What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #293
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #293
The bull 💪🏼 case for DevOps - GitLab's big quarter + what's next on product roadmap
While we can’t ignore the fact that U.S. inflation hit a four-decade high in May at 8.6%, I wanted to zoom back in on the micro and talk about Gitlab’s quarter. While the stock was up 20+% for the week until inflation numbers came out, the learnings for founders is that the DevOps market is early and customers are still spending real 💰.
Not only did GitLab exceed target revenue/earnings estimates for Q1, it also guided upwards for Q2. This is clearly a bullish sign and you can read more here in the earnings transcript.
more in 🧵…
Whether you believe in the single DevOps platform model or the best of breed one, IMO there is room for both. Here’s a slide from Sapphire Ventures from last week showing the amount of devtools cos out there (this is just a fraction) along with another map from the CNCF.
Along with the GitLab earnings transcript, I encourage you to check out the presentation laying out its GTM model in more depth. For GitLab it always starts with the product and rapid iteration. The company has insane product velocity which brings in new developers who want to try the latest product feeding top of funnel.
🔑 is then aligning the sales motion to the user and economic buyer which is clearly laid out above. As I’ve so often said, every company eventually becomes an enterprise sales company whether you start selling from top down or bottoms up with a PLG motion.
Finally, since GitLab is a platform play, you can see from this product roadmap what is next to integrate. Lots of security offerings are featured on the far right hand side and startups should be aware that these offerings only exist because customers want them. No need to worry that Gitlab will kill you as you can still focus on the best of breed play which is a much larger market opportunity.
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
Scaling Startups
So important for founders on scaling their teams…read why adding more people is not a direct correlation to increased productivity
Thrilled for my firm boldstart ventures to participate in the OpenView PLG Product Benchmark Survey - some awesome data for founders - download here
Enterprise Tech
👏🏼💪🏼 to Stellate on its $25M Series A funding led by Tiger Global
GraphCDN is now @Stellate 🚀 Announcing our new name and $30M of funding to build the global data graph 🎉 stellate.co/blog/graphcdn-…
My partner Ellen Chisa has more on why we at boldstart led the seed round and are pumped about Stellate…
Web5 is here - Jack Dorsey just launched this and here’s the presentation
RSA Week - first time I have not been there in quite some time…but good news
On IT Spend from Protocol: “Cybersecurity spending isn't recession-proof. But it's pretty close.” and here’s a comment from the Crowdstrike earnings call on customer spend
George Kurtz -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I'll try the first part. No, we haven't seen any slowdown in terms of the willingness to buy security. It continues to be the No. 1 risk factor for any board of directors.
Fortune 500 still spending on IT as Citi announces plans to hire 4000 tech staff to tap into digital explosion (Bloomberg) and increased IT budget by 10% to $10B 😲
Banks are upgrading decades-old technology platforms to make services available remotely for both clients and workers, with multibillion-dollar programs that investors are watching closely for signs that this largess will eventually boost returns. At Citi, Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason said in March the lender raised tech spending by 10% to $10 billion last year. JPMorgan Chase & Co. boss Jamie Dimon said last month he just wants “to get it done” on the technology front, amid broader shareholder scrutiny of the bank’s expenses.
Docusign had a huge miss and CEO was asked about why huge sales rep churn…must read 🧵 and IMO, it’s simple, Reps stay if they make 💰 and if not go to next place. You can do sales math all you want, X # of reps ramped * XX% of productivity but end of day, need to sell and if not, they vote with their feet. Read on and also comments…
Trending this past week from HackerNews from Liveblocks, a port co.
Notoriously tough to build, undo/redo in a multiplayer environment is even more fraught with difficulty. In this article, we will take you on a behind-the-scenes exclusive, explaining one of the most complex developer issues for multiplayer apps.
Yep, this is true
Markets
Sign of times: Coatue raising a structured equity fund, down rounds vs. structured equity, think debt with some equity conversion and not just your standard flavor of preferred, more a guaranteed interest rate + some creative equity conversion. End of day, it’s debt plus if co does well, some nice upside. Great opportunity for Coatue to help founders avoid down rounds but founders need to be careful when taking this capital…
Coatue Management is raising a structured equity fund that could help cash-strapped startups stave off raising money at lower valuations amid turbulent public markets, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. is weighing a similar fund, according to people familiar with the matter.
IMO, if you need to raise capital, better to take the pain and new valuation vs. being too creative on maintaining a price which will take years to grow into.