ve worked on a lot in the past few years. The second was “where to play” which is reminiscent of the Play to Win framework
NFTs and a Thousand True Fans Chris Dixon (reading time: 5 minutes)
Kevin Kelly’s Thousand True Fans should be required reading for anyone that wants to start a business. Simply, you only need a thousand true fans in order to make a living. Chris Dixon explains how NFTs will unlock tremendous value for creators and businesses. He also provides some great stats on collectibles that have been exploding this year. What I’m curious about is how this will create an entire new economy with radically different business models.
Content-driven growth Lenny Ratchinsky (reading time: 20 minutes)
I’ve been out of the digital marketing world for a few years now and it’s fun to dive back in from time to time. Lenny does a great job of dissecting five key content-driven growth strategies. I’ve always liked the expression that every company is a media company. This article provides a blueprint on how to think about content for your business.
Strategy as Problem-Solving Roger Martin (reading time: 7 minutes)
Most strategic planning processes produce strategic plans that are not worth the effort put into them.
Hat tip to my colleague Antoine for this article. We’ve covered Roger Martin on this newsletter recently and he provides another great framework to think about strategy. Roger argues that most corporate strategic planning exercises are simply that, exercises. Instead, they should be trying to solve a specific strategy problem.
The Man Who Abandoned Value Institutional Investor (reading time: 17 minutes)
Arne Alsin runs a hedge fund that bears his name and invests in disruptive companies. He was an Amazon and Tesla bull long before it was fashionable. This is a good read on a new kind of money manager. One that looks at exponential growth curves and not in the rearview mirror.
Bonus:
Your Value Creation Team: Best Practices and Common Challenges The PNR (reading time: 10 minutes)
Over the past few years, we’ve been working with investors in the field of value creation. The guiding principle is simple, the more involved in its portfolios an investment firm is, the greater its returns. We wrote a research report on the topic. If you’re interested in the topic, you should check it out!
