What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #334

Q1 round volumes significantly 📉 but keep the faith, true believers needed more than ever - how 2 rounds got done in last 30 days

It’s ugly out there, but let me share 2 stories of portfolio companies that did raise rounds in the last 30 days.

Tomasz Tunguz @ttunguz

The hardest round to raise so far in 2023 is the Series B. Although, all the early & mid-stage rounds have fallen to levels not seen for 5-10 years. Q1 volumes by year show broad declines across early-stage venture capital.

First up is dope.security. While we’re mostly focused day one investing in new categories in cybersecurity, there are a select few founders like Kunal who know an industry so well that we’ll go after incumbents with a bold approach. In this case, dope.security has created the fly direct, secure web gateway (SWG) with a consumer like experience that puts the intelligence back on the edge vs. the cloud resulting in a 4x faster and more secure approach than existing solutions from Forcepoint, Symantec and others.

Ed Sim @edsim

💪🏼 Congrats @iamkunala @dopesecurity on $16M Series A led by @GVteam @SangeenZeb! Team on a mission to reinvent secure web gateways #SWG w/fly direct approach: faster, easier, more secure! 🔥 up to continue investing @Boldstartvc along w/@PrefaceVentures @farooq_abbasi!

TechCrunch @TechCrunch

Dope Security nabs $16M led by GV to build out secure web gateways designed to work on endpoints, not in the cloud https://t.co/YtqCgdUfVy by @ingridlunden

We initially partnered with Kunal and team in June of 2021 when just an idea and announced the seed round upon shipping the alpha in September of 2022. Here’s more on why we invested originally.

While follow on rounds post-seed are difficult to get done in this environment, it’s even harder to get a round done >$10M since the world has changed dramatically. One of the 🔑 to getting a $15M+ round in this environment is to not only find a true believer in your vision, having some wins on the board in terms of customers, but also spending quality time with your future partner.

In this case, Sangeen notes in his LinkedIn post

After almost a year of conversations, GV (Google Ventures) is excited to finally partner with Kunal Agarwal and the dope.security team as they reshape the Secure Web Gateway market!

As I’ve always said, the world got too transactional the last few years, and I’m pumped to see the pendulum swing back to relationship oriented investing.

Next up is Dylib.so, a developer tools company focused on accelerating the adoption of WASM into production. We initially partnered with Steve, Zach and Ben in October 2022, and all I can say is this team ships fast with the launch of Extism (an open source universal plug in system) and Modsurfer (analyzes code + dependencies of WASM binaries). On the heels of early traction and excitement around WASM, we were 💪🏼 to double down on our initial investment with Felicis in a $6.6M seed round.

Shomik Ghosh 🇺🇦 @shomikghosh21

🔥 up to announce @dylibso $6.6M seed funding co-led by @Boldstartvc & @felicis to enable devs to use WebAssembly in Production 🎉 @nilslice, @bhelx, & Zach 🎉 in partnership with @pebble_bed & @crew_capital 🤝 🧵👇 medium.com/boldstart-vent…

medium.comDylibso: Delivering Developer Tools to Take WebAssembly to Production…Welcome to the Boldstart…We get fired up about new market creation at boldstart. To execute this well, you need a blend of deep end user understanding, lived…

Once again, Dylib.so found true believers who did not need to understand the opportunity and risks ahead for WASM but who were bought in on the need for developer tools to accelerate the adoption of WASM.

So despite the doom and gloom on the stats from Tomasz, keep building and shipping, get some wins, and find the true believers which doesn’t require talking to dozens of firms.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

---

Scaling Startups

1. Another example of cleaning up excess of last few years - these are painful times for some employees, esp at FAANG cos who will have to accept a lower compensation

   Pranay Srinivasan @utekkare

   the trickle down effect of the 2021 boom in valuations and easy VC money is now showing in candidate comps. met a super bright, amazing candidate who should get around $120k - $130k base for their experience, was drawing $180k ++, startup is dead and now their entire lifestyle… https://t.co/WloZCZXEwx

2. I highly encourage you to read 🧵 and comments

   Gokul Rajaram @gokulr

   Many founders who raised large amounts of money ($10m+) in 2020-21 but subsequently realized they don’t have PMF, are going through an excruciating psychological journey right now. On one hand, they feel beholden to employees and investors to keep building, pivoting, doing… https://t.co/TMRtj3h1t6

3. 👇🏼 for any developer first founder ready to start a company, come talk to us at boldstart - Anna will share her product superpowers from early days of Snyk to scale

   Ed Sim @edsim

   👇🏼 @Boldstartvc is growing! Welcome @anna_debenham in London 🇬🇧. So awesome to collaborate since early days @snyksec + super excited for Anna to bring her 0-1 product experience @Boldstartvc. Stay tuned 4 upcoming series of posts on product best practices for dev founders...

   

   Eliot Durbin @etdurbin

   🔥 up to welcome our friend @anna_debenham as an Operating Partner @boldstartvc. Anna was employee #4 @snyksec and brings her developer-first product superpowers to our founders. Read more about her role + a preview of what’s to come here: https://t.co/dniX23qRE5

---

Enterprise Tech

1. Battery State of Cloud Q1 is out - here are some key findings from the deck - “TL;DR, even amid the challenges the tech industry continues to navigate, the Q1 2023 survey results should come as good news for enterprise-tech startups.”

   Breaking Down the Latest Battery Ventures Cloud Software Spending Report

2. RIP Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel - what a legend and visionary

   Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen

   Gordon Moore's famous 1965 paper remains astonishing: cs.utexas.edu/~fussell/cours… RIP: intel.com/content/www/us…

   

3. 👀 last part of tweet got cut off…Pretty clear that without leveraging AI, most dev productivity cos will get crushed...

   Ed Sim @edsim

   🤯 killing many a developer productivity startup - auto document on pull requests, analyze test coverage + suggest tests, chat interface...what's next? over last 5 yrs dev tooling went from why invest to super 🔥, now too many dev tools cos which r undifferentiated with dozens… https://t.co/DutraHZc85

   

   GitHub @github

   GitHub Copilot is already helping developers code faster in their IDEs. But what’s next? Our answer is GitHub Copilot X. It’s our vision for the future of AI-powered software development. Check it out ⬇️ https://t.co/3Xrn7dAPgi

4. Along those lines here’s Sequoia’s market map on developer tools on the AI opportunity - IMO I still believe many of the incumbents like Github will still win but a select few will create new categories

   

5. ChatGPT plugin marketplace is out and wait until these are all connected together into workflows with an output from one task becoming an input to the next 🤯 🧵

   swyx 🤖 @swyx

   ChatGPT casually dropped an APP STORE 🤯 It can now: - browse the web (RIP Bing waitlist, cutoff) - write and run Python (RIP replit?) - access org info (RIP docsearch startups) - add third party plugins from OpenTable, Wolfram, Instacart, Zapier, etc) - developer SDK in preview

6. What are the security ramifications of OpenAI - privacy concerns? This one is just an bug in OSS but folks are thinking through the ramifications of proprietary data being used to train models - “OpenAI Shut Down ChatGPT to Fix Bug Exposing User Chat Titles” Bloomberg

   OpenAI temporarily shut down its popular ChatGPT service on Monday morning after receiving reports of a bug that allowed some users to see the titles of other users’ chat histories.

   An OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg that the titles were visible in the user-history sidebar that typically appears on the left side of the ChatGPT webpage. The chatbot was temporarily disabled after the company heard these reports, the spokesperson said. The substance of the other users’ conversations was not visible.

7. Adobe and Canva both announced expanded AI offerings this week

---

Markets

1. 👇🏼 must watch documentary Age of Easy Money (PBS|Frontline) - yes, folks its over, and this will enlighten you to all things Fed and how much power it wields and why/how it has made some of the decisions in the last few years - 🎩 my partner etdurbin