Blog

I realize women are expected to hem and haw about their age, but I’m 50 years old and not at all bummed about it. Frankly, being of a certain age has tangible benefits. I’m tempted to plagiarize Farmers Insurance and say something about resilience and “having seen a thing or two,” but I won’t (asRead more

Since the beginning of this epidemic, one positive part of our ‘new normal’ has been the emergence of what CNN anchor Chris Cuomo dubs ‘AmeriCANs.’ While the ranks of these AmeriCANs include people going the extra mile for their neighbor, as well as the front-line workers doing extraordinary work on the public’s behalf, corporations are also stepping up. From car companies, like GM and Hyundai offering financial relief to their customers to companies like Salesforce pledging no significant layoffs over the next three months, these companies are both buildingRead more

In the sports world, complaining about referees and “bad calls” is an ancient pastime – and the lifeblood of sports talk radio. Fans get frustrated and they need to vent. It’s different, of course, when the head coach complains about referees in a post-game press conference. While they may have a legitimate beef about aRead more

Why Do So Few Break Through? When I started out in tech in the Valley, we were still producing physical clip reports using x-acto knives and Elmer’s paste. The office memo was far more commonplace than a relatively new innovation called email. There were dozens of industry publications dedicated to the burgeoning PC revolution, withRead more

Welcome to Dave Reddy, Marianna Vyridi and Charlie Cooper, bolstering our team of experts to build the “new playbook” for technology marketers.

To my ear, tone-deaf communications reached new decibel levels in 2018, with the tech world contributing mightily to the noise. It was a shrieking cacophony of a year, brimming with inept statements, videos, tweets and posts that offended, hurt, angered or baffled the intended audience—inevitably, to the utter amazement of the tone-challenged communicators. “Tone-deaf” inRead more

It took longer than people expected, but the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) came down hard on Theranos yesterday — banning the company and its CEO from owning or operating a medical lab for two years. As I’ve written before, this is an important story for Silicon Valley business and marketing leaders toRead more

Unicorns aren’t dead yet, though some would like them to be. Others claim we’re now in a “post-unicorn” world. Whatever the future holds, the class of $1B+ private companies continues to expand and contract weekly – providing a valuable microcosm to understand today’s tech trends and startup dynamics. To that end, we’re launching the first complete study thatRead more

Silicon Valley continues to be in the news for the wrong reasons. Theranos is the leading culprit – though not the only one – and it’s important for Valley companies to track what’s happening in the broader communications environment. Crises rarely just impact one company. They tend to drag down a category of like companies (at leastRead more

Silicon Valley has been in the hot seat recently, with several companies facing major and minor media firestorms. Tesla was accused of using low-paid foreign labor for its factories. Facebook is defending itself against charges of editorial bias. Palantir is responding (or not) to staff turnover and customer satisfaction questions. And Theranos is battling a series of disclosures aboutRead more