What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #241

Remote talent wars ⏩, more 💰, more opportunity, more competition

So what do enterprise startups with 💰💰💰 do? They hire, hire, hire. And what I can tell you is that the war for talent is getting even more intense.

First, let’s talk about finding talent. This is a tweet from earlier this year.

Ed Sim @edsim

There is so much 💰 flowing in enterprise that talent is the rate limiting factor to scale Great news with world going remote is access to talent is > than ever Bad news is your competition is now global Focus on recruiting, hiring, + retaining best talent must start on day 1

Yes, you can hire from anywhere but so can anyone else. Competition is fierce. Second, when you find the talent you want, closing speed and process matters. Zoom has accelerated everything.

Ed Sim @edsim

In today’s world, closing speed matters more than ever; for new hires, new investments…Best talent and investments go super fast, no time to dawdle, having a prepared mind and process going into the situation also helps

👇🏼 fore more on this - Time to Offer and Offer to Acceptance rates are two critical measures to understand how good your machine is.

Gagan Biyani @gaganbiyani

An extremely smart recruiter told me yesterday that startups time-to-offer should be 3 days. 🤯 That's time from first comms with a candidate to making an offer. What is time-to-offer at your company?

Because of all of this 💰 and need for talent, we will see more and more of 👇🏼 in the coming months.

Ed Sim @edsim

Its the "haves" + "have nots" in enterprise world - those who are🚀 + raising every 3-6 months + those who can't. Expect tons of private-private M&A - those who can build the right rationale + execute well will 📈 even faster but it can be perilous if not done right

And once you have the talent onboard, the need to retain them is even more needed! Grant Miller from Replicated, a portfolio co, is taking a bold stance with this.

Grant Miller @GrantM

Being a remote company shouldn't be a way to offload office expenses onto employees. @replicatedhq we're changing that... today! We're launching monthly recurring reimbursements for home office SPACE (and utilities etc). Find out more:

replicated.comFully Remote: Home Office Should Not Be a Financial Burden on Employees - ReplicatedWe’re excited to announce our new Replicated home office reimbursement program that we’ve recently launched for all employees.

Finally, this is not what you want.

Teddie Wardi @teddiew

I assume this isn't what they mean when my portfolio companies say they want to hire "10x engineers"

Kat Maddox @ctrlshifti

this is one of the funniest hackernews comments i've ever read https://t.co/J8G3TYz9zK

Kat Maddox @ctrlshifti

this is one of the funniest hackernews comments i've ever read

So my two takeaways are this; build your people engine early from day one, culture, hiring, retention and over time as you scale and do not rule out the right acquisitions for talent, roadmap, acceleration, and more.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.

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Scaling Startups

1. Great practical advice on how to write great content

   Nicolas Cole @Nicolascole77

   Ghostwriting 101 Over the past 4 years, I have ghostwritten more than 2,000 articles for startup founders, C-level executives, Silicon Valley investors, and more. Want to know a secret? I use the same 5 templates every time. 🧵👇

2. 👇🏼 all about the growth mindset - great 🧵

   Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom

   Lifelong learning is a competitive advantage. But contrary to what you’ve been told, lifelong learners are built, not born. THREAD: 20 lifelong learning habits you can start developing today.

3. A good reminder rom @hunterwalk

   👨🏻‍💻☕️ @hunterwalk

   Who made this????

   

4. Mental models for investing…

   Sumit Grrg @sumitgrrg

   Five valuable mental models 1. Gates' Law 2. Parkinson’s Law 3. The Paradox of Choice 4. Hanlon's Razor 5. Leverage On startups, business, finance, investing, career, life and whatnot. Here's a quick guide/refresher:

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Enterprise Tech

1. The genius and execution of Marc Benioff (Fortune)

   

2. Amazing lessons learned from Dharmesh as Hubspot celebrates 15 years of Hubspot - must read 🧵, 15 lessons

   dharmesh @dharmesh

   Woo hoo! HubSpot turned 15 years old today. Happy Birthday, HubSpot! Here's a post with 15 (somewhat) humble lessons learned (and mess-ups made) over those 15 years.

   

   dharme.shHappy Birthday, HubSpot! 15 Lessons Over 15 YearsHubSpot turned 15 years old today. Here are some lessons learned over those 15 years.

   Build a diverse team early.

   Instill a “customer first” mindset and implement mechanisms to foster it.

   Good intent is necessary, but not sufficient. Good execution is what pays the bills.

   Learning culture through osmosis stops working pretty quickly.

   Transparency is scary -- but spectacularly effective

   More companies die of co-founder conflict than any other cause. 

   and many more…

3. Yes, but always a question of when to charge your first $ and hire your first rep but no doubt to scale, sales is needed

   Chase Roberts @chsrbrts

   Think you don't need an enterprise sales team for developer-led growth? Sales headcounts/% of total... Snyk: 141/23% Databricks: 437/20% Twilio: 874/18% Segment: 167/27% AWS: 9,898/12% Stripe: 355/9% A sales team is like sunscreen -- you need it even when you think you don't.🏆

4. Patience required to do open source the right way and build a community and 2 years for many is about right - see my previous post on developer ♥️ and patience

   Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh

   Everyone thinks that Terraform was an overnight success and that couldn't be farther from the truth. It took almost 2 years to see growth start to tick up. We're gonna be talking a lot of Terraform at HashiConf tomorrow. Join us for the keynote (free!): hashiconf.com/europe/

   

   HashiCorp @HashiCorp

   Downloads of #Terraform were pretty slow early on — so slow that @mitchellh & @armon even considered killing the project. But by 2016 downloads began to increase rapidly, thanks to a growing ecosystem and community. What's next? Join us at #HashiConf https://t.co/B4LQkXl3Bc https://t.co/DXNusjQ7uD

5. Patience also required when creating new categories and privacy tech is here to stay - from Axios and read Future of Privacy Forum report (linked below) for more - also shoutout to BigID one of the market leaders (a portfolio co)

   What's happening: The companies that help other companies process, maintain, and legally maximize use of consumer data are in high demand, and collectively need to mature, according to a Future of Privacy Forum report shared first with Axios. 

   • Some of the largest players — such as BigID and OneTrust — have multi-billion-dollar market caps on their own.

   • Venture capital investment remains high: According to TechCrunch, about 207 privacy startups have together raised more than $3.5 billion in funding. 

   • Private equity firms are buying up smaller niche firms to provide suites of services to compete with the biggest companies.

6. Just a reminder of importance of cyber security and resiliency engineering as JBS was shut down due to a cyberattack, shutting down a huge portion of beef processing industry and Fastly went down due to a single customer triggering a bug

   Although it seems they weren’t down for long, the impact it would have had will be huge, especially on e-commerce sites,” said Naomi Aharony, the agency’s managing director. “With our research estimating Amazon could have potentially lost $6,803 every second it was down, it’s clear an investigation will want to be made to find out what happened.

7. I’m not a crypto investor per se, but love developer first infrastructure. So awesome to see @blockdaemon (a portfolio co) raise its $28M Series A led by Greenspring and including Goldman Sachs - heroku for blockchain is real!

   Ed Sim @edsim

   Huge congrats @_blockdaemon @konstantin11 - awesome validation to have @GoldmanSachs invest with @GreenspringVC leading the A, heroku for blockchain, nodes as a service + staking - thrilled to continue investing from day one @Boldstartvc

   

   Bloomberg Technology @technology

   Blockdaemon, a firm that creates and hosts the computer nodes that make up blockchain networks, raised $28 million from investors including Goldman Sachs https://t.co/SWa1vim9fN

8. 👇🏼so glad we are all in enterprise tech

   Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi

   Feels like you could fill an entire season of “Silicon Valley” with stuff just from the Bitcoin Miami conference.

   

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Markets

1. Monday.com IPO this past week opened at $155 and closed at $178.87 with a market cap of $7.5 billion (more on Monday SaaS S-1 breakdown from newsletter a few weeks ago)

2. UiPath first earnings report, beats expectations but analysts concerned about valuation

   First quarter ARR was $652.6 million up 64%. We delivered record incremental ARR, which grew 55% to $72.1 million. We ended the quarter with more than 8,500 customers with great new logos including a flyboard Global Healthcare Exchange overstock Ralph Lauren, Siemens Mobility and the State of North Carolina.

   Expansion metrics remain best-in-class as existing customers accelerated their adoption of our platform and deployment of our software robots. We now have 1105 customers that account for at least $100,000 in ARR, up sequentially from 1002 including 104 customers at a million dollars plus up sequentially from 89. Notable new logos and customer expansions during the quarter included; first Verizon Communications, which became a customer in July 2019 to support their attended automation needs.

3. 😲 Atlas hosted db already over 50% of revenue in 5 years!

   Justin Dignelli 👀 @Justin_Digs

   MongoDB Atlas launched ~5 years ago and has gone from $0 to >$400M. For the first time, Atlas now represents >50% of MDB revenue - a major milestone. A true "startup within a startup" success story made possible through an incredible team effort.

   

   Public Comps @publiccomps

   MongoDB $MDB Q1FY22: - Total revenue: $181.6M, +39% YoY - Sub revenue: $174.6M, +40% YoY - Atlas revenue +73% (51% of total revenue) - Gross margin: 70% - FCF: $8.4M (4.6% margin) Shares up +4% after hours. Great quarter from $MDB, fundamentals trending in the right direction!