What's ๐ฅ in Enterprise IT/VC #249
๐คฏ Enterprise on ๐ฅ with no end in sight - big rounds, earnings + more on Superhuman journey, bespoke onboarding to bespoke Series C
We just finished another insane week for enterprise software and the world of VC. On the funding front some of the big ones that got my attention were Hopin which raised at $7.5B and Dataiku which raised at $4.6B. On the public side, Datadogโs stock popped over 15% as it crushed its Q2 numbers and now has a $40B+ market cap. There seems to be no end in sight and as many of the largest corporations like Amazon delay office openings to January, expect more of a boost for the โ๏ธ in the coming months.
If youโve been reading my newsletter for awhile, my themes are quite consistent - patience required when creating new categories and building a community and new product takes time. Last week I shared the 6 year journey with Replicated since our investment at company formation and its creation of modern on-prem software. This week, Superhuman, announced its carefully curated $75M Series C round, and I thought it appropriate to share learnings from the 6 years since we wrote the first check there.
First letโs start with the vision and our initial investment memo:
And hereโs the first mockup which Rahul showed Eliot and I along with my daughter:
6 years later and the company is still on the same mission: to make people brilliant at what they do with a focus on the 1 billion professionals in the world who on average spend 3 hours a day in email. More here from Rahulโs post on the round and hereโs Forbes coverage as well.
Since then, Superhuman customers have sent over 100 million messages, triaged over 335 million conversations, and used over 1 billion keyboard shortcuts. Together, they have saved tens of millions of hours.
Co-founder Vivek Sodera shares the thoughtfulness in how they crafted the round which was led by IVP and in particular Ajay Vashee who was formerly CFO of Dropbox as it scaled from $50M ARR to $2B ARR (read ๐งต)
All I can say is many times people discounted Superhuman, whether or not you could build faster email, charge people $29 for it, build a massive business on the backs of Google Apps and ios alone (new funding for outlook 365/android and more), and whether its bespoke onboarding for each new user would work. Finally folks questioned the ability to build a sizable business with single player mode - the book is still being written but founders donโt let the naysayers keep you down as Iโm looking forward to even bigger things ahead at Superhuman.
As always, ๐๐ผ for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Pitchbook article from Monday lays out why โsolo VCsโ for many founders and WSJ from the weekend shows the increasing ๐ฐ from hedge funds and mutual funds.
Scaling Startups
Yes, founders donโt forget you need to build ๐๏ธ
How you turn browsers into happy customers
Startups: there is nothing more magical than delivering โfixed that for youโ on a <24h timeline. Do this from the start, and fight like hell to never let โgoodโ reasons stop you from doing itOur data warehouse has a lot of tables (>100k). We started using a free trial of @getcensus yesterday and it was slow because of the # of tables (not their fault, Glue API is slow). So Census deployed a new feature overnight to fix this. For us. A free trial user. (not for long)
Steve Pulec @spulecJust a little customer โค๏ธ
All about LTV and CAC ๐งต from Bryan Kim, Andreessen Horowitz
Enterprise Tech
Great summary of whatโs ๐ฅ on building the analytical data stack vs. the data infra stack (Davis Treybig)
Over the last few years, data infrastructure has evolved tremendously.ย Muchhasbeenwrittenย about the โmodern data stackโ, and at this point there are an immense number of startups covering areas like data quality, data monitoring, reverse ETL, and similar.
However, one area where less attention has been paid, yet where it seems like there is still significant opportunity, is the stack for building analytical applications. By โanalytical applicationโ, I meanย an end-user facing application that natively includes large scale, aggregate analysis of data in its functionality. This is sometimes also referred to as โdata appsโ.
Datadogโฆaccelerating on all fronts - earnings transcript sheds light - also huge push into cybersecurity
To discuss just a few of these, we announced the general availability of two new security products, Cloud Security Posture Management and Cloud Workload Security, which target security issues around infrastructure. Cloud Security Posture Management runs continuous configuration audit so customers can track environments to industry benchmarks and regulatory standards. And Cloud Workload Security performs real-time threat detection directly within the workloads themselves within hosts and containers. These are our second and third GA products in security, alongside Security Monitoring, which performs a threat detection on events and loading data streams.
With these offerings, the first building blocks of our Cloud Security Platform are coming together, and we can start delivering on our vision to break down silos between DevOps and security teams. And with the addition of these two products, we now have 11 GA products on the Datadog platform. We are also at the beginning of our opportunity to bring observability to the CI/CD space, and we announced the beta of our CI Visibility product in late July. CI/CD is a combined practice of continuous integration and continuous delivery, allowing software to be consistently written, tested, and released to production.
The state of cybersecurity from the Blackhat vendor floor
ROI calculator for dev productivity from TurboRepo
Yep
Where the world of VC is and where itโs going - go big, go niche, or go home - an important read for both investors and founders ๐งต
What will next 6 months look like in terms of return to office and what are implications? ๐งต from FirstbaseHQ founderโฆ
If youโre interested in how Bitcoin ๐ฉ๏ธ infra works, great read
Markets
Congrats to Confluent on its first quarter as a public company - while overall growth <100%, โ๏ธ is growing strong >200%
First earnings: 64% year-over-year growth in total revenue, 200% (!) year-over-year growth in Confluent Cloud. A huge thanks to all our customers, employees, partners, and investors! Onward!Today we announced our first earnings results as a public company: Total revenue of $88.3M (up 64% YoY), 617 customers with โฅ $100K in ARR (up 51% YoY) and Confluent Cloud revenue of $20M (up 200% YoY). See here for more info: https://t.co/KpB4F8X2al #DataInMotion https://t.co/BzR6g3qA2E
Confluent @confluentincDropbox still at $12.7B market cap and a strong Q2
