What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #349

VC is hard to come by but how are pre-money valuations for seed rounds higher than 2021?

This was a short, uneventful week other than with the launch of a new social network and Twitter competitor, Threads from Meta, which had 70 million sign ups after one day 🤯. There are lots of kinks to work out, but I must say I’ve been pleasantly surprised, and it’s been super fun bootstrapping a new network. If you want to try it out and talk dev tools, infra, cybersecurity and What’s 🔥, you can find me here: Ed Sim (@edsim9) on Threads

If you look at who I follow, you’ll find other startup founders, investors, and developer types so let’s try to create a new place to have discussions. So far, the algorithmic feed has a bit too much entertainment content for my taste but as more of us join the community, it will get better and better at filtering for startup and infrastructure discussions.

In other news, here’s the latest investment data fresh off the press from Carta for Q2 2023. As you can see below, seed valuations now are higher than they were during the 2021 funding boom.

There is lots of 💰 still waiting to be deployed and many multi-stage funds pointed their $billion guns at the seed market increasing round size and valuation. The median seed round is now $3.5M which is equal to or higher than all of the data points in 2021. If you hear founders lament about having a hard time raising this can still be true as there are less seed rounds done now than in 2021, but these are also more competitive. I can tell you from my personal experience for the 4 rounds we are closing now, these were all competitive and 3 out of 4 had the larger multistage funds hovering around to invest in founders with a well formed idea. IMO, multi--stage funds investing at the pre-product stage never ends well as these investors have too many companies to support and these checks mostly amount to option value for the next round.

Another point regarding seed valuation and round size is that you still have to be slightly insane to start a company now. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we at boldstart are seeing an insane quality of founders finally taking the leap of faith to start a new company and these more experienced founders tend to raise larger first rounds at higher prices than first time founders.

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

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Scaling Startups

1. More Frank Slootman…can’t get enough 🤣

   

2. As I’ve always preached, less is more, lean teams get shit done faster - remember that and please, please don’t prematurely scale and be honest with yourself when you hit Product Market Fit and not hire in advance of having it

   

3. Paul Graham on How to Do Great Work

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Enterprise Tech

1. A reminder for all of us infra investors and founders - full CNCF landscape here

   

2. Github Economic Impact of the AI-Powered Developer Lifecycle - believes increase in developer productivity due to AI could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion 🤯 (full research PDF here)

   Today, GitHub Copilot has been activated by more than one million developers and adopted by over 20,000 organizations. It has generated over three billion accepted lines of code, and is the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool.

   and AI is learning and getting better

   

3. Huge release from OpenAI with Code Interpreter - here’s the guide on how to get the most of out it and some pretty cool data analyst replacement examples (Ethan Mollick)

   Code Interpreter is an impressive data scientist. I have been using it extensively over the past months, and it is operating at a very advanced level, automating a lot of the complexity of quantitative analysis, and capable of very sophisticated approaches to data. As one way of of illustrating this, I started with a fun dataset, a public domain list of superheroes and their powers. You can download it if you want to try these steps with me….

   What AI can do with a toolbox... Getting started with Code Interpreter

   This is just scratching the surface of Code Interpreter, which I think is the strongest case yet for a future where AI is a valuable companion for sophisticated knowledge work. Things that took me weeks to master in my PhD were completed in seconds by the AI, and there were generally fewer errors than I would expect from a human analyst. Human supervision is still vital, but I would not do a data project without Code Interpreter at this point.

4. Your IT Buyers, CIOs already with AI + Copilot fatigue (WSJ CIO Journal)

   “I don’t think I’ve had a partner or vendor meeting this year where I wasn’t pitched a generative AI play,” said Brian Woodring, CIO of Rocket Mortgage, a nonbank mortgage provider.

5. Pay attenion :this is going to be hugely important as more data is used to train AI models and IMO secure enclaves in the cloud like AWS Nitro is the way to go - VMware, AMD, Samsung and RISC-V push for confidential computing standards

   Revealing the effort at the Confidential Computing Summit 2023 in San Francisco, the companies say they aim to bring about an industry transition to practical confidential computing by developing the open source Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project.

   Among other goals, the project aims to standardize on a set of platform-independent developer APIs that can be used to develop or adapt application code to run in a confidential computing environment, with a Certifier Service overseeing them in operation

   VMware claims to have researched, developed and open sourced the Certifier Framework, but with AMD on board, plus Samsung (which develops its own smartphone chips), the group has the x86 and Arm worlds covered. Also on board is the Keystone project, which is developing an enclave framework to support confidential computing on RISC-V processors.

6. How does Datadog work at scale

   

7. Great 🧵 on how rate limiting works and how to prevent downtime…

   

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Markets

1. State of VC funds