What's Hot 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC

What's Hot 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC

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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #194
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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #194

20 years ago there was the ASP market before SaaS and Salesforce was just getting started...

Ed Sim
Jul 18, 2020
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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #194
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As I’ve said before, this enterprise market is about the haves and have nots as security, automation, and cloud continue to be top of mind.

UIPath (automation) becomes the first European decacorn with a $10 billion valuation, Auth0 (security, dev tooling) raises at a $1.9 billion valuation, and Gartner updated its tech forecast with declining overall IT Spend but forecasted double digit growth for cloud between now and 2021.

While SaaS and the cloud are givens today, here’s a tweetstorm from earlier in the week discussing when it wasn’t. Take a look - covers the ASP market, what’s old is new again, concept IPOs, and makes me think what will be a given 20 years from today that we don’t think about now?

Twitter avatar for @edsim
Ed Sim @edsim
1/ cleaning out my desk before SaaS, we had the ASP (application service provider) market, found this from August 1999 where I'm quoted in @InfoWorld talking @LivePerson Can’t believe how far we’ve come, yet in many ways things didn’t change much, just got WAY MORE EFFICIENT
Image
Image
1:39 PM ∙ Jul 12, 2020
43Likes7Retweets

As always, be safe, thank you for reading, and please like and share!

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Scaling Startups

  1. Founders if you are raising money, take a look at The TechCrunch list which is based on survey data from founders and highlights20 who really leads first checks and are most founder friendly.

    TechCrunch further breaks out the 11 VCs who founder love the most, so super honored to be on this list along with my partner @Eliot Durbin. Behind paywall but others include Jerry Chen from Greylock, Josh Kopelman from FirstRound, and Mar Hershenson and Pejman Nozad of Pear.

    Twitter avatar for @edsim
    Ed Sim @edsim
    Humbled to be on this list with my @Boldstartvc partner @etdurbin - 🙏🏼 to all of the amazing founders we’ve had the opportunity to partner with + look forward to many more partnerships forged on day one with repeat + new founders. Now back to work 😃 https://t.co/mxD3aZa308
    Twitter avatar for @TechCrunch
    TechCrunch @TechCrunch
    Data from The TechCrunch List shows the 11 VCs who founders love the most https://t.co/hMuzzA78xy by @dannycrichton
    7:55 PM ∙ Jul 14, 2020
    102Likes6Retweets
  2. Here’s the other side of starting a company; Luke Kanies, founder of Puppet, shares his founding story and subsequent burnout - it’s a must read for enterprise founders.

    The birth of our kids was more than a turning point for our family. It transformed Puppet. It forced me to acknowledge I could not do it alone. I brought in help before they were born, and by the time they turned one I’d raised a funding round and moved to Portland.

    In the four-and-a-half years of bootstrapping, we went from zero to around $250k a year in revenue, and from one to three people. In the seven years after funding, we grew to five hundred people and more than seventy million dollars in revenue. More importantly, we had an impact on thousands of people and thousands of companies.

  3. An absolute goldmine on early stage positioning from our friend Justin Warren of PivotNine. Here’s his presentation from Heavybit outlining the importance and the hows.

  4. Founder priorities - I find for many founders that #4 is hard to do, that is learning to let go for the right key execs you bring to your team. Also, what’s missing and a super key ingredient is building a product people love.

    Twitter avatar for @shl
    Sahil Lavingia @shl
    A CEO’s first job is to get the company capitalized. A CEO’s second job is to recruit a team. A CEO’s third job is to provide them with clarity so they can solve their customers' problems. A CEO’s fourth job is to get out of the way until one of the above is no longer true.
    3:01 PM ∙ Jul 16, 2020
    5,881Likes1,185Retweets

Enterprise Tech

  1. GitLab DevOps 2020 survey is out - some interesting anecdotes…

    Still tons of upside ahead for microservices…

    The majority of respondents aren’t using Kubernetes and microservices yet, but they are investigating them.

    Who owns security?

    It depends on who you ask. But, more than 25% of developers feel solely responsible for security, indicating that shifting security left has begun in earnest.

    Biggest areas of investment?

    Last year, respondents told us they wanted to invest in their DevOps processes. And they did. The top three areas for investment this year: CI, SCM, and test automation.

  2. What is RevOps as opposed to DevOps? Erol Toker from portfolio co Truly.co nails it and how bringing an engineering mindset can unlock huge value. We are seeing tons of internal tooling around all of these areas and also engineers getting embedded into these teams. This is why we are so excited about not only Truly, but also Clay (spreadsheets that fill themselves), PlanGraph (pricing treated as a product), and Cycle (app for product centric teams).

  3. What is true developer friendly? Love this post from Udi Nachmany, head of Cloud Alliances at Snyk (portfolio co).

  4. While security is 🔥 but also rife with too many startups, SIEM is still a huge opportunity for someone to do right. If interested, check out Kate’s thread and the commentary.

    Twitter avatar for @securitybrew
    Kate Brew @securitybrew
    Need your input! Doing an #infosec poll collaborating with @anton_chuvakin to figure out the worst / biggest / top problems with current-day SIEM tools. What is the top trouble in your opinion? Please RT for reach :)
    12:40 AM ∙ Jul 17, 2020
    52Likes66Retweets

    Added to that, Brian Heemsoth from CVS mentioned this as a burning need of his in our recent CISO security panel.

    Twitter avatar for @bheemsoth
    Brian Heemsoth @bheemsoth
    @shomikghosh21 @edsim Great thread. I can't think of a cyber security market that is more ripe for disruption nor a capability that is more critical for the success of threat detection & response.
    4:53 PM ∙ Jul 17, 2020

    Medium post and video here:

    Twitter avatar for @shomikghosh21
    Shomik Ghosh @shomikghosh21
    For those who missed it, here is the video of @Boldstartvc last CXO connect w/ the following forward thinking F500 Security Execs: @BrianL1775 HBO Max @bheemsoth CVS David Hahn @SVB_Financial You can read our 6 takeaways here: medium.com/boldstart-vent…
    youtube.comSecurity in a Remote-First World; How Have Enterprises Adapted?Boldstart CXO Connect Presents Security in a Remote-First World; How Have Enterprises Adapted? 7.8.20 The global pandemic acted like a forcing function, driv...
    12:37 AM ∙ Jul 17, 2020
  5. Developer onboarding is a huge problem and some data points that average tenure of a developer is 12 months and one of main reasons for leaving is not getting up to speed on the codebase. I’m super excited because we just invested in a stealth company trying to solve this real problem. Click through for more on this…

    Twitter avatar for @EmmaBostian
    Emma Bostian 🐞 @EmmaBostian
    Spotify provides a step-by-step coding tutorial on building an application for new developers. It covers APIs, authentication, component creation with React & TS, E2E & unit testing, security, and more. Having a complete coding tutorial is so freaking useful for new devs 👏
    11:36 AM ∙ Jul 13, 2020
    6,100Likes587Retweets
  6. 👇🏼💯

    Twitter avatar for @reillyusa
    Christian Reilly @reillyusa
    Hence why "cloud" is always going to be more complicated than traditional on premises. We are not even scratching the surface yet.
    Twitter avatar for @msandbu
    Marius Sandbu @msandbu
    Working on a ecosystem overview of Microsoft Azure related security services. There are a lot of services integrated #azure #microsoftazure #azuresecurity https://t.co/ySFwfcndR5
    10:39 AM ∙ Jul 13, 2020
    47Likes10Retweets
  7. The more we rely on the cloud, the more uptime, security and resiliency matters. In both Slack and Cloudflare’s recent outage was a configuration change!

    Twitter avatar for @eastdakota
    Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota
    Details on how we caused an 23 min outage for~50% of @Cloudflare's network today. The root cause was a typo in a router configuration on our private backbone. We've applied safeguards to ensure a mistake like this will not cause problems in the future.
    blog.cloudflare.comCloudflare outage on July 17, 2020Today a configuration error in our backbone network caused an outage for Internet properties and Cloudflare services that lasted 27 minutes. We saw traffic drop by about 50% across our network.
    1:28 AM ∙ Jul 18, 2020
    2,230Likes839Retweets

    Here’s a great Medium post this past week from Slack engineering detailing its first major outage this past May and why learning from incidents is the way to make sure repeatable mistakes are avoided.

    We strive to keep Slack available and reliable, and in this case, we failed. We know that Slack is a critical tool for our users, and that is why we aim to learn as much as we can from every incident, whether customer visible or not. 

  8. Europe’s first decacorn in UIPath (from Philippe Botteri, Accel) and automation is 🔥 as revenue is at $400 million, up from $100 million 2 years ago

    UiPath says it has automated millions of tasks for over 65% of the Fortune 500. Among its 6,300 customers are Google, Amazon and NASA.

    And IBM can’t ignore the space any more as they make their first automation acquisition in WDG Automation.

    Previously, IBM provided access to RPA tools via an alliance with vendors such as Automation Anywhere. Once the deal is closed IBM will be able to offer a more tightly integrated RPA alternative that would be more aligned with IBM’s overall artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, says Mike Gilfix, vice president of cloud integration for IBM.

    With UIPath at over $10 billion valuation and still private, all of the big companies are now jockeying for a piece of this fast growing market that is somewhat COVID resilient with Microsoft buying Softmotive and IBM buying WDG. Who’s next? ServiceNow? SAP? This is a market the big boys can’t ignore.

  9. I’ve always liked CB Insights Cyber Defenders report, 2020 version is here. Covers disinformation detection, container security, bot-assisted defense and centralized digital identities.


Markets

  1. 21 years in the making! Mentee (Marc Benioff) takes over mentor (Larry Ellison).


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By Ed Sim
Ed Sim's (@boldstartvc) weekly readings and notes on enterprise VC, software, and scaling startups
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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #194
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #437
building the AI Native company - not just product
Mar 15
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #406
The race to be the last mile AI platform for enterprises - lessons from Palantir's Bootcamp model (BLG is the new PLG), Glean, and others...
Aug 10, 2024 • 
Ed Sim
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #416
8 years of What's 🔥 🙏🏼 - more on Palantir's model from services (FDE) to product and now product + some services + why every startup will have to…
Oct 19, 2024 • 
Ed Sim
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