What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #230
🤯 UiPath files for IPO - from screen scraping & UI automation to market leader in RPA
Congrats to Daniel Dines and the UIPath team and investors (wish I were one!) on their IPO filing. While there will be many who breakdown the S-1 way better than I, I just wanted to highlight a few 🔑 thoughts centered around the story.
First - big mission - “We make software robots so people don’t have to be robots.” with a purpose “To accelerate human achievement.”
Second, the vision leads to the story around the “fully automated enterprise” and full platform approach.
But it started here in 2012 as Deskover, a screen scraping & UI automation product for desktop and web. Remember, you can’t sell a platform, and need to start with a product first.
In March of 2013, Deskover became UIPath. As you can see, the story evolved to process automation and a broader story on workflow and workflow automation.
And by the end of 2014, the true robotic process automation story starts.
And here is how they’ve done since:
Simply insane numbers and the dollar based net retention at 145% is off the charts for a company of that size.
A limited number of customers represent a substantial portion of our revenue and ARR. If we fail to retain these customers, our revenue and ARR could decline significantly.
We derive a substantial portion of our revenue and ARR from sales to our top 10% of customers. As a result, our revenue and ARR could fluctuate materially and could be materially and disproportionately impacted by purchasing decisions of these customers or any other significant future customer.
As of January 31, 2021, we had 1,002 customers with ARR of $100,000 or more and 89 customers with ARR of $1.0 million or more, which accounted for 75% and 35% of our revenue, respectively, for the fiscal year then ended.
Despite the heavy reliance on its top 1,000 customers over $100k, the bottom up, land and expand business could be a public company unto itself at $145M ARR!
We believe that the success of our land-and-expand business model is centered on our ability to deliver significant value in a very short time. We grow with our customers as they identify and expand the number of business processes to automate, which increases the number of robots deployed and the number of users interacting with our robots. Our ability to expand within our customer base is demonstrated by our dollar-based net retention rate, which represents the rate of net expansion of annualized renewal run-rate, or ARR, from existing customers over the last 12 months. Our dollar-based net retention rate was 153% and 145% as of January 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively.
As of January 31, 2020, we had 6,009 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10 and 61% of the Fortune Global 500. As of January 31, 2021, we had 7,968 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10 and 63% of the Fortune Global 500. Our customers span a variety of industries and include Adobe, Applied Materials, Chevron, Chipotle Mexican Grill, CrowdStrike, CVS Health, Deutsche Post DHL, EY, Generali, KDDI, SBA Communications, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Uber Technologies, Inc.
Congrats again to the UiPath team for an amazing story and execution.
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Scaling Startups
Technical Ops and Compliance at Slack — From Bootstrap to Scale with Richard Crowley - You haven’t sold into an enterprise until you run into compliance and SOC II audits. At boldstart, our founders are facing these issues earlier and earlier in their life cycle and if managed correctly and taken care of in advance, it can streamline your sales process and minimize disruption. Given this, my partner Eliot Durbin sat down with Richard Crowley to learn the ins and outs of how he built technical ops and compliance at Slack as it grew form 35k simultaneously users to over 10mm.
YC stats - great companies can be built anywhere and still about 50% of cos are B2B software
YC W21 categories:
B2B Software and Services – 46%
Consumer – 14%
Education – 4%
Financial Technology and Services – 15%Countries represented: 41 countries (50% of the W21 companies were based outside the U.S.)
and this is 😲
A reminder for founders who find themselves in “out of favor” sectors from VCs - who cares!
Wow, how the world has changed in 7 years! Thx @ellenchisa for surfacing this oldie but goodie from @DannyCrichton VCs back in day: You can’t make 💰 investing in dev tools cos VCs today: Dev tools? Take my 💰 This can be said for many mkts, btw techcrunch.com/2014/08/22/wil…For all the dev tools founders that are having 💰 thrown at them from VCs now... This is what it was like in 2012 for the OGs...@edsim @ellenchisa @DannyCrichton Tell about it. Fundraising for BugSense in 2012 - Developer tool - Team in Greece - Several fortune 2000 customers - Growing 20% Mom It was brutal. We raised a small seed of $100k for 17%. Reached 1M ARR in 18m. Sold to Splunk eventually. Really roughPanos Papadopoulos @PanosJee
Enterprise Tech
10 Predictions for cloud native in 2021 - Keynote, The DevOps Conference by Cheryl Hung - Backstage.io, chaos eng. and more
It’s raining 🦄 for Israeli security cos as the Wiz raises at $1.7B and Orca at $1.2B (both in cloud security) and Axis Security raises $100M. Deeper dive from CEO of Orca on how it became a 🦄 in 2 years - hint, ☁️ first and only.
“So if 40–50 companies haven’t managed to solve this problem, what makes you think Orca can?” my friends asked.
“For two reasons,” I answered. “First, they have it all wrong. They think of the cloud in the same terms as on-prem legacy systems, so they create products that can support both cloud and on-prem environments. Yet cloud workloads are materially different than on-prem servers. To win the battle of cloud security, one must not be limited to tools that also cater to the ‘90s datacenter. In that sense, backward compatibility is a curse, not a virtue.
“Second, to deliver this outcome we’ll need to implement bleeding edge technologies. Nobody has done it before. But if there is one team in the world that can do it, it’s Team Orca. We literally gathered the world’s best cloud security experts and put them in one building.”
Retool State of Internal Tools 2021
Developers spend more than 30% of their time building internal applications.
That number jumps to 45% for companies with 5000+ employees. And on top of that, 4 out of 5 teams plan to keep or increase this level of investment over the next 12 months.
Other surprising data points include the % of businesses with FTEs dedicated to internal apps with fin services at 73% and IT at 57%
The Two Sigma Ventures Open Source Index: Want to know what the fastest growing projects are using the TSV Score: a weighted average normalized to fit a scale of 0 to 100 with weights in parentheses - Watchers (40%), Watcher growth (25%), Contributors (15%), Release cadence (10%), Community health score (10%)
Seven of the top 100 projects were created by private, venture-backed startups These include Redis, Hashicorp (Terraform), Grafana and Vercel (NextJS) in the former category and Confluent (Apache Kafka ), Databricks (Apache Spark), and Preset (Apache Superset) in the latter category.
You don’t get net expansion without selling
This needs work 😄 and UI matters which Salesforce does not seem to get-
Salesforce adds an info overlay to sales meetings in Zoom as sales goes further into digital realm. tcrn.ch/31cLoDFSeeing other companies go after this space and Bonjour.io is one to watch