What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #266
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #266
How I stay sane in an insane world - hint, it's hard 😃
The pace is only accelerating for startup funding, and it’s hard to keep up with the deal flow, private valuations, FOMO, events, crypto madness and everything else in between. Looking at my Twitter feed, chatting with investors about each new insane round of funding after another, and watching the sky fall 📉 for lots of SaaS stocks can be enough to drive one absolutely insane.
Fortunately for now, as I look at my current portfolio and talk to other investors what’s happening in the public markets is still divorced from the private markets. Valuations continue to be incredibly robust and there seems to be no slowing down. To that end, I was meeting with an emerging manager the other day, and he asked me what’s next for boldstart especially as it relates to $400M seed funds and intense competition at every stage.
And my answer was this:
While the advice sounds basic, it does allow me and boldstart to focus on the signal from the noise. By knowing what you love to do, you can easily say NO to everything else that does not fit your focus. This means you can really focus on the 5-10% of founders and new opportunities that really matter, the ones who equally want to partner with you on their journey. I’ve always told our LPs, I never want to wake up feeling pressure to put money to work and only want to take enough to execute on our strategy. Here’s a slide from our annual meeting which was held a couple of months ago with respect to every VC investing in seed and how we stay focused and calm:
In addition, as one raises more capital it becomes easier and easier to start paying higher valuations upfront, to write bigger checks upfront, and fall into the trap of as long as I own X% and if this is huge, it doesn’t matter what entry price I pay. Yes, for now it’s working for many but in the long run things will adjust.
You will also F*^# up and miss out on some opportunities but by staying focused, you should hope that you will partner with more winners than ones you missed out on. Just from this past week alone I can name 2 companies we passed on by staying in our swim lane but at the same time, we are incredibly 🔥 up for the founders we did partner with. You can’t win them all and you can’t invest in everything so constraints force you to focus.
Before you raise your next fund as an emerging manager, think long and hard about what your swim lane is. It’s different for everyone and should take into account understanding your own super powers, what you love to do every single day, how you like to work with founders, focus, strategy on leading vs. co-leading, firm building - solo vs. partners, etc. But one common theme is to not take too much money as it can cause lots of bad habits.
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
Scaling Startups
It’s never too late - h/t @brianlaungaoaeh
💯 When raising at too high a price it impacts talent
Mr. Speiser is crushing the twitter game
Optimize one step ahead…
Enterprise Tech
☁️ still early - from CEO of AWS - also of note, going more vertical offerings on top of platform - standard evolution of many infrastructure companies like Snowflake and others
"There's no industry that hasn't been touched by the cloud," said Selipsky, who added that only 5% to 15% of enterprises have moved to the cloud. "It's still early days, and we're tailoring services to industry-specific use cases.
"We've launched targeted services across a wide range of industries," said Selipsky. He cited Amazon FinSpace as an example to prepare financial data. The aim is to power new customer experiences. AWS is also launching the Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data, which combines Goldman Sachs's data with AWS Data Exchange and FinSpace integration. The effort rhymes with Snowflake's Financial Services Data Cloud.
Goldman Sachs now wants to be the Stripe of market data analysis - every Fortune 500 will be a dev first company
“The new service, called GS Financial Cloud for Data with Amazon Web Services, will help asset managers save time by allowing their developers to focus efforts on trades, rather than spending time wrangling data sets and leaning on a patchwork of legacy software to analyze them, the companies said. It will also “lower the barriers to entry” for firms to use advanced quantitative trading techniques, Goldman said.
If you take a step back, Goldman is not only a bank or a financial services provider, it’s now also a software company,” Selipsky said. “We’ve been a software company for a number of years, figuring out how to expose the powerful capabilities that Amazon has in a way that is explosively beneficial to customers.”
🤯 Airtable raising at $11.7B valuation, double its last round from March of this year (The Information)
DeFi is the future of finance until this happens - just in last couple days - this says it all
Crypto/security people: we can’t *possibly* run a secure messaging app over the web because everything’s too insecure! Dapp folks: let’s secure $100m using Javascript served by Cloudflare.
The investigation continues. Badger has retained data forensics experts Chainalysis to explore the full scale of the incident & authorities in both the US & Canada have been informed & Badger is cooperating fully with external investigations as well as proceeding with its own.
There was no unauthorised withdrawal from badger. The funds never reached badger. Badger's frontend was compromised and made users interact with malicious contracts instead of badger contacts. Celsius should have verified the contract they are authorizing before signing the tx..@CelsiusNetwork was made aware that the Badger platform had suffered an attack of unauthorized withdrawal of funds. The attack did not occur on the core Celsius platform. No Celsius client and user assets were affected. (1/5)
Celsius @CelsiusNetworkJames Governor from RedMonk analyst firm on GitOps potential role in compliance
“The opportunity to use Git-based workflows for compliance purposes is currently underappreciated, but there is a growing understanding in the industry that it’s a significant opportunity. One of the biggest challenges in any compliance project is understanding who did what, and when. With a GitOps-based approach you naturally track system changes, but also know who made them.”
Will DevSecOps Finally Take Off?
“However, the confusion around and implementation of DevSecOps processes is changing, he added. In fact, Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Application Security puts DevSecOps on the “Slope of Enlightenment” — and it’s headed toward the “Plateau of Productivity.
A few things have conspired to make DevSecOps a reality, Horvath said. First, security became a board-level topic, and boards of directors have started asking tough questions about their company’s security posture.
Additionally, DevSecOps tools have become more developer friendly”
Sapphire Ventures CIO Survey - startups on the 📈
Rough week
Markets
Haschicorp aiming for $13B valuation in IPO (CNBC)
🤯 Snowflake juggernaut - amazing growth and NRR at this scale is absolutely incredible…
Investing for the long run
