What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - Issue #138
back to great advice for enterprise founders this week including why one should have a public product roadmap, the 5 commandments for building an enterprise startups, and the 10 laws of cloud; I’m trying not to include too many articles on that messaging company that went public but 2 other gems include Atlassian’s move to create a standard M&A term sheet and a thought provoking article on professional decline starting earlier than we think and how to reframe it…
Scaling Startups 🚀

We made our product roadmap public -- and haven't regretted it (Front)
Highly recommend! - Market the vision, sell the product - public roadmap has helped @FrontApp create transparency with customers, get product feedback and also share LT vision - In 2015, my startup, Front, decided to make its product roadmap public, and it was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
my favorite is product first - that is the core driver from Zoom to Slack and others - “Focus on building an outstanding proprietary product because it’s the primary thing that wins (and keeps) customers.” from Bessemer Venture Partners
The Five Commandments of a Startup
great read from Jeff Haynie from Pinpoint on building enterprise software startups, his fourth startup - sell painkillers, not vitamins; just because we can doesn’t mean we should; build the best team (really); customer loyalty > customer acquisition; scale for growth, not for show
10 years ago, the combined public market caps of bottom-up, user-led enterprise software companies was $0. Today, it’s $100B+. Amazing how much this industry has changed in under a decade.
1:55 PM - 20 Jun 2019
Enterprise Tech 👨🏼💻👩🏼💻
Salesforce’s Bret Taylor Talks Tableau and the ‘New Normal’ Among Businesses
on-prem and hybrid will not go away and for largest enterprise customers, it is still a must -have - “We have more data than ever before, so actually seeing and understanding it is harder than it was ever before,” Mr. Taylor said. “When we got to know Tableau…it felt like a really great fit for that reason.” Mr. Taylor also acknowledged that the agreement was part of a recent shift for Salesforce away from an exclusive focus on applications that run in the cloud, rather than on software customers run on their own computers.
www.theinformation.com • Share
Opening up our Atlassian Term Sheet
👏🏼Thanks Chris Hecht Tom Kennedy Atlassian- much needed in the M&A market and hopefully will pave way to focusing on value two companies can provide for customers vs legal wranglings, I hope other enterprise companies follow this lead - “Opening up our Atlassian Term Sheet - The traditional M&A process is broken and favors large companies. So, we’re leveling the playing field by releasing our Term Sheet for anyone to see.”
U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid - The New York Times
Here we go. Question is are our industrial systems more vulnerable? @SangerNYT - book is a must read - The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age - The Trump administration is using new authority to take more aggressive digital action in a warning to Moscow and in a demonstration of its abilities. And the predictable response from Russia - “The Kremlin warned on Monday that reported American hacking into Russia’s electric power grid could escalate into a cyberwar with the United States”
Markets 📈
Enterprise-Technology Companies Trigger Investor Zeal
it'a about time! Enterprise software spend is just in second inning and glad to see PagerDuty, Crowdstrike, Slack and others as “the latest example of investors’ unquenchable appetite for tech companies building modern digital services for other businesses.”
Thought Provoking 🤔
Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think
defines fluid vs crystallized intelligence or raw intellectual horsepower vs widsom and how to transition - “Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems—what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.
Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it.”
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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