What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - Issue #151
Huge congrats to NYC based Datadog, cloud monitoring as a service, as it hits $10.9 billion market cap on its debut Friday. The interest in all things enterprise infra continues and who wouldn’t be excited with expansion numbers in the 150% range. This is also a huge win for the NYC enterprise tech ecosystem which was traditionally seen as an ad tech and media community but as I like to say, this is where the money is with 50+ Fortune 500s buying enterprise tech in NYC. For the founders, take a look at the Openview SaaS benchmarks remember to not raise too much money as it can be a crutch in the long term.
Scaling Startups
2019 Expansion Saas Benchmarks
annual must read for SaaS founders, the OpenView Ventures benchmark reprot, lots of data on product led growth, rise of remote-first and sales efficiency metrics for startups - always great for my firm Boldstart to participate in this
Founders please don’t forget that “necessity is the mother of invention” - may sound self serving but raising too much $$$ in seed may set u up 4 failure, some of best thoughts come from middle of night, building culture of scrappiness + ingenuity will serve you well in long run https://t.co/h8rM6Wkpfk
8:54 AM - 20 Sep 2019
Enterprise Tech
So how tied in is the cloud computing sector to startups buying services? “Research by the hedge fund Bridgewater (see FT article) found that spending by private tech start-ups made up about 10 per cent of the revenue of tech giants and accounted for more than 0.4 per cent of global economic activity. That figure is close to the peak of roughly 0.6 per cent reached during the tech bubble of 2000 and will stoke concerns of overheating in private markets, where deep-pocketed backers are subsidizing frequently unprofitable tech business models.”
Cloud Providers Bet on New Encryption Technology to Woo Customers
imagine a default-encrypted world but problem is you can’t do operations without decrypting until homomorphic encryption or other techniques can do it fast enough to make analyzing this data usable - also Dropoutlabs (a portfolio co) making it easier to incorporate multi-party computation and HME
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How data privacy engineering will prevent future data oil spills
a topic near and dear to my heart, data privacy! Alex Ferrara from Bessemer Venture Partners has a great landscape map and overview of the key issues and opportunities for startups
Why banks are adopting a modern approach to cybersecurity—the Zero Trust model
while from a Microsoft centric view of the world, a great read on what Zero Trust Security is and why companies are so interested in it, I would also suggest reading Google BeyondCorp white paper as well if you want a deeper dive into a focus on identity and credentialing and verifying every person or device before granting access
Element AI closes financing, securing $200-million backed by the Caisse, Quebec and McKinsey
While Element AI sounds like a smashing success, there is more beneath the cover. IMO giving startups too much money from the start never allows founders to build a culture of ingenuity and scrappiness - as per quote in Globe and Mail - “The funding comes after several setbacks for Element in getting products to market, after a torrid hiring spree that saw it grow its ranks to more than 500 people before proving there was substantial commercial interest in its offerings. The company generated less than US$10-million in revenue last year, primarily from consulting contracts. By contrast, Ottawa e-commerce software provider Shopify Inc. only reached the 500-employee mark the year it hit US$100-million in revenue.”
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Markets
Another week and more infrastructure IPOs with DataDog reaching a $10.9 billion market cap selling monitoring and logging software - also a huge win for NYC enterprise tech while on same day Ping Identity (competes with Okta) went public and is now worth $1.2 billion. Gitlab just raised another $268mm showing at a $2.75 billion valuation showing the continued rise and importance of developers, especially in the enterprise
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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