The Lateen Sail changed the course of Mediterranean navigation. It was a flexible triangular sail that allowed ships to harness the power of natural resources, specifically headwinds. Previously, fixed square-sailed ships could only sail with the wind; their direction was bound by their design. The Lateen Sail changed all that…

This is a story about putting your money where your mouth is. Last month, on Earth Day, Google pledged to run all of its data centers on carbon-free electricity by 2030. CEO Sundar Pichai said: “Within a decade, we aim for every Google data center, cloud region, and office campus…

A Conversation with Jeroen Tas, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer at Philips — Welcome! This week I’m discussing digital transformation and healthcare with Jeroen Tas, the Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer of Philips, a Zuora customer. Most of you are familiar with Philips, the $25 billion Dutch manufacturing conglomerate that makes everything from smart LED bulbs to MRI systems. Jeroen has been with…

In the Subscription Economy, how do you know when it’s time to kill a product? A couple of weeks ago I talked about product offerings with Zuora’s Amy Konary, and our research data on this topic is clear: revenues of higher-growth companies are typically concentrated in a more highly curated…

We may have just shot forward ten years in ten months. The pandemic has acted as a dramatic accelerant for the Subscription Economy in terms of agility, flexibility, and autonomy. It has been the ultimate forcing function for digital transformation. Here in the US, roughly 40% of the workforce are…

By Tien Tzuo — Want to triple your sales efficiency? Think about trimming your product catalog. That’s according to the new benchmark study from the Subscribed Institute and McKinsey & Company (you can download the full report here). This week I’m talking to Amy Konary, VP of the Subscribed Strategy Group, about these surprising…

Netflix recently announced that it has over 200 million global subscribers, an impressive milestone. But more importantly, the company is “very close” to being free cash flow positive, despite previously forecasting a loss of up to $1 billion on the year. As Barron’s put it, “the big news was the…

In the late Nineties, Yahoo was the Internet. Technically it was a human-compiled directory of web sites, but it was essentially the home page of what was then a very new and exciting space. When I was looking around for a new job after business school, I discovered Salesforce on…

GM’s EV-focused keynote at the virtual CES this week was literally electrifying: an entirely new battery system, a new business unit dedicated to delivery solutions, a cool new EV Hummer, even a flying Cadillac air taxi. But perhaps more than all of the new product announcements, I especially appreciated Mary…