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What's ๐ฅ in Enterprise IT/VC #265
๐ข Strap it on for a bumpy next couple of months - but opportunity abounds in the long term + fun matters
Wow, I needed thatโฆa brief pause for Thanksgiving ๐ฆ to spend time with family and to just be ๐๐ผ for being here and for friends, family, science, and the web which helped us out just a bit through these last couple of years.
Iโm also ๐๐ผ for the incredible and unexpected bull market and the new golden age of developer and infrastructure software which the mainstream, public investors have seemed to adoptโฆI truly believe this is still just the beginning.
That being said, the latest news of a new Covid variant reminds me that we are not out of the woods and that the stock market is an amazingly efficient voting machine which makes decisions about the future in rapid fashion.


Zoom stock was down 14% earlier in the week on lowered growth expectations due to reopening and just like that itโs back up 10% in pre-trading. Itโs important for the founders and VCs reading this to remember that while we need to buckle up for a bumpy ride the next few months, we should also not get too spooked by the near term and keep building and investing for the long term.
Clearly, private investors right now are quite bullish on the long term as 1000x multiples are becoming the norm for the most sought after founders. ๐ here is to find the underdog founders who are not en vogue and hope they do become that founder in the future. That being said, I wonder how sustainable these prices are as investors are paying it forward 3+ years in advance for companies to โgrowโ into these valuations.


For now, the public markets are continuing to reward one thing, growth, and the second that a company slows down, the valuation multiples compress quickly.

Regardless of multiples, builders build because they fundamentally want to solve a problem they deeply care about and want to see their product or service alive in the world. When it comes to whatโs next in enterprise software, Iโve had a number of conversations in the last couple of weeks with founders or executives who are going all in on crypto instead. It reminds of back in 2017 when we started our blockchain accelerator at boldstart and then things died down. However, many believe this time is differentโฆ

Yes, these are enterprise engineers, security experts, and execs who are excited about web3 and digging into to understand the infrastructure challenges associated with it from sidechains, privacy, scale, node monitoring, security and auth - there is still so much to build and itโs super early.


One other point that was made repeatedly from these folks is they are just having so much FUN diving into web3 and thinking about the possibilities. And for most of these folks who have done pretty well the last 10 years, FUN really matters!
As always, ๐๐ผ for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
Scaling Startups
Donโt go to business school and you wonโt have this problem
As an investor, past does not = future ๐งต
On hiring PMs from founder of Plaid
Enterprise Tech
Want to know what's next in DevOps? See ๐งต from my colleague @ellenchisa @Boldstartvc as she kicks off Day 2 #DevOpsDaysTLV.
With 8 investments in ๐ฎ๐ฑ in the last couple of funds, it's great to see the community of infra super ๐ช๐ผ as it's not just cyber security!
Game on - JAMstack (JavaScript, API, Markup) on ๐ฅ as Netlify raises a $105M Series D and its competitor Vercel just raised a $150M Series D
What are analytic apps in the Modern Data Stack ๐งต?
All about usage based pricing and how to scale to $100M+ from Openview
Great adviceโฆ
Many web scale companies like Uber, Netflix, Lyft, AirBnB have released some of their code as open source but none have actually made a move to monetize the OSSโฆuntil Spotify
โTLDR: Next year, Spotify is going to start selling some new plugins we build for Backstage (developer portal). Weโre doubling down on Backstage with a sustainable business model as the cornerstone to our long-term commitment to the project. Following in the footsteps of the most successful open source projects, our goal is to pave a path for careers and companies to be born out of Backstage.โ
Markets
Great roundup of origin stories and how businesses work from Datadog to Twilio to Salesforce to John Deere
>$10B outcomes?
Did analysis for cryptocurrencies per @fredwilson's post. Here's where marketcaps sit today: 1 = $1T+ (BTC) 1 = $100B+ (ETH) 19 = $10B+ (SOL/AVAX/USDT etc.) 103 = $1B+ (UNI/AXS/SC etc.) # of >$1B entities that went live in ~last decade? 131 public tech co's 124 cryptocurrenciesSome historical context on @fredwilson's latest. Between 1/1/2010 - 12/31/2019, 166 tech startups went public. Here's where their valuations sit now: 2 = $1T+ (TSLA/FB) 4 = $100B+ (SHOP/NOW/TEAM/SQ) 48 = $10B+ 35 = <$1B Median = $4.4B Deploy wisely! https://t.co/6levc7OkXdFlaherty.eth @josephflaherty