What's š„ in Enterprise IT/VC #298
Mid š check in: anecdotal state of VC/startup market, IT Spending data still strong for must-have products
Weāre halfway through the summer, and I thought Iād share what Iām seeing based on on a number of conversations with investors and founders. None of this is surprising, but here it is in two tweets.
Assume things will be quite slow until September and even then this pause could last well into Q4. On the sales side, Gartner just released its latest IT Spending Report and while a downward revision, these are still enormous numbers, particularly driven by software spending which is still projected to increase by almost 10% from last year.
Global spending this year on enterprise IT is projected to grow 3% year-over-year to a total of $4.53 trillion, Gartner Inc. said Thursday, a drawdown from an estimated 10.2% increase in 2021.
But despite the slowdown in overall spending, a serious reduction in IT budgets is unlikely. āA lot of this spending is no longer considered discretionary,ā John David Lovelock, Gartnerās chief forecaster, tells The Wall Street Journal's Angus Loten. āIT has moved to the front office to support revenue growth.ā
Market volatility pushes CIO to cloud. Cloud computing, which offersĀ the advantage of spreading out costs through ongoing subscriptions is oneĀ of the few areasĀ where IT spending is expected to outpace 2021, according to Gartner. The firmĀ anticipatesĀ $806.8 billion in spending on software, up 9.6% from last year.
Hereās also more data from Ryan Neu from Vendr: spending trends on SaaS across Q2 - h/t @ETDurbin - lots of security cos on there with Snyk, Okta, Crowdstrike, Sentinelone
As always, šš¼ for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
Scaling Startups
Pure gold from Lenny and quite the same for any PLG or dev first startupā¦have to zoom in to day of life of user and how to make life 10x better and expand from thereā¦
Ideal for distributed/remote teams
More on what makes a great remote culture š§µ
Reminder for investors to remember their North š from one of our LPs + prolific investor in VC funds
šš¼šÆ especially on zero to one PM - founders should always play that role
Operating efficiently at scale - bringing the founder mentality back to Coinbase, how to empower individuals, ship product, not slides and moreā¦
So weāre experimenting with banning slide decks in product and engineering reviews. Instead of a slide deck, you can show:
*A dashboard with your metrics ā hopefully your team is looking at this at least weekly anyway
*Figma mockups
*But most importantlyā¦.show the product itself and use it live!
Itās fine to include a one page agenda to capture action items, or to link to any pre-reads like technical design documents. But the best use of time in product and engineering reviews is to share your screen and walk through the actual product on mobile or web. It could be the production version, or a staging version. The important thing is to get hands-on with the product, see what the customer is seeing (or is about to see), and make it better.
Enterprise Tech
Great interview and case study of building an open source or developer first infrastructure company as told by the founder/CEO of Pulumi in the infrastructure as code marekt and Hashicorp competitor.
Reminder: it takes a LONG time to build a developer first infra co. Patience needed. @PulumiCorp story @protocol Y1: build Y2: OSS Y3: first commercial version Y4-5: accelerate to almost 1000 commercial customers Who will emerge in next 2 yrs? protocol.com/enterprise/pulā¦also wedge to bigger vision:
We started with infrastructure as code, but when it comes time to adopt cloud engineering in an organization, it goes well beyond infrastructure as code. You think of policy as code, you think of āHow do I empower my developers with self-serve portals.ā You think of observability, you think of all the management tasks ā so compliance and auditing and security, enforcing best practices. How do we enable the cloud engineering team ā that's developers, infrastructure teams and security experts ā to just collaborate in the most seamless way?
Great š§µ on how SaaS cos could potentially flip the switch from growth at all costs to free cash flow - yes, this is all based on sales math which is ramping up GTM 6-12 mos in advance based on the time it takes for a rep to hit full quota. In addition, as each new rep is hired it adds strain on the rest of the org as you need more leads, inside sales, presales, support, etcā¦
For OSS founders, how Jana helped build the Hashicorp community
šÆ
How Slack went from local to remote development environments as it scaled (ht: DevOps Weekly). Many of the developer first startups we see are all building towards a cloud-first future and this is a great read on how Slack rolled this out and measured adoption.
As a developer productivity team, we noticed this pain through our user surveys and metrics, and desperately wanted to solve the problem. We explored moving the entire development experience to remote environments, from code intelligence to type-checking and builds. Engineers would no longer have to maintain code or dependencies on their local laptops. They could get a fresh isolated environment on demand, ready to be used within a couple of minutes.
Whatās happening in the markets - risk on or risk off - great overview on how the asset allocators think - Risk Capital and Markets: A Temporary Retreat or Long Term Pull Back? Aswath Damodaran - NYU professor on valuations
š¤Æ First image from the James Webb Telescope and just a reminder of how big the universe truly isā¦
Oh yeah!
Markets
Recession or not? JPM and Morgan Stanley released earnings and despite slowdown, CEOs relatively upbeat
āThe consumer right now is in great shape,ā Dimon said on a conference call discussing his companyās second-quarter results. āSo even if we go into a recession, theyāre entering that recession with less leverage and in far better shape than they did in ā08 and ā09.āĀ
Gorman, on his bankās earnings call, said a deep or dramatic recession in the US is unlikely, and Morgan Stanley is ālong the USā in most of its businesses. āThe US is a great region to be in the world.ā
The first book on investing I read was One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch where he talked about buying what you love and introduced the concept of ten baggers - hereās his 20 golden rules