What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #249

🤯 Enterprise on 🔥 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, Datadog’s 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 ☁️ in the coming months.

If you’ve 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 let’s start with the vision and our initial investment memo:

Ed Sim @edsim

@rahulvohra @Boldstartvc @firstround 🙏🏼 just for kicks, reminded me to look back at our memo from 2014 - key risks - not being able to build a world class product ✅, not being able to get users to pay ✅, not being able to cost effectively get distribution ✅ - 😃

And here’s the first mockup which Rahul showed Eliot and I along with my daughter:

Ed Sim @edsim

@rahulvohra that was a fun day + she mostly says No 😃 - what I ❤️most + I like to tell all of our pre-product founders is show us what the future will look like, put a mockup together - remember this? Still similar in format but obviously so much under the hood for 100ms or less and scale

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 Rahul’s post on the round and here’s 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 🧵)

Vivek Sodera @vsodera

Excited to finally announce @Superhuman raised a $75m Series C on an $825M valuation, led by @IVP. ‘Be Intentional’ is one of our core values and we were very, very intentional about who and the mechanics of the fundraise.👇🏼 1/5

Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad

News: startup Superhuman has raised $75 million ahead of its email app coming to Android and Outlook users. I spoke to CEO @rahulvohra about bringing on investors like @drewhouston, @ariannahuff and @aplusk, and the future of his still waitlist-only app. https://t.co/fgRxYQqoS1

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 don’t let the naysayers keep you down as I’m looking forward to even bigger things ahead at Superhuman.

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

Pitchbook article from Monday lays out why ‘solo VCs’ for many founders and WSJ from the weekend shows the increasing 💰 from hedge funds and mutual funds.

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Scaling Startups

1. Yes, founders don’t forget you need to build 🏗️

   Jack Altman @jaltma

   Founders have more advantages right now than ever before. Cheaper capital, experienced employees, bigger markets, incredible software to accelerate product development. But you do still have to buckle down and build as much as ever. That part is sometimes getting lost.

2. How you turn browsers into happy customers

   Chris Sperandio @sperand_io

   Startups: there is nothing more magical than delivering “fixed that for you” on a <24h timeline. Do this from the start, and fight like hell to never let “good” reasons stop you from doing it

   

   Steve Pulec @spulec

   Our 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)

3. Just a little customer ❤️

   Eli Scheinman @eli_schein

   The PM who wrote this is ❤️ @SlackHQ

   

4. All about LTV and CAC 🧵 from Bryan Kim, Andreessen Horowitz

   Bryan Kim @kirbyman01

   5 important things you might not know about LTV and CAC. A thread 🧵

   

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Enterprise Tech

1. Great summary of what’s 🔥 on building the analytical data stack vs. the data infra stack (Davis Treybig)

   Over the last few years, data infrastructure has evolved tremendously. Muchhasbeenwritten about the “modern data stack”, 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 “analytical application”, I mean an end-user facing application that natively includes large scale, aggregate analysis of data in its functionality. This is sometimes also referred to as “data apps”.

2. Datadog…accelerating 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.

3. The state of cybersecurity from the Blackhat vendor floor

   Robᵉʳᵗ Graham @ Las Vegas @ErrataRob

   Blackhat vendor floor — overheard conversation “but they all do the same Zero Trust and I can’t tell what each does differently”

   

4. ROI calculator for dev productivity from TurboRepo

   Turborepo @turborepo

   What's the ROI on boosting developer productivity? 🧮 We built a calculator to help you out turborepo.com/roi-calculator

   

   turborepo.comDeveloper Productivity ROI CalculatorHow much can Turborepo boost developer productivity?

5. Yep

   James Watters @wattersjames

   Those who dismissed the multi-cloud attacked a straw-model -- of lowest common denominator. Instead best of breed per functionality is winning across clouds. I.E. @SnowflakeDB @confluentinc

6. Where the world of VC is and where it’s going - go big, go niche, or go home - an important read for both investors and founders 🧵

   sam lessin @lessin

   We are coming to the end of the road for west-cost 'software' oriented VC. The choice for firms is either to drop the 'venture' and compete with the onslaught of the mainline global financial system, or if they move on looking for what comes next

   

   theinformation.comThe End of Venture Capital as We Know ItAll signs seem to indicate that by 2022, for the first time, nontraditional tech investors—including hedge funds, mutual funds and the like—will invest more in private tech companies than traditional Silicon Valley–style venture capitalists will. Many people are quick to write this off as a ...

7. What will next 6 months look like in terms of return to office and what are implications? 🧵 from FirstbaseHQ founder…

   Chris Herd @chris_herd

   Over the last two weeks I’ve spoken to 10 x Billion $ companies cancelling return to the office due to the delta variant A few predictions on what most companies are about to do [ a thread ] 💻 🏠 🌍

8. If you’re interested in how Bitcoin 🌩️ infra works, great read

   Meltem Demir◎rs @Melt_Dem

   1/ want to learn more about lightning ⚡️ bitcoin’s high speed transmission protocol? this newest ⁦@CoinSharesCo⁩ research drop from ⁦@C_Bendiksen⁩ dives deep into the mechanics of payment channels, liquidity, and settlement

   

   coinshares.comLightning: Bitcoin’s High Speed Transmission Protocol | CoinShares ResearchLightning Explained | The ultimate guide to the decentralised payments aggregator built on Bitcoin’s settlement chain

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Markets

1. Congrats to Confluent on its first quarter as a public company - while overall growth <100%, ☁️ is growing strong >200%

   Jay Kreps @jaykreps

   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!

   

   Confluent @confluentinc

   Today we announced our first earnings results as a public company: Total revenue of $88.3M (up 64% YoY), 617 customers with ≥ $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

2. Dropbox still at $12.7B market cap and a strong Q2

   Timothy Young @timyoung

   Congrats to the full @Dropbox team for a standout quarter surpassing all expectations, and incredible momentum across the business. Thought I would share some highlights of our Q2 👇