If Your Moat Was Data, What Happens When AI Can Manufacture It?
In late 2021, ZoomInfo was worth roughly $25 billion. Today it’s worth about $1 billion. The database didn’t get worse. The customer list didn’t disappear. Something else broke, and every B2B data and intelligence business needs to understand what before the market explains it to them the hard wa...
What Does It Mean When the Company That Grades Everyone Else’s Disruption Gets Disrupted?
Gartner’s stock is down roughly 71% from its November 2024 high. Market cap fell from more than $45 billion to about $12 billion. Forrester is worse off: market cap near $105 million, down from roughly $300 million, on a full-year net loss of $119.4 million. These are the two firms B2B buyers hav...
Goals Are for Losers. Systems Are for Winners
That line has been founder gospel for a decade. Scott Adams coined it, and James Clear’s Atomic Habits turned the idea into a movement. It’s also half right.
A goal without a system is hope with a deadline. You know where you’re headed, and nothing on the ground tells you when you’re drifting. A ...
“Thanks for the Lecture on Price”
The largest contract Computer Intelligence had ever sold came down to one meeting. I was leading sales and marketing for Ziff-Davis’s research businesses, and on the other side of the table was the president of a large enterprise software company. We gave a long presentation, slide after slide br...
B2B Marketing is Driving Forward, Looking Backward
Ninety-four percent of B2B buyers now use AI somewhere in the buying process. Forrester and 6sense surveyed buyers separately and landed on the exact same number. Eighty-nine percent of B2B marketers use AI to create content
Same technology. Opposite jobs.
Buyers use it to decide. It does the res...
AI Stopped Being a Story. Now It's in Your Multiple
The Uphoff Value Index tracks what buyers pay for B2B information, marketing and technology businesses, and why it changes. Each quarter, this report shows what moved and what it means if you're building, running or funding one.
What the UVI is, and who it’s for
What it is. The Uphoff Value Index...
Skydance’s $110 Billion Bet on Netflix’s Order of Operations
Paramount Skydance closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6. The combined company is now simply called Skydance: roughly $70 billion in revenue, more than $30 billion a year in content spend, and about $79 billion in debt.
Most of the coverage will treat this as a Hollywood s...
Your AI Pilot Doesn’t Have a Job
Somewhere in your organization right now, a team is piloting technology nobody can explain the job of. They can describe the vendor. They can describe the demo that got everyone nodding. Ask them what specific job that technology was hired to do, and watch the pause.
That pause is the whole probl...
Before You Flatten the Org Chart, Make Sure You Can Measure What AI Delivers
I’m a fan of radical thinking. It forces you to test assumptions you didn’t know you were making. You don’t always have to agree with it. Agreement was never the point.
The point is whether it makes you think. Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha’s essay, From Hierarchy to Intelligence, did that to me. I...
I Asked AI Who to Hire. It Recommended Me. Once
B2B buyers still build shortlists. They just don’t build them alone anymore.
Google “Tony Uphoff” and you get about 86,000 results. Thirty-five years of bylines, press releases, bios and CEO announcements make me discoverable, and by extension the two businesses I started in February. As long as ...
