What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - Issue #130
business productivity is super hot with Zoom at $16.5 billion market cap (IPO at $9b cap) and Slack just filing to go public, cyber security continues to be an area of concern in S-1 filings but none have cited nation state and organized crime as threats like Slack did, speaking of cyber security I had fund joining a podcast with George Rettas (ex-MD security at Citi, JPM) discussing what’s next in cyber security and why developers are important in this new world, on the cloud side AWS and Microsoft Azure crushed earnings this week with both growing 41% year over year, , and for startup founders read how the amount of cash to go from seed to A is increasing
had a great time on TaskForce 7 Security Podcast with George Rettas - The Founder and Managing Partner of Boldstart, Ed Sim joins Task Force 7 Radio to talk about how he applies a First Check for Enterprise Technology Entrepreneurs, how he identifies pain in a new startup, and what’s hot in the Cyber Security VC market. Sim also gives him opinion on if emerging tec…
Scaling Startups
always fun to read the investor stories post success, here are some key ones from Emergence Capital who led the A and Sequoia Capital who led the D - customer happiness is a key metric
How Zoom's CEO Eric Yuan Changed the Way We Invest
from Emergence Capital - key takeaways include what is north star metric (happiness for Eric Yuan and Zoom), ability to attract followers on mission, perseverance and more
Zoom IPO: How Eric Yuan Delivers Happiness
Sequoia’s view on Zoom and Eric Yuan - “He cared more about our business than he did about our money — because he was, as he is today, singularly focused on his mission of making people happy. That clarity of thought is something the best founders share, and it’s one of the main drivers of the performance that’s getting noticed despite Zoom’s under-the-radar approach.”
How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell
great read on the historical Kleiner Perkins, the rise and fall, and their rebuilding process - Once the embodiment of Silicon Valley venture capital, Kleiner Perkins has suffered a two-decade losing streak. Can it ever regain its magic?
Enterprise Tech
Slack Warns Investors It's a Target for Nation-State Hacking
while we all know about constant cyber security threats, none of the recent S-1 filings (Lyft, Uber, PagerDuty, Zoom) “explicitly referred to “organized crime” or “nation-states,” as Slack did in its S-1 filing - As Slack prepares to go public, the company is warning potential investors that it’s a target for malicious attacks from “sophisticated organized crime, nation-state, and nation-state supported actors,” according to an SEC filing published today.
Demand Surges for Software ‘Robots’ That Automate Back-Office Tasks
if you’re a loyal reader to this newsletter, no surprise here - Global spending on RPA reached $680 million last year, up 57% from 2017, and it is on pace to reach $2.4 billion by 2022, according to tech-industry research firm Gartner Inc
My Medium post from our dinner with 6 Fortune 500 Global Heads of Automation can shed more light on use cases - https://medium.com/boldstart-ventures/how-do-6-global-heads-of-automation-from-the-fortune-500-think-about-the-future-b4df00d96692
Tech Companies to Watch 2019: FortressIQ
speaking of RPA, CFO Magazine has a great profile on FortressIQ (a portfolio co) on how it speeds up digital transformation through imitation learning - this is first step in automation journey and company partners with the RPA vendors
I recently ported some demo apps to Cloud Functions and the process mostly involved deleting code, Dockerfiles, and a bunch of YAML files. Serverless is an understatement.
10:41 PM - 24 Apr 2019
A quick look at how Series A and seed rounds have ballooned in recent years, fueled by top investors
More recently, Wing has been tracking deal sizes, capturing the details of 6,205 financings of 2,982 companies funded by one of those 21 firms over the last nine years to discern the ways in which round sizes are changing. And the results, while not shocking, are still eye-opening.
Starting with seed rounds, last year the average startup raised a total of $5.6 million prior to raising a Series A, up from $5.2 million in 2017, says Wing. That’s a lot of seed capital, especially when considering that the average amount of seed funding for a startup in 2010 was $1.3 million.
Markets
key stats (link to S1 here) - Slack reported a net loss of $146 million on $105.2 million in revenue for its fiscal 2017; then a net loss of $140 million on $220.5 million in revenue for 2018; and a $138.9 million loss on $400.6 million in revenue for fiscal 2019. 10 million daily active users, over 600k orgs, 50% outside US, and only 15% paying customers, net expansion of 143%
www.businessinsider.sg • Share
Amazon Web Services revenue grew 41% in the first quarter
41% growth for AWS as sales rose to $7.7 billion from $5.44 billion a year earlier
Microsoft beats expectations with $30.6B in revenue as Azure’s growth continues
41% is magic number as cloud offerings drove commercial cloud revenue to $9.6 billion this quarter, up 41 percent year-over-year,”
Other
You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep—and It’s Killing You
I read Matt Walker’s book Why We Sleep and I highly recommend but in a nutshell - “The decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, even the safety and education of our children. It’s a silent sleep loss epidemic. It’s fast becoming one of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st century,” Walker, an expert in sleep at UC Berkeley and author of the best-selling book Why We Sleep, told a rapt TED audience on Thursday.
By Ed Sim
Ed Sim's weekly readings and notes on VC, software, and scaling startups - #enterprise #seed #DeveloperFirst #IntelligentAutomation #DataInfra #CloudNative #Cybersecurity
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