What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #263

Going down the crypto 🐰 hole...

In the last month, my twitter feed has experienced an epic takeover of tweets around web3, DAOs, and the metaverse. Many enterprise investors who were all in on dev tooling just weeks ago are now fully in the “crypto rabbit hole.”

And here is why it’s different now versus 5 years ago…

Jesse Pollak (jessepollak.eth) @jessepollak

$ENS is a watershed moment: * important public good, built as OSS over many years * $2B+ of ownership distributed to contributors and users, with no allocation to investors * scaled liquid democracy governance w/signed constitution welcome to our crypto cooperative future!

This past week, the Network Solutions of Ethereum addresses just did an airdrop of tokens (award free tokens to early users/contributors) and created quite a buzz. As for myself, I bought my own ENS address just weeks ago and was airdropped $11k which is now worth about $15k. You can find me at edsim.eth

edgar.eth 🦉 @EdgarAronov

50% of $ENS goes to a community treasury. That's 50m tokens. With the current price at $29, that's a 1.5 billion treasury managed by @ensdomains users & contributors. Web 3.0 is astonishing.

While everything in infrastructure land won’t be turned into a coop or DAO, it is something important to pay attention to because I truly do believe what can be Web3-ed will be.

Ed Sim @edsim

All web2 infra will have web3 equivalent which is why I ❤️ this token drop ENS is decentralizing governance w/ #ENSDAO! @ensdomains is an open public identity protocol owned by the community. I own edsim.eth, claim your $ENS governance tokens 👇🏼 claim.ens.domains

claim.ens.domainsENS AirdropENS token claim app

Example - Discord

sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 @sassal0x

If web2 platforms won't integrate web3 features, we'll just work around them and build our own platforms Web3 is inevitable

Ryan Brown 📼🎮 @Toadsanime

Discord is pausing its NFT plans after a huge backlash, which included a wave of users cancelling paid subs. I was told the server made of Discord staff & big game studio reps erupted over this, with many threats to take communities elsewhere. Hard to progress facing that. https://t.co/WP6hkyZsXD

But Josh Elman brings up a great point…

Josh Elman @joshelman

I feel like the critical question we should all be asking needs to be flipped. It isn’t “how will you make money?” But instead “how will you grow to have meaningful mainstream adoption?”

Josh Elman @joshelman

So instead of asking “how will you make money?” Or with NFTs “how much money are you making right now buying and selling into the hype?”, please ask “how does this lead to deep habitual usage?”

We went down this 🐰 hole back in 2017 looking for a there there at the intersection of crypto and enterprise. So we started an enterprise blockchain accelerator with IBM (creators of Hyperledger blockchain) and Comcast (investing in the future).

And after meeting over 1500 “enterprise” blockchain companies, we (cofounded with Rob Bailey, Eliot Durbin and myself) were fortunate enough to invest in infrastructure and analytic cos like Blockdaemon, Fireblocks, and Amber Data. What we concluded was as much as supply chain and couponing and other use cases sounded super cool and relevant, databases for the most part worked just fine. In addition, IBM and hyperledger fabric blockchain is pretty much dead - no one wanted to take part in a company led revolution versus one led by the people. Ultimately, the real killer app we discovered back in 2017 is digital money and hence blockdaemon (now the largest independent node operator and staking platform), Fireblocks (leading digital asset and custody software), and Amber Data (cryptocurrency APIs to run your business) all in the portfolio. This next wave with DAOs and NFTs is going to be quite exciting so if you’re building anything infrastructure related (auth, security, privacy, off chain stuff), I’d love to chat.

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

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Scaling Startups

1. 💯 but sequencing matters

   Mike Speiser @laserlikemike

   Go slow until you have a great product. Then go fast. The economic efficiency gains from a great product compound everywhere. If you go fast too early, you will fail. Once you have nailed product, go so fast that it scares everyone. If you don’t go fast enough, you will fail.

   Ed Sim @edsim

   @laserlikemike 💯

   

   Ed Sim @edsim

   With all of these preemptive rounds, founders will need to make sure that they don't believe their own hype. U can't skip steps to product market fit. Hiring more sales reps won't help you find it faster, only 🔥 💰. Stay the course, build the right way, don't prematurely scale.

2. Just ship it

   Ryan Hoover @rrhoover

   Why so many people with a startup idea never ship

   

3. How Jeli started…Learning from incidents community

   GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg

   Most minimum viable products can begin with: - No-code - No product - Community is the product - WhatsApp group, Discord server etc - No venture capital Build community before you build big products

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Enterprise Tech

1. 💪🏼 so 🔥 up for @Boldstartvc to partner with @cloudqueryio, the #OSS cloud asset inventory powered by SQL, enabling developers to assess, audit, and monitor the configuration of their cloud assets.

   CloudQuery @cloudqueryio

   We are super excited to announce our seed funding round. The round was led by @Boldstartvc with @Work_Bench , @haystackvc, and Mango Capital. You can read more about what this means for our open-source cloud asset inventory platform buff.ly/3onYZ6h

   

2. AWS moving up the stack to app layer - they are busy, for sure, getting ready to put a M&A machine in motion - will need to buy their way into this IMHO

   “Mr. Selipsky said Amazon Web Services plans to maintain its lead by offering more applications that can help organizations take advantage of the cloud. For example, it has developed a cloud tool that uses artificial intelligence to digitize and categorize physical documents, and another that monitors the health of the expensive equipment used in the agriculture and energy industries.

   “ We’re still probably not close to where customers need us to be at the end of the day,” said Mr. Selipsky, who became chief executive of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, in May. “We need to build a lot of services. We need to build a lot of capabilities.”

3. The modern data stack according to Battery Ventures

   Chiraag @chiraag_deora

   Following @collibra & @matillion’s recent financings, we took a swing at laying out our thesis for investing across the modern data stack to address the data deluge Welcome thoughts, comments and criticisms! battery.com/our-take-on-th…

   

4. Why this revolution is different

   Shehan @TheCryptoCPA

   Web 1.0 - Read-only. Web 2.0 - Read & write. Web 3.0 - Read, write & own.

5. and sounds a lot like #OSS culture to me…

   Insight @NFT1nsight

   1/ The NFT space enables some of the best communities to grow and connect, but there are no shortcuts to building and you cannot simply skip the investment and effort of doing so. If you are looking to grow a community, here are some ideas!

6. Yes, not enterprise but 🥫 for 🤔 🧵

   Shaan Puri @ShaanVP

   Hot take: Everyone is wrong about the Metaverse. here's my 3 part theory..

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Markets

1. The bull case for Confluent 🧵

   Francis - Analyst @InvestiAnalyst

   Confluent: The Central Nervous System that is empowering Data in Motion for the Leading Corporations. Why Confluent could become as dominant as Snowflake as a leading Open-Source Data Infrastructure. This is my long-awaited $CFLT Investment Thesis: