What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #251

APIs + developer tools for the win 💪🏼: Postman and Apollo at combined $7.1B of value 🤯 - Postman's dev first flywheel

We’ve been hearing about the API economy for many years with companies like Stripe valued at almost $100B and Plaid at over $13.4B but what about the tools that developers use to create these APIs and manage and deliver them? This was another big week for developer tools and APIs in particular as Postman just raised a $225M round at a $5.6B valuation and Apollo raised a $130M round at a $1.5B valuation.

Speaking of Stripe and APIs, let’s start with Postman.

Abhinav Asthana @a85

Excited to announce that the Postman Public API Network (postman.com/explore) is the largest API hub in the world now! Huge thanks to incredible partners like @stripe @SalesforceDevs @CiscoDevNet @TwitterDev @microsoftgraph and many more! finance.yahoo.com/news/postman-p…

Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.

While companies like Okta, Twitter, and Shopify use Postman the 🔑 to success is Postman’s focus on starting with a developer first motion. See below for how the Postman flywheel works and how its serving over 17M developers now.

This flywheel is a work of art and one that any developer first company should use. Win the ❤️ and 🧠 of each individual developer who then shares with their team, then moves beyond the developers only to other cross functional teams, and 💥 enterprise deals!

•  There are now 17 million developers on the Postman API Platform, and the Postman app has been downloaded more than 60 million times so far.

• Collaboration for teams: After recently announcing unlimited collaboration for small teams in Postman, we’re seeing record amounts of collaboration activity on the platform today.

• Enterprise customers: We continue to add phenomenal customers like Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and more. You can read more on our case studies page.

• The Public API Network: The Postman Public API Network recently became the world’s largest public API hub, and it has quickly grown to more than 20,000 public workspaces (from top organizations like Mercedes-Benz, Notion, Microsoft Graph, and more) that enable developers, teams, and companies around the world to work together on APIs at a scale that was never before possible.

Of note is the company was started in 2014 and notice the time between its Series A round in 2016 and Series B in 2019 - remember, it takes time to build a developer first community and evangelize and 🔑 is to build it the right way and not force top down sales too early.

Next up is Apollo which is the leader in GraphQL.

For those who don’t know what GraphQL is:

GraphQL is a query language and server-side runtime for application programming interfaces (APIs) that prioritizes giving clients exactly the data they request and no more. 

GraphQL is designed to make APIs fast, flexible, and developer-friendly. It can even be deployed within an integrated development environment (IDE) known as GraphiQL. As an alternative to REST, GraphQL lets developers construct requests that pull data from multiple data sources in a single API call. 

Additionally, GraphQL gives API maintainers the flexibility to add or deprecate fields without impacting existing queries. Developers can build APIs with whatever methods they prefer, and the GraphQL specification will ensure they function in predictable ways to clients.

Apollo is “The leading open-source GraphQL implementation with 17M downloads per month and the only end-to-end cloud management solution for GraphQL.”

Also notice the time between funding rounds for its Series A and B (over 3 years!) and Series B and Series C (4 years!). It takes time to build a developer first company and sometimes a huge part of battle is not running out of 💰!!!

Of note is that Insight Partners is betting big on API developer tools as they led both rounds in Postman and Apollo!

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

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Scaling Startups

1. 👇🏼🔥

   rahulvohra @rahulvohra

   We get asked constantly: "how do you make the GIFs for your product emails?" 🤔 So we wrote down everything we do… 👉 blog.superhuman.com/how-to-create-… …everything from scripting to compression! Thank you to our wonderful designer @ifbirdsfly for sharing! 🙏

   

   Superhuman @Superhuman

   GIFs do a lot in small packages 🎁 They bring life to our blog, product changelog, and this very channel! ✨ By popular demand, Superhuman design lead @ifbirdsfly is here with a guide to creating remarkable GIFs ⤵️ https://t.co/trLaPlemvb

2. So true…but truly these can be sequenced, its the increasing cost of talent that really can kill a company quickly and knowing when to bring on who and when is the art

   Alex Cohen @anothercohen

   Congrats on your $2m seed round. Your small team now only has 3 months of runway after paying for: - Zendesk - Carta - AWS - Slack - Figma - Zoom - LaunchDarkly - JIRA - Amplitude - Quickbooks - Twilio - Sendgrid - Snowflake - Gsuite - 1password

3. ❤️ this from Mathilde at Front (a portfolio co)

   Mathilde Collin @collinmathilde

   How do you celebrate big milestones at work when dinner parties and swag are illegal or impractical? At Front we went full digital and issued a unique commemorative NFT to every Fronteer 🤣 that's 2021 for you! check out the growing collection here: opensea.io/collection/fro…

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Enterprise Tech

1. More on Apollo and why developers love it - the company cares about the developer experience and frequently runs developer audits to make sure the speed, ease of use, and ❤️ is there.

   The goal of DX Audits is to document, report, and address product friction by having developer advocates experience common developer workflows, document and report their findings, and surface actionable steps to take to reduce friction. Remove the friction, and more developers will be successful!

   Each audit is scoped to a particular developer persona (or, as we call them, journey stages) and consists of use cases to audit. A use case is essentially a workflow that a developer would have to go through to complete a given task (i.e., add monitoring to a GraphQL server).

2. Hashicorp State of the ☁️

3. How do you measure dev rel? 🧵💯

   swyx @swyx

   🆕 Measuring Developer Relations swyx.io/measuring-devr… How you measure DevRel = what you think effective DevRel *is* + your philosophy on lagging vs leading metrics for a creative, unattributable, human endeavor. Here are some thoughts for friends entering the industry:

   

   swyx.ioMeasuring Developer Relations ∊ swyx.ioDevRel is hot but nobody knows how to measure it. That’s because we don’t agree on what effective DevRel *is*, and we don’t agree on the tradeoffs of lagging vs leading metrics for a creative, unattributable, intimately human endeavor.

4. Been enjoying Chris Dixon’s post on the decentralized web - here’s his latest

   Chris Dixon @cdixon

   1/ Topic: Blockchains are the new app stores 🧵

5. More wood to chop! 🧵

   Aaron Levie @levie

   There has never been a confluence of this many mega trends at once, all causing a reshaping of enterprise software: explosion of data, massive security challenges, remote work, need for greater automation, new forms of collaboration, and everything analog going digital.

6. For those building data teams

   Emilie Schario @emilieschario

   Building a data team in 2021

   

7. What a launch! Great example of open source to hosted commercial version from Tina to TinaCloud (a portfolio co)

   Tina @tina_cms

   We just launched our public beta: - Brand new dashboard - Media Manager with @cloudinary - Command line quickstart - And much more! Visual editing has arrived! tina.io

   

8. Want good content for developers? Have engineers write it 👇🏼

   Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

   How @datadoghq got so good at content-driven growth: they hired full-time engineers to write blog posts.

   

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Markets

1. Who says that growth investing doesn’t pay off?

   Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings

   Let this sink in: Tiger Global have 41 companies in The Cloud 100. 41... Yea, that strategy of paying up and moving fast looks to be not working for them... 🤯

   And Coatue’s latest returns (The Information) - Newer Growth Funds Return More Than 45% Annually, Internal Data Show

2. Databricks 🤯 valued now at $38B!!!