What's Hot 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC

What's Hot 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC

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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #258

More 💰💰💰 = More Competition for Talent

Ed Sim
Oct 09, 2021
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Q3 was another record breaking quarter for global venture funding as it hit over $158B (CB Insights). To give you an idea of what this number means, Dan Primack from Axios says:

That's more than double the Q3 2020 total, and more than any full-year totals before 2018. Or, put another way, startups raised more in three months of 2021 than during the entire dotcom boom years of 1999 or 2000. Imagine how fat these issues of Red Herring would be...

Which leads me to my next point, where does all this 💰 go?

Twitter avatar for @edsim
Ed Sim @edsim
Access to capital for enterprise startups has never been better. Access to talent for enterprise startups has never been worse. The winners in the next 5 to 10 years will be those who can build a hiring machine and get the best talent, not the ones who raise the most capital.
3:13 PM ∙ Feb 25, 2020
296Likes64Retweets

Talent, talent, talent - that is the lifeblood of any company and without an ability to attract, recruit, and retain talent, all the 💰 you raise goes down the drain. This is even more true today as quarter after quarter hits record funding numbers.

In fact, I spent a good part of this past week helping founders deal with talent issues. First, some of our later stage companies are getting hit up constantly by recruiters looking to poach some of the best people. My advice for those who find themselves in that situation is to proactively make sure you have your top list of 10-20 in the organization who are must-haves and for those folks to have their 5-10 who are must- haves. Review this quarterly. Also understand where they are in their option vesting, and make sure to have a proactive plan and option refresh program ready to go.

For those on day one, before you even start your company, make sure you have your top 5-10 potential hires you plan on recruiting to join you on your mission. It shows your ability as a future founder to sell a story and to show what kind of leader you are, especially if these are folks that you’ve worked with in the past. There is no better sign when raising capital on day 1 then to show up at an investor and say, I have 5-6 engineers who are rockstars ready to join me - I just need to incorporate and raise capital so I can also pay them!

Once you get the capital, then I would suggest doing this 👇🏼

Twitter avatar for @edsim
Ed Sim @edsim
Best practices like bringing in a head of recruiting, then head of people earlier than once dictated becoming new norm, esp. with new culture w/remote teams Momentum for startups at beginning so important and comes from product velocity and closely tied to that, hiring velocity
1:16 PM ∙ Jan 8, 2021

And here’s a great example of the little things an amazing Head of People can do to help you optimize your talent funnel. This comes from Natalie Ledbetter, our Head of People at boldstart. Natalie was an operator beforehand helping scale Stash (fintech 🦄) as Head of People from 7 to 300 and is bringing her knowledge to our portfolio. Here’s Natalie’s direct take when working with one of our portfolio companies:

The one mistake I see time and time again is lack of personalization and WAY too much time spent on the co/product/vc's etc. With how competitive it is right now, it needs to be all about the candidate and why THEY would fit/What's in it for THEM ("employee value prop" EVP) rather than focusing primarily on the product. The product/problem space is very important, but showing the candidate that you took the time to reach out to them SPECIFICALLY is crucial and improved your chances of getting a response. Even if they aren't looking, making that connection could lead to something in the future-- this makes you stand out

And Natalie goes above and beyond and even share’s a few sample emails. Here’s one example. The details matter!

Imagine having this advice for your whole funnel down to streamlining your interview process and having an offer letter in hand to reduce time to close. Personalizing and moving quickly matters in this insane market!

Finally, I spent time with an executive recruiter who is leading a search for one of our portfolio companies, and he reiterated how hard it is to get people’s attention. There are so many 🦄 which are private where employees have not had a chance to create real wealth yet and do not want to leave until they do so. Which means when hiring for VPs, for example, betting on up and comers is the way to go. Find the folks who are super hungry and want a step up in role and while they don’t have that senior experience, they are more than capable to step in and make it happen.

In fact, oftentimes in a search for an early company in terms of operations but not in funding. founders can over index on experience. And the problem with that is:

Twitter avatar for @edsim
Ed Sim @edsim
Founders, no matter how much 💰 you raise, remember to not lose your scrappiness - speed is one of your advantages and I've seen some founders opt for too much process too early, need to layer on appropriately as you scale
6:18 PM ∙ Oct 7, 2021
42Likes8Retweets

Remember, no talent, no product and no company! If you want more of Natalie’s advice check out this podcast she did on the Business of Being Cloud Native.

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

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Scaling Startups

  1. Food for 🤔

    Twitter avatar for @gokulr
    Gokul Rajaram @gokulr
    1M ARR growing to 3M ARR in 12 months is no longer top decile for startups. It's 1M to 5M in 12 months. Everything is being reset at a higher level, including growth rates.
    4:13 PM ∙ Oct 5, 2021
    789Likes62Retweets
  2. The beauty of remote first and the problem 👇🏼 - this is not the first time I’ve heard of this issue

    Twitter avatar for @GergelyOrosz
    Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz
    The third founder with a remote team sharing the same story: An engineer they hired did great on the interviews but worked unexplainably slow day to day. When pairing: they worked fast. They stopped pairing: slowed down. Turns out, the person had a second job in all cases.
    8:52 PM ∙ Oct 6, 2021
    674Likes79Retweets
  3. Great reminder of the feeling from the last boom before the dot com bust

    Twitter avatar for @aweissman
    Andy Weissman @aweissman
    Michael Lewis, on the mid/late-90s Silicon Valley "vibe" (from The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story)
    Image
    1:41 PM ∙ Oct 8, 2021
    94Likes2Retweets

Enterprise Tech

  1. 😲 Chronosphere raised $200M Series C at 🦄 valuation - next gen observability platform with insane growth numbers!

    “A mere two years ago, Chronosphere was still in stealth mode and it was just my co-founder, Rob Skillington, and me working pandemic-style. I was huddled in the laundry room of my condo, and Rob was working from a desk tucked into a corner of his living room. Blink – Chronosphere is a unicorn. Going from zero to unicorn status in 2.3 years, this is rare. In fact, according to Pitchbook, Chronosphere is now in the top 10 fastest B2B SaaS unicorns. EVER. 

    Last month we shared the news that Chronosphere’s multi-million dollar ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) grew by 9x so far in 2021, and that we are doing 6- and 7-figure deals. This means Chronosphere’s unicorn status happened on the back of record-breaking ARR growth.”

  2. And here’s why - observability, incident analysis, chaos and load testing all matter - its complicated as hell! Here’s deep dive into the massive Facebook outage last week

    Twitter avatar for @copyconstruct
    Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct
    Tons of more details on the FB outage yesterday. Lots of interesting details; especially how they came back online. I fully expect an OSDI/SOSP paper in a year or two on chaos experiments that take out the backbone network.
    Image
    Image
    Image
    Image
    Twitter avatar for @fb_engineering
    Facebook Engineering @fb_engineering
    Now that our services are fully restored, we are sharing more details about yesterday's outage. https://t.co/SwDmBGZaZU
    5:44 PM ∙ Oct 5, 2021
    347Likes87Retweets
  3. More on our reliance or dependence on AWS and us-east-1 in particular which is quite frightening 😧 and when us-east-1 did go down a few years ago, it was only s-3…

    Twitter avatar for @QuinnyPig
    Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig
    One of the hands down most sobering conversations I’ve ever had was with a bunch of Very Savvy Investment Bankers about what exactly a total failure of us-east-1 would look like economically. The *best case* outcomes closely resembled a global depression.
    Twitter avatar for @mattblaze
    matt blaze @mattblaze
    I’ve gotten a lot of smug responses from AWS fans that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and that frankly makes me want to run for the hills away from depending on services like this.
    5:01 AM ∙ Oct 6, 2021
    649Likes118Retweets
  4. State of Software Quality and Testing from SmartBear - testing continuing to shift ⬅️

  5. Must read from Protocol on how IBM lost its way and great reminder for startups, choose your first customers wisely…

    Twitter avatar for @edsim
    Ed Sim @edsim
    Reading “Why IBM Missed the ☁️" + found a classic lesson for startup founders: This is why founders need to choose their first customers wisely - big $ upfront can mean sacrificing LT product roadmap it kill value, not create it protocol.com/enterprise/ibm…
    Image
    1:37 PM ∙ Oct 3, 2021
    22Likes3Retweets
  6. 💯 - great 🧵 on data stack as code

    Twitter avatar for @sarahmk125
    Sarah Krasnik @sarahmk125
    Imagine a world in which your whole data stack could be defined as code (think Terraform). Including vendors. I'd argue that's scalability at its finest and the next step for data teams. 🧵
    12:13 PM ∙ Oct 7, 2021
    143Likes5Retweets
  7. More on the data stack - must 🎧 from Seth Rosen from TopCoat Data

    Twitter avatar for @j_schottenstein
    Julia Schottenstein @j_schottenstein
    🗣 New @dbt_labs Analytics Engineering Podcast episode is LIVE! @jthandy and I sit down with data meme lord @sethrosen to talk about dashboard factories, the mesh that broke data Twitter, and his latest venture @TopcoatData 🔥🔥🔥 Give it a listen 👇 open.spotify.com/episode/1UZOaZ…
    open.spotify.comSeth Rosen: On Becoming a Full-stack Data AnalystListen to this episode from The Analytics Engineering Podcast on Spotify. Seth Rosen has broken data Twitter many times, and in his early-fatherhood sleep deprivation developed a wonderful Twitter persona as the battle-tested data analyst. IRL though Seth is a serious data practitioner, and as Found…
    4:26 PM ∙ Oct 7, 2021
    56Likes10Retweets
  8. 💯

    Twitter avatar for @naval
    Naval @naval
    Unlike other hyped technologies (AGI, rocketry, life extension, 3D Printing, VR), Web3 is entirely in software, requires new engineering but not new science, iterates quickly, and attracts brilliant people with immediate incentives.
    6:58 AM ∙ Oct 2, 2021
    7,994Likes1,047Retweets
  9. Privacy engineering on 🔥 as Gretel raised a $50M Series B and Duality raised a $30M Series B

    Duality - empowers organizations to extract business value from sensitive data by enabling secure data collaborations within their ecosystem

    Gretel - Privacy engineering tools delivered to you as APIs. Synthesize and transform data in minutes. Build trust with your users and community.

  10. Gartner Magic Quadrant for APIs

    Twitter avatar for @fintanr
    Fintan Ryan @fintanr
    We published the Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle #API Management (FLAPIM) last week and the companion Critical Capabilities for Full Life Cycle #API Management this week. (🧵) 1/14
    Image
    5:41 PM ∙ Oct 5, 2021
    39Likes16Retweets

Markets

  1. Coding platform GitLab aims for nearly $9 bln valuation in U.S. IPO

  2. Notion raises at $10B valuation from Coatue and Sequoia


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By Ed Sim
Ed Sim's (@boldstartvc) weekly readings and notes on enterprise VC, software, and scaling startups
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #437
building the AI Native company - not just product
Mar 15
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #406
The race to be the last mile AI platform for enterprises - lessons from Palantir's Bootcamp model (BLG is the new PLG), Glean, and others...
Aug 10, 2024 • 
Ed Sim
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #406
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #416
8 years of What's 🔥 🙏🏼 - more on Palantir's model from services (FDE) to product and now product + some services + why every startup will have to…
Oct 19, 2024 • 
Ed Sim
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