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.
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.
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).
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.
Scaling Startups
👇🏼 another great Dan Rose 🧵
💯
More on management and culture from Mathilde Collin (co-founder Front, a portfolio co)
On products…easy to say but incredibly hard to do
Great 🧵 with lots of tips to build a better culture and more productive team
Enteprise Tech
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.
💯
State of the Jamstack report - more here (h/t NewStack)
👇🏼 so true and IaC automation is next big thing…which is why I’m pumped about Env0 (a portfolio co)
👏🏼 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!
opportunity in vertical SaaS from Jason Lemkin
👇🏼Fluid Office Documents - pretty slick from Microsoft - componentizing and embedding its office productivity into calendars, emails, etc…
Still a ton of room for startups to fix this problem - read 🧵 and comments
😲
Markets
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.