“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads is a work of genius. I’m not the kind of person that often ruminates on the choices that have gotten me to where I am today, but this song always puts me in an introspective mood. While I will use any excuse no…

I realized something recently when I was picking my friend’s brain about writing this particular post. I shared what I thought was a compelling outline for the basis of the piece, hitting upon the rationale for why I led the Series A investment in Replicant, a company that has developed…

I love investing in great entrepreneurs and products, and Qualified checks both boxes. I have known the founders, Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley, for a decade, working together during some of the highest growth years at Salesforce. Having built multiple companies in the CRM, Marketing and VoC spaces, the founders…

Picture this: it’s 1996. I’m at my first job since graduating with an E.E. degree from the University of Michigan. My hair is bleached (be honest, didn’t we all want to be Crash Override or Acid Burn after Hackers came out?) …

If you’re reading this post and you’re not my mom, chances are you know what SaaS stands for. There once was a time in the not-so-distant past when software only came in one form: boxed. It was something you could hold, feel the weight of, throw away the physical instructions…

So, this just happened: https://www.leanplum.com/blog/series-d-funding-annoucement/ As a fresh-off-the-operating-boat investor, friends and colleagues frequently ask me: what qualities do I look for in companies I wish to invest? The answer you may already know is that at Norwest we have a pretty rigorous process to determine the viability of a company…

They say there are two types of people in this world — those with inbox zero and those with 15,968 unread messages. I tend to be of the former, with a pretty solid spam filter to augment my email maintenance routine. …