What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #242

Impacts of IRL on fundraising 💰...

I just came back from my first west coast trip in over a year and wow was it exhausting an exhilarating.

Ed Sim @edsim

Wow, forgot how much energy IRL takes,💪🏼amazing to be with folks again, but brain needs to get rewired for multiple dimensions and not flat screens, and also for those board meetings when someone talks too much, no more multitasking 🤣

I ❤️ the energy of being in person with folks and no longer being tied to a screen but I was so productive hopping from Zoom to Zoom during the last year. I know for all of us, it will be an interesting adjustment period to figure out what meetings to take IRL or over Zoom. In particular, I keep 🤔 about how this will affect the founder/investor relationship and fundraising in general.

Ed Sim @edsim

Zoom was the great equalizer for founders + investors alike where geographic boundaries + location never was the reason for a partnership. Yes, we all missed IRL but what an incredibly efficient process. How will that change as we all reenter the world?

The old rule of thumb used to be you can't invest early without being able to drive to the founder. Well that was changing pre-last year + only accelerated. Let's all agree that location means way less than it used to, you can add value from anywhere esp. as teams are more distributed. But I suspect this will vary by founder and investor. More to come especially as speed does not equal in person (also inline with my comments from last week’s newsletter).

Paul Graham @paulg

The main reason late-stage funds like Tiger and Coatue are eating traditional VCs' lunch is that they're faster. Speed is probably the number one difference between what founders think is important in VCs, and what VCs think is important in VCs.

So founders and investors, which world are you going to live in, the old, the past, or some form of hybrid?

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

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Scaling Startups

1. 👇🏼 another great Dan Rose 🧵

   Dan Rose @DanRose999

   In my experience the best founders develop a fighter mentality. Mark Zuckerberg was a fighter, and without that mentality Facebook would never have achieved its full potential. Here’s what I saw over 13 years working for Zuck:

2. 💯

   David Ulevitch 🇺🇸 @davidu

   First time CEOs often confuse empathy and compassion with being soft. People want to work for empathetic and compassionate leaders but they absolutely do not want to work for soft ones. - Manage out poor performers - Do not compromise all decisions - Give people real feedback

3. More on management and culture from Mathilde Collin (co-founder Front, a portfolio co)

   Mathilde Collin @collinmathilde

   I repeat this so often at Front: there's good and bad transparency. Good transparency answers questions, creates trust, reassures people. Bad transparency raises more questions than it answers questions.

4. On products…easy to say but incredibly hard to do

   Suhail @Suhail

   It can take years to nail this: Discover a common problem that plagues people and solve it so well they think it’s magic. Explain it in a short plain spoken way most people can understand.

5. Great 🧵 with lots of tips to build a better culture and more productive team

   Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

   PMs: What's your best pro-tip for being successful in a remote and distributed team world?

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Enteprise Tech

1. It’s the golden age of databases. It can’t last (@JoePWilliams31 - Protocol) - great balanced read on all of the💰 flowing into the market with contrasting opinions on who wins between cloud providers, Snowflake, Databricks, and others…

   Beneath Snowflake's IPO and Databricks's $1 billion funding round in February, other startups were also raking in big investments. 

   Dremio raised $135 million at a $1 billion valuation. Cockroach Labs raised $160 million at a $2 billion valuation. Starburst raised $100 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. And Redis Labs raised $110 million at an over $2 billion valuation. 

   It's perhaps no surprise the sector saw such attention after Snowflake's historic IPO.

   "People will have data in Snowflake. And they'll have data in S3. And they'll have some data in a relational database," said Starburst co-founder Matt Fuller. "We can be that engine that really provides access to all your data … We're not going to go into the space of trying to force everyone to move all their data." 

   Larger competitors, however, view the future of the industry much differently. 

   "The infrastructure players are the ones that are going to have a hard time. I wouldn't put a dollar in Starburst or Cockroach," said Snowflake product chief Christian Kleinerman.

2. 💯

   Sam Altman @sama

   Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects.

3. State of the Jamstack report - more here (h/t NewStack)

   

4. 👇🏼 so true and IaC automation is next big thing…which is why I’m pumped about Env0 (a portfolio co)

   Adam Rackis @AdamRackis

   "Infrastructure as Code" is one of those things that, once you see it, you wonder how you ever existed without it.

5. 👏🏼 Huge congrats to Utilize Core on it’s $5.3M first round of funding - glad we @boldstart could lead and Vivek, cofounder of Superhuman, summed it up well!

   Vivek Sodera @vsodera

   Excited to have invested in @utilizecore alongside @Boldstartvc @TheChainsmokers. The BI article doesn't do the company justice: • Uberization for service management = 🤩 • Insane PMF • Ryan, Jason, & Johnny = strongest founder-market fit I've seen businessinsider.com/utilizecore-fu…

   

   businessinsider.comSoftware startup UtilizeCore raised $5.3 million off this sleek pitch deck to help property managers with mundane tasks like hiring janitor…The cofounders explained how they are replacing tedious call-center work with a tech platform that handles everything from scheduling to billing.

6. opportunity in vertical SaaS from Jason Lemkin

   Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ @jasonlk

   So if you are interested in Vertical SaaS the one public Cloud company would need to know is $46B+ Veeva Veeva is at $2B ARR and has 1,000+ $1m ACV customers for its vertical SaaS solutions, mainly for life sciences 5 Interesting Learnings: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

7. 👇🏼Fluid Office Documents - pretty slick from Microsoft - componentizing and embedding its office productivity into calendars, emails, etc…

8. Still a ton of room for startups to fix this problem - read 🧵 and comments

   Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower

   Today I'm reminded that programming is still too hard. If you don't believe me try teaching someone with little to no experience writing software. Just getting a development environment setup can be overwhelming, and without some serious motivation, this is where people give up.

   Federico Tomassetti - Language Engineer @ftomasse

   Am I the only developer wishing to spend less time on sys admin stuff and more time programming? 100% of joy comes from programming but 90% of frustration from CI, automation, packaging, etc

9. 😲

   Nat Friedman @natfriedman

   GitHub processes 2.8 billion API requests per day, peaking at 55k rps. Lots of busy bots. 🤖

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Markets

1. Startup Nation: “🇮🇱 shares traded on Wall Street reach massive $300B valuation”

   Tech firm WalkMe’s initial public offering of shares has brought the total valuation of the shares of the 85 Israeli companies traded on Wall Street to $300 billion, Calcalist reported Wednesday, citing data compiled by investment bank Oppenheimer Israel.

   The figure represents a $100 billion jump in value since the start of 2021, of which $75 billion is the total value of new companies that have issued shares on Wall Street or have merged with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACS). The remaining $25 billion is a surge in value of preexisting Israeli stock on the US markets.