What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - Issue #136
infrastructure companies in the crosshairs of public cloud offerings got rocked with Pivotal missing earnings and stock price down 45% and Cloudera down 28%, on SaaS application side we have a different story with Salesforce crushing it’s numbers and stock up 5% and Zoom beatings its numbers as well and up 12% - Jay Kreps from Confluent discussed the future of open source and Apple is a privacy first company
CIOs Crack Open the ‘Black Box’ of Tech Productivity
great read on how CIOs are using data to track efficiency and nice mention of portfolio co Pinpoint Software as SVP tech at Ancestry.io comments on the value - Data is critical to the way enterprise technology executives run their divisions, but it wasn’t always easy to get. “Before, it was a black box,” said Niraj Nagrani, senior vice president for product and technology at genealogy website Ancestry.
Salesforce Growth:
2020 $16.25 (guidance)
2019 $13.2B
2018 $10.5B
2017 $8.4B
2016 $6.7B
2015 $5.4B
2014 $4.1B
Thank you Ohana!
4:34 PM - 4 Jun 2019
Scaling Startups
Why startups are hard -- the math of venture capital returns tells the story
Great read from Andrew Chen of a16z: Here’s another surprise from the data, which is that the best investors don’t seem to be better at avoiding startups that fail. It’s not about the downside. Instead, the data says that a “good” 2-3x fund and a fantastic >5x fund lose money about the same % of the time. However, for a fantastic fund, its winners are much, much bigger than everyone else’s. For these top funds, the biggest startups end up generating 90% of the returns. It’s all about upside! For startups that ask why investors seem so obsessed with market size and say that few ideas are big enough, here’s the data that explains why.
from Box earnings report, FOUNDERS REMEMBER - solution-selling = longer sales cycle, the more products u have the more complex the selling becomes, simplifying product offering/bundles is a must have to make it easier for customers to buy + sales to sell

Enterprise Tech
Apple has cemented a turning point for the future of the web. In building products, the question is moving from “how much data can we gather” to “how little data can we gather” to deliver the same value proposition.
7:14 PM - 4 Jun 2019
Apple is now the privacy-as-a-service company
this is a huge deal from Apple, offering consumers to sign on by generating a new random email associated with Apple account - Apple unveiled a new single-sign on unified ID platform, as well as a new way it’ll operate […]
'A white-collar sweatshop': Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft
sad reality of #AI works more like Fred Flintstone than Google tagline “Keep making magic” – which obscured more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.”
What Does The Future Of Open Source Look Like?
Confluent’s Jay Kreps discusses what the future of open source software looks like - open core works along with changes to hosting to prevent the cloud providers from crushing these communities - MongoDB, Elastic and Confluent have still thrived despite the big cloud going after them
Google's Looker purchase opens new front in cloud computing wars
huge purchase by Google at $2.6 billion for looker - “Google sees the acquisition as a way to double down on its position as a provider of cloud-agnostic services as well as the success of its BigQuery cloud data warehouse, which Kurian called an “essential part of digital transformation.” The addition of Looker will give customers a common data model for all their data, augmented analytics and better ability to build collaborative data-driven applications across a variety of industries.”
Markets
Salesforce's Benioff: 'Massive' digital transformation is driving our growth
no secrets here - digital transformation = massive $$$ - key to Salesforce continued growth - The digital customer transformation “is as big as Y2K was for the tech industry,” CEO Marc Benioff says.
Pivotal Software loses almost half its value after 'train wreck' of an earnings report
the cloud native infra company for the Fortune 500 takes a huge stumble, public cloud offering hybrid and kubernetes has slowed growth, I don’t think a market issue but more complexity of existing offerings - Shares of Pivotal Software fell as much as 45% Wednesday after the company’s weak revenue forecast
Zoom shares jump after the company tops estimates in first earnings report since IPO
Zoom’s guidance and results beat estimates, with revenue soaring more than 100% in the fiscal first quarter
Cloudera customers hit brakes on renewals ahead of Cloudera Data Platform, CEO Reilly to retire
Cloudera was seeing competition from public cloud providers. In our first quarter as a merged company, we experienced headwinds in bookings from existing customers. These customers generally represent more than 90% of our growth with a focus of the quarter’s activities. We’ve analyzed the challenges we encountered in the quarter and believe the 2 factors primarily contribute to the bookings impact… During this period of uncertainty, we saw increased competition from the public cloud vendors. Second, the announcement in March of Cloudera Data Platform, our new hybrid and multi-cloud offering, created significant excitement within our customer base. CDP is compelling as it addresses many of our customers’ pressing needs. However, our rapid execution on the Cloudera platform caused customers to wait until release to renew and expand their agreements.
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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