What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #158
Just came back from spending the week on the west coast and attended 2 great events, the Battery Open Cloud Summit and the Lightspeed Enterprise Scale event. Both had amazing speakers and when it comes to scale, building the right culture came up many times. In other news, Microsoft entered the RPA game with PowerAutomate with a end-user driven approach and Github came out with it’s state of the Octoverse report (40m devs, up 10m from 2019). Wining hearts and minds of developers to win enterprise deals will only get stronger in the years to come.
Finally, if you like the new format or content, please share and ❤️ above!
Scaling Startups
Dharmesh Thakker and the Battery team share their views on how to build a world class open cloud company. One of my faves was their 90/90/90 one when it comes to focusing on Time to Value.
Euny Hong shares The Korean Secret to Happiness and Success called nunchi. It’s kind of like a Korean equivalent of EIQ and something all of us may want to understand.
One of the first I learned was “nunchi”— literally translated, “eye-measure.” Nunchi is the art of sensing what people are thinking and feeling, and responding appropriately.
Ryan Floyd from Storm Ventures breaks down why managing churn is so important for SaaS companies
Enterprise Tech
Microsoft enters RPA game with low code, no code approach, renaming Microsoft Flow to Power Automate. Reminds me of how Microsoft Teams entered well after Slack had been well established. In this case, it’s behind UIPath and Automation Anywhere and others but with its huge user base of analysts, this makes a ton of sense. IMO, I’d keep a close eye on what they are doing. One of our boldstart portfolio companies, FortressIQ, is a launch partner and will help customers “automate the automation.”
While numbers likely overstated, directionally this is powerful! Win ❤️and 🧠of developers and win enterprise customers.
Some numbers that are somewhat shocking in @github's 2019 State of the Octoverse (octoverse.github.com) - 40M developers (up *10M* in 2019) - 44% more developers created their first repository in 2019 than in 2018 (Accelerating innovation?) - 80% of developers outside the US*
How to build a $100 billion SaaS company, not a $1 billion one. Excellent post by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr
Today, there is 1 $100B+ SaaS Company, Salesforce. Just one. We could add older companies like Adobe, Microsoft, etc. but they aren’t pure SaaS plays. Salesforce is the “only” $100b+ pure-play SaaS company.
Power of customer success - 73% of revenue from installed base, expansion and upsells
Thought provoking framework from Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures on the Future of Work. I like his layered approach with fundamental tech on the bottom of the stack with an importance on mapping out business processes and then measuring before automating.
Markets
Are we mad asks Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates? Point is money is free for those who have wealth and inaccessible for those who don’t. In addition, this money is being put into investments driving up asset prices across the board and reducing returns. Below remind you of anyone?
There is now so much money wanting to buy these dreams that in some cases venture capital investors are pushing money onto startups that don’t want more money because they already have more than enough; but the investors are threatening to harm these companies by providing enormous support to their startup competitors if they don’t take the money. This pushing of money onto investors is understandable because these investment managers, especially venture capital and private equity investment managers, now have large piles of committed and uninvested cash that they need to invest in order to meet their promises to their clients and collect their fees.