What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #232
Keeping user (not customer) stories top of mind as you scale your dev first/PLG startup
The enterprise venture funding market continues to be on 🔥 with a number of newly announced massive rounds including Canva at $15B and Redis at over $2B and anyone with a pulse who says they are developer first or PLG getting a check.
That being said, focusing on what you do with the 💰 will be the more important step as we move into 2021 and beyond. Along those lines, if you are a PLG or developer first company, here’s a tip:
If you want to be successful at PLG or developer first, you need to consistently keep the individual user top of mind, no matter how big you get. It also sets a nice tone for the meeting and brings what the company mission is to life. especially as the meeting progresses to product roadmaps, key wins and losses in sales, hiring, etc.
This past week Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio shared another one of his board decks from 10 years ago, April 2011. And it’s no surprise that he too started out his deck with user stories. Amazing to see the consistency of focus and messaging to this day as it’s grown to over $1.8 billion of revenue in 2020.
Here’s one of the first slides from that Twilio board deck. I highly encourage and recommend any dev first company to share individual dev stories at the beginning of the board meeting to make sure the product and company North 🌠 is top of mind.
Second, while ARR important, one of key metrics is developer usage and growth in registrations.
Which leads to tracking free vs. paying accounts.
Consistency of purpose and vision has led to Twilio amassing over 10 million registered developers - this takes a crazy amount of time, especially in the beginning, drip by drip to build that bottoms up motion (see investor presentation from March 21).
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
Scaling Startups
How do you make your first hire for a product led growth (PLG) motion and how do you build your team? Hear from one of the best as Kyle Parrish from Figma joins us at boldstart to discuss his learnings while scaling the team. Sign up here for 4/16 at noon ET.
👇🏼Founders pay attention - time to drop the “no code” in pitches
Dan Rose from Coatue on culture…great 🧵
👇🏼💯 and the book is fantastic, btw
Enterprise Tech
OSS and RedisLabs for the win - raised $110M at over $2B valuation from Tiger, Softbank
Redis Labs closed an exceptional fiscal year ending in January 2021 as the need for real-time data collection and analytics has accelerated for every business. Recent company highlights include:
Revenue growth of over 54% (CAGR) over the three years ended 1/31/21
More than 8,000 paying customers, including 31% of the Fortune 100
Net retention rate greater than 120%
Canva raises $71M at $15B valuation - PLG model at its finest
Today, that number stands at 55 million active users, three million of them paid, Adams (whose own stake in Canva is not known) said in an interview. Originally popular for lightweight design tools that made it easy for small- and medium-sized businesses to draft print and digital assets like menus and Instagram cards, Canva has since grown into more of a real-time collaboration suite.
Usage-Based Pricing 2.0 from Kyle Poyar at OpenView
Data infra and OSS companies have been on 🔥 with funding lately including Streamlit which just raised $35M led by Sequoia and Snorkel which raised $35M led by Lightspeed. If interested in what’s 🔥 in OSS, click through to see the DataCouncil survey on top OSS data projects.
The results are here from the extensive @DataCouncilAI survey in case you wondered: What are the most popular #OSS data projects of 2021? link.medium.com/ZlIQdMwNffb⠀ ⠀ #dbt #airflow #superset #dagster #trino #prefect #Greatexpectations #spark #amundsen #dataengineering #opensourceGreat debate - read 🧵
There is still so much room to improve and automate software engineering and delivery - “It’s time to fulfill the promise of Continuous Delivery” from Charity Majors, Honeycomb
Is homomorphic encryption ready for primetime? IBM thinks so…and since I am a betting man, take a look at Cape Privacy (a portfolio co) - there is so much value to be unlocked in “dark data” with HME and other techniques to feed data science models with encrypted data to get smarter
Target goes true multi-cloud, able to distribute workloads to any cloud
Target is run by a single commerce platform. There is no difference between the technology that sits underneath our website and sits underneath our stores. If you scan a box of cereal in our stores on a cash register, you're hitting the same exact binaries as if you had clicked on it to put it into your online basket.
We achieved that through this application platform that we built ourselves. That gives us huge flexibility in terms of cloud. So I can take a workload and I can choose where I want to deploy it. I can choose to deploy it in [Google Cloud Platform]. I can choose to deploy it on Azure, or as I say, I can choose to deploy it on Target assets.
AI 100 from CB Insights along with link to the market map - just waiting for the Low Code 100 next 🤣
A new workflow for cloud development as proposed by Slim (a portfolio co)
Markets
Venture funding in Q1 was on absolute🔥