What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #286
Miami 🌴 Tech Week 🔥 - some observations - need more founders!
I just finished experiencing my first Miami 🌴 Tech week and here’s what I observed…
Hennessy and Jo Merse Marley, Bob Marley’s grandson, are amazing. We co-hosted an event with one of our LPs, Top Tier Capital, to kick off the week and send some good vibes to all.
Miami 🌴 became Sand Hill Road or SOMA for a week - seems like every investor from the west coast and NYC and beyond descended on Miami to figure out what is happening here.
If you’re a founder wanting to network with some of the leading firms, I’d suggest coming next year. The VC to Founder ratio was 5:1. One founder said he couldn’t walk 3 feet without bumping into someone who wrote checks.
The late stage market is on pause for now unless you’re a crypto company.
Seed and Series A markets continue to be on 🔥 as many of the growth funds are squarely pointed at the earlier stages.
If you’re a crypto infrastructure company, there is lots of 💰 flowing into the space since many funds are still leery of holding tokens and infra investing is an easier bet closer to traditional venture investing. It’s funny as I remember how hard it was for our portfolio cos like Blockdaemon and Amberdata to raise capital a few years ago as all of the crypto investors did not want to invest in anything without a token and all of the traditional infrastructure VCs did not want to invest in anything with crypto. Amazing how the world has changed.
The energy was electric and while many of these events were great opportunities to network, I hope that Miami 🌴 is also taken seriously and not seen as one huge party. We do need more builders here, and I hope to see more founders joining us in the warm weather.
It will be interesting to see how the Miami Tech ecosystem evolves over the next few years. This is one grand experiment in ecosystem building as Miami is starting with the capital instead of the engineering talent and founders. Some who visited think it’s just a novelty that will eventually be forgotten while others like myself believe this is the beginning of the next great place to be. Only time will tell…
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and hope to see you in Miami soon!
Scaling Startups
Solid lessons 👇🏼
Bootstrapping to success…
Last week my company reflect.app launched. Reflect is bootstrapped. Opposite approach than my last company Clearbit where we raised venture-capital and now have a ~200 person team. Let me tell you about the ups and downs on our bootstrapped journey... 🧵👇
Following up on my Quality over Quality post last week…
So good…
💯 seen advisor shares given up too easily for connections but no value beyond that…way too many times
Enterprise Tech
This is the beginning of something huge and while still just USDC stable coin Stripe “plans to add support for additional rails and payout currencies over time.”
🤯 Crypto…(The Information)
More 💰 needed for dev tooling and infra…let’s go
Developer experience still has a ton of room for improvement…
Much of the hard core enterprise blockchain use cases don’t need blockchains…at all 🧵
Blockchain, applied in the real world with a case study: To handle the ‘staggering’ amount of data of 500K loads per year (~1,500/day), Walmart Canada contracted an innovative blockchain solution using a private cloud, running 600 VMs to handle thousands of transactions per day.@GergelyOrosz So, 600 VMs for ‘thousands’ of transactions per day 😐 https://t.co/BOaQRLqsgw
Richard North 🇺🇦 @whichrichSmart contract error leads to this…
Who’s doing the dependency mapping and analysis on these? Lots of opportunity for defi security startups…
Markets
The free fall continues
Dev experience, dependency mapping, dev tooling. It’s all about the same thing: sw engineering hasn’t progressed beyond its electrical engineering roots and is ripe for disruption.