What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #259

GitLab 😲 and the importance of doing things your own way

Once upon a time, the word was that you could not make money in venture selling to developers. Well, it’s been an insane past couple of years with IPOs of Datadog, now at a $48B market cap and Gitlab which ended the week after an IPO at a $16.5B market cap 😲. It’s amazing how we went from a world of investors who did not know what DevOps was to one where companies are decacorns many times over.

There are so many amazing angles to write about, but this one from Aaron Levie best sums it up for founders…

Aaron Levie @levie

The GitLab story shows the multiple paths to winning in software that 10 years ago few believed. You can build massive value around open source. Your biggest competitor can get acquired by a major player, and the market still grows massively. You can be 100% remote. And so on.

There is so much chatter and news and “how tos” on twitter and blog posts but in the end, there is no “one way” to start and build a company. If anyone tells you that, believe otherwise. Be an original, take the best from others and find your own path. The biggest outcomes also come from choosing your own path which in the beginning often feels like this.

My own personal experiences include folks telling Rahul at Superhuman he couldn’t scale a business by doing bespoke onboarding…a few years later there was a period of time when everyone was the “Superhuman of X”.

toddgoldberg.eth @toddg777

New blog post: The "@Superhuman of X"! It covers: ⚡️ The core product elements of Superhuman 🔍 What "Superhuman of X" startups will look like 💡 Things to consider if you're building one toddgoldberg.com/posts/superhum…

toddgoldberg.comThe Superhuman of X | Todd GoldbergExploring the Superhuman experience and how it can be used to build new productivity products.

In fact, looking at our portfolio and the 🦄, I can tell you that almost all of them at some point in time had a hard time raising capital with excess of dozens of Nos because folks didn’t believe in the market size, the business model, or what have you but in the end despite what anyone tells you, remember…

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

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Scaling Startups

1. Painful founder lessons from Ali in his meeting with Steve Jobs

   Ali Partovi @apartovi

   As the world celebrated Steve Jobs’s life last week, I recalled a lesson he taught me. My one meeting with Steve didn’t end well. It’s one of my most painful memories, and a warning to startup CEOs about the danger of taking hype too far. Here’s the story. (1/n)

   Ali Partovi @apartovi

   @hadip @natbro Never overplay your hand when negotiating a major deal -- especially not against a stronger player. There are ways to be a strong negotiator without lying. /22

2. Speaking of exits…great 🧵 for founders…

   Micah Rosenbloom @micahjay1

   🔕 Because most exits are modest The median exit value from this sample was $44M. If you only count the successful exits under $100M – the modal outcome – the average value was $28M. VCs focus on $1B+ exits. Founders should pay more attention to <$1B exits.

   

3. So true…

   David Ulevitch 🇺🇸 @davidu

   1/ I’ve been talking to firms after the dust settles… and… so many “moving fast and “super hot” Series A rounds are not hot at all and the heat is manufactured / made up. This is a relationship business and too many folks are incinerating goodwill. Buyer beware. Do the work.

4. Easier to sell the dream vs. being measured on revenue

   Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke

   My friend’s company has $200k ARR and had 30+ seed meetings and struggled to raise. I told him to delete the revenue slide. He raised a great round in 2 weeks. This is not a shitpost, it’s a true story.

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Enterprise Tech

1. Must read reports on the State of European/Israeli Tech (Accel) and State of AI (Nathan Benaich) - so happy to have over 60% of our investments in last few yeas in Europe and Israel!

   Philippe Botteri @pbotteri

   2021 @Accel Euroscape: Global Dominance? is out❗ ➡️ Europe is 🔥🔥 👉 Market snapshot 👉 Top 💯 Cloud co from 🇪🇺&🇮🇱 👀 linkedin.com/pulse/accel-20… 👏👏👏 to the winners! @VPurandare @CandiceHdF @SaaStock @alextheuma @LucyWimmer #accelfamily #saastockemea

   

   linkedin.comAccel 2021 Euroscape: On the path to global dominance?This article was co-authored with my colleagues Varun Purandare and Candice du Fretay. The Accel 2021 Euroscape was unveiled earlier today at SaaStock EMEA and you can view the full presentation here.

   Nathan Benaich @nathanbenaich

   Tomorrow (Tues 12th Oct) at 7am UK time, our 4th annual @stateofaireport report goes live! Huge thanks to my co-author @soundboy and our star Research Analyst @osebbouh for a 🔥 summer of science, data, politics, debate, and keen slide making 🖼 More at: stateof.ai

   

2. Was viewed as crazy at time by some but…

   Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh

   GitHub for $7.5 billion by Microsoft in my mind still goes down as one of the cheapest, highest value acquisitions of all time. Absolutely incredible steal, especially in light of the $GTLB IPO today (also on that list is Instagram at $1B and YouTube for $1.65B).

3. 🤔…

   Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb

   During the cold war, foes pointed missiles at industrial centers. Today if you want to aim missiles at the industrial center of the United States, you would aim them at China. We are interconnected enough that harming another becomes, effectively, self-harm.

   Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb

   [In 1914 there was mild commerce and NO supply chain integration... no consequences of the analog of a chip shortage. The equivalent in 2022 would be disastrous.]

4. ☁️ security continues to be on 🔥 as Wiz raised $250M at $6 Billion valuation and Orca raised $550M at $1.8B valuation - both 4-6 months after their last rounds 🤯

5. k8s on bare metal - upsides and downsides from Saad Malik (Spectro Cloud, a portfolio co) - The New Stack

   “One of them comes in the shape of running apps and the Kubernetes (K8s) platform directly on bare metal servers. The upside? Better performance and of course less cost (say goodbye to hypervisor licenses) and effort (one layer less to manage). Indeed, K8s has everything we need to run our apps directly on top of bare metal machines.

   The downside? Until now it has been generally quite challenging to install, run and manage bare metal K8s clusters, viewed often as a “disconnected” experience between the underlying server and the K8s nodes, let alone treating them as just another “location” of a multi-environment K8s management strategy. But what if there was a way to unify the experience and treat a bare metal server like any other cluster?”

6. This is 🔥 from Replicated (a port co) - kubernetes theme song for Kubecon

7. Must listen from OpenView with Kyle Parrish…we at boldstart also hosted Kyle for a chat on day one PLG sales and building out that initial motion

   OpenView @OpenViewVenture

   🎙️👂 @KyleHParrish built @figmadesign's sales team from the ground up. On this BUILD, he shares: ✔️ How to build a strong #sales team and sales #culture ✔️ What you should keep in mind when your team or company scale ✔️ Why team culture matters 🎧👇 openview.vc/3BycAgx

   

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Markets

1. Enterprise software - let’s go!

   Chris Conforti @Chris_Conforti

   2021 Software IPOs may eclipse ALL tech IPOs from last year (a near record year!). Just an incredible level of issuance and appetite from investors to back this sector. Expect this pace to continue

   

2. 🤯 71x NTM Rev for Cloudflare!

   Jamin Ball @jaminball

   This week in enterprise software: Top 10 #SaaS #Cloud multiples as of today's market close. We have a new #1!