Independent consultant, EIR at Balderton Capital, and author of Kellblog.
Silicon Valley, CA
Joined December 2009
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Dave Kellogg retweeted
For the first time in 30 years of @NBCNews polling, more voters say they are dissatisfied with their financial situation (51%) than satisfied (49%).
🔗 nbcnews.com/politics/2026-el…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
If I were CMO of a $50M+ SaaS company, I'd rip up my 2027 plan after reading this 🤯
Here's what I'd replace it with:
1. Stop reporting on traffic alone. Track how often you're named when buyers ask ChatGPT, AI Mode and Perplexity about your category. Same prompts, every month. Watch the trend.
2. Make Reddit a core channel, not an afterthought. Google is still crawling it as hard as ever, and the threads about your category shape the answers buyers see. Have your experts show up openly and helpfully. Never script your customers.
3. Turn your data into research. At $50M+, you're sitting on numbers nobody else has. Anonymise them and publish them. AI is far more likely to quote a specific stat than an opinion.
4. Get named on the pages AI reads. Listicles, G2, comparison pages, analyst reports. Being on someone else's page now matters as much as ranking your own.
5. Rebalance paid search. Protect branded and high-intent terms. Cut the informational ones AI now answers for free.
6. Fund branded demand. When AI gives the answer, the buyer's next step is searching your name. Podcasts, creators and events feed that search.
7. Build an audience you own. Communities, newsletters and events give buyers a reason to come to you directly.
8. Fix attribution. Add "how did you hear about us?" alongside last-click. In a zero-click world, it catches what the dashboard misses.
9. Change your content team's KPIs. From sessions to citations, mentions and pipeline sourced.
10. Make your product easy for AI to read. Starting prices, clean docs and structured data. Agents can't recommend what they can't understand.
If I could do only three in Q1: I'd go with 1, 2 and 4.
And I’d start today :)
Reddit's CEO just admitted something $GOOGL would rather you didn't hear!!
"Google is crawling us as hard as ever. AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody."
The way the internet ran on for 25 years is you let Google read your site, and Google sends you visitors/traffic. That deal is over now and it’s all because of AI.
Google now reads Reddit, writes the answer itself and the user never leaves the search page.
Reddit does the work and Google keeps the reader…and that’s how money is being made.
For $RDDT, its biggest front door is closing which is why the stock is down -25% this morning. Huffman's plan is that people will just come to Reddit directly. Maybe. But US user growth is already down to 6%, and "we'll change everyone's habits" is a hope that’s never gonna come.
For Google, the issue is the same. The damage is slower but it goes deeper. Its AI is only as smart as the open web it learns from. Stop sending sites traffic, and they'll lock their content up, sell it to rival labs or block Google outright. Google is eating the thing it feeds on.
AI killed the click and both of these companies were built on it. It's a fight over who survives the next version of the internet… $GOOGL looks interesting if they cannot win the search
Dave Kellogg retweeted
Heard from so many VC LPs this week. “The math doesn’t math”.
An LP with a mature VC program is in this scenario:
- At or over allocation to VC / Growth. Why? The NAV of their VC/Growth portfolio has grown 100%+ YTD because of lots of cap calls, few distributions and markups. Their public NAV is likely up +10% YTD (if indexed) and the PE/RE/Credit is flatish. The VC Growth numerator has wildly outpaced the denominator.
- They don’t know how to plan for distributions because of public lockups and some big GPs still holding onto spacex.
- 75%+ of their VC/Growth funds are raising right now.
- Their IC is worried about bubbles, credit markets and being further overweight into any further market downturn. It’s the end of the year, so no one wants to make big decisions. At the same time, these LPs (having spent time in VC/Growth) know that all of the best stuff has NOT been done yet (so early on diffusion, the chatGPT moment in science/health/Physical AI)
- This is going to lead to some tough decisions. GPs should plan accordingly. Helping LPs make the case to boards on why now/what next and understand cash flow planning is important at the moment.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
ServiceNow grew subscription revenue 21% at $16B scale. The stock still fell 27% in a day.
Gross margin: 77.3% to 70.5% in a year. Operating margin: 16.8% to 9.4%.
AI is costing the incumbents margin faster than it adds growth.
saastr.com/saas-isnt-dead-ol…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
"We cannot let the free world be dismantled before our very eyes."
- Richard Branson, Founder of the Virgin Group
Dave Kellogg retweeted
Another super insightful post from Kyle.
An important read for GPs and LPs alike.
#nonconsensus #conviction #vc
@gamechangersvc
Dave Kellogg retweeted
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
It’s that time of year. Everyone’s working on their strategic plans and budgets. Before we get too far into the process, let’s take a moment to think.
Remember “Coffee Talk” on Saturday Night Live, with Mike Myers playing Linda Richman? “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Discuss.”
Here’s my business version: Most strategic plans are not strategic. Discuss.
They’ve got goals:
• Two product goals
• One sales goal
• One marketing goal
• One people goal
• Two financial goals
Everyone’s represented. Nobody feels left out. We’ve negotiated the numbers, assigned owners, and put everything into a nice deck.
But where’s the strategy?
As Richard Rumelt put it: “Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy.” In Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Rumelt tells a story about his UCLA colleague John Mamer sitting in on his strategy classes. Mamer observed that every case seemed to revolve around one question: “What’s going on here?”
Rumelt’s conclusion: “A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on.” Yet many strategic plans skip that part entirely. We go straight to what each department promises to deliver next year, without agreeing on the central challenge or how we intend to overcome it.
Seven goals don’t add up to a strategy just because you put “strategic” in front of them.
How much diagnosis is in your plan? If there's not a great diagnosis of the situation, how can you even build a good strategy?
Discuss and with your executive leadership team. Now more than ever, there needs to be a strategy in your strategy.
Hex raised, by my math, about $50 per line of deleted code. There's an AI transformation angle.
Announcing our $100M raise hex.tech/blog/hex-new-era/
I'm not sure this reads the way they think it does
BREAKING: More than 4 in 10 names flagged as possible noncitizen voters in California cannot be found on voter rolls, according to a legal filing. apnews.com/article/californi…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
Less than a month ago, OpenAI was looking to raise “at least” $30 billion at a valuation of $1.4 trillion.
Today it raised $11 billion at $1.25 trillion valuation and faced “tepid” interest.
OpenAI has raised less than half of the $30 billion it had initially targeted for its latest funding round on.wsj.com/4zqPW7W
If you wanted to know what "central casting" likes to send, here it is:
Which startups are most likely to get an investment from top tier VCs?
I looked at ~60 attributes across 5000 startups and these were the 15 strongest.
#1 is being from a top tier fund. MBA is a negative signal
Full list of signals below:
Dave Kellogg retweeted
The ranking members of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees have written a letter to President Trump asking whether he has been soliciting advice from Grok in order to help carry out his official duties as President of the United States.
They also demanded that he preserve any prompts sent to Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, as well as outputs in response to those prompts, that were 'submitted to AI chatbots in carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties.'
The letter was provided by Politico.
I would have picked Liberace over Hussein but he's the professional
The former President’s riff on Saddam Hussein, the Cheesecake Factory, and our gold-besotted leader was not only funny but politically brilliant. newyorker.com/news/letter-fr…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
This is such a bleak story about what it's like to try to land a job right now. nytimes.com/interactive/2026…
The corruption is in broad daylight and yet Congress, the only body that can hold him accountable, does nothing.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
We are facing a crisis of impunity. That's why we built The Rule of Law Project — to investigate unlawful conduct by federal officials, and work with state and local prosecutors to hold them to account.
Watch former DOJ prosecutor Mark Blumberg and human rights leader Brad Adams launch this critical accountability initiative on MSNOW with Nicolle Wallace.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
A classic chart to counter the wisdom of crowds idea. US Americans are absolutely clueless about how common things are. They think over a quarter of Americans are Native Americans, one in five Americans is transgender, over a quarter of the population are Muslim, one in five households earn over half a million dollars. The right answer to all of these questions is 1%. They build their worldview on totally incorrect assumptions towards reality. Data literacy matters.
