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:

Ed Sim @edsim

Love when developer 1st companies start board meetings w/ a couple of user stories…not customer ones - reminds us of the North 🌠 for product + GTM, win ♥️ + 🧠 of devs to win company.

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.

Jeff Lawson @jeffiel

Time again to dig into the @twilio Board Deck archives & share the preso from April, 2011. Things have progressed: we have the beginnings of a sales machine, the revenue impact of GroupMe was a hot topic, & yes Twilio Client's codename was "Chunder" dropbox.com/s/cko59e3iasfe…

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.

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Scaling Startups

1. 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.

   

2. 👇🏼Founders pay attention - time to drop the “no code” in pitches

   David Ulevitch 🇺🇸 @davidu

   Calling your SaaS application "No code" is the new "We have AI" 🙄

3. Dan Rose from Coatue on culture…great 🧵

   Dan Rose @DanRose999

   What defines a great company culture? I worked for two iconic companies and founders with nearly polar opposite cultures. Amazon was heads-down, secretive, forthright. Facebook was open, transparent, collaborative. Here's what I learned about culture working for Bezos and Zuck:

4. 👇🏼💯 and the book is fantastic, btw

   dharmesh @dharmesh

   Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. ~ Don Norman ("The Design Of Everyday Things")

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Enterprise Tech

1. 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% 

2. 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.

3. Usage-Based Pricing 2.0 from Kyle Poyar at OpenView

4. 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.

   🔗 Simon Späti @sspaeti

   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 #opensource

   

5. Great debate - read 🧵

   Justin Searls @searls

   The PaaS (e.g. @heroku) vs. IaaS (e.g. AWS) debate needs to be revisited. For most teams, the most surefire way to blow deadlines and run over budget is to go it alone on AWS instead of sticking with a batteries-included PaaS that lets you forget about infra and focus on the app.

6. 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

   

7. 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

8. 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.

9. AI 100 from CB Insights along with link to the market map - just waiting for the Low Code 100 next 🤣

10. A new workflow for cloud development as proposed by Slim (a portfolio co)

    

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Markets

1. Venture funding in Q1 was on absolute🔥

   crunchbase @crunchbase

   📈Global venture investments reached $125B in the first quarter of 2021, a 50% increase quarter over quarter and a whopping 94% increase year over year. Check out our 🆕 quarterly report and read where the money went: news.crunchbase.com/news/global-ve…

   

   news.crunchbase.comGlobal Venture Funding Hits All-Time Record High $125B In Q1 2021In the first quarter of 2021, global venture investments reached $125 billion, a 50 percent increase quarter over quarter and a whopping 94 percent increase year over year, and global funding hit an all-time high, marking the first single quarter to reach above $100 billion, according to Crunchbase …