What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #367
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #367
OpenAI Dev Day - it was the best of times, it was the worst of times; also latest data on AI deployment in enterprise
So which is it for you?
Many enterprise founders reminded of Charles Dickens after yesterday’s OpenAI developer day (tweet here)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Holy 🐮 - the OpenAI developer day announcements are 🤯. It’s 45 minutes, and if you haven’t’ watched already, you should drop what you are doing now and watch it here 👇🏼. This gives you a glimpse of what’s ahead for GPT, how non-developers can build their own GPTs on their own data without knowing any code (OpenAI term for agents), and use Zapier enterprise integrations which can easily be called via natural language chat to build sophisticated bots and workflows.
I must say I haven’t been this pumped 💪🏼 for awhile. The future is certainly bright for AI as OpenAI continues to democratize access to APIs and make it easier for anyone to build their own custom instances. And oh yeah, they will have an App Store like Apple which will only accelerate this into the mainstream. We are not too far from a future where we all have our own Jarvis scouring the web 24/7 to do things for us. It’s coming faster than you think.
That being said, I also stand by my assessment in April this year that funding niche white spaces where OpenAI and others aren’t solving them is a fast path to roadkill 🧵.
So if my “Poof” comment in April centered around Amazon Bedrock, you can now multiple that 100x as what OpenAI is building is incredible. Here’s the rest of my 🧵:
BTW, here are some areas which now will be difficult for the “first movers” to navigate 👇🏼
While it may be extreme, you get the point.
Here’s what that could look like for Vector databases - I highly encourage you to click through to read the comments for downsides as well.
But the cost advantage can work differently when creating custom models on-prem.
For many large enterprises this cost may be a drop in the bucket in exchange for access to developer tools, better models, more accuracy, etc. but for mid-market or smaller cos this could be cost prohibitive and a reason to go on-prem with open source or to explore micro-models as well.
And by the way, it’s still super early in the enterprise!
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Scaling Startups
Yes, this is happening more and more and there is a tried and true method to get this done where all boxes are checked - dropping term sheets pre-incorporation can cause major tax issues for founders if not done appropriately. Regardless, click 🧵 as comments are enlightening.
And if you want to know more about Inception Rounds read my post from a couple of weeks ago along with links to a guest appearance on the 20VC podcast
Having some fun this week at our boldstart ventures AGM, a VC’s annual meeting for investors - click through, turn volume up!
Enterprise Tech
💪🏼 Huge congrats to Nora Jones and the Jeli team on exit to PagerDuty! So awesome to see Nora’s mission to help organizations learn from incidents grow even bigger with the PagerDuty customer base! Here’s more from Nora on the “better together” story
Together, we’re building a world where you’re continuously improving your incident management through seeing data from previous incidents, and instilling people with more expertise than they had about the incident before. Over a year ago, Jennifer Tejada and I grabbed coffee to connect about the incident management space, and it was clear from that conversation that PagerDuty and Jeli had similar missions and would continue building and integrating together.
Also super pumped for my firm boldstart to have been there from Inception and pre-incorporation. Here’s a great quote in TechCrunch from my partner Eliot who was on the board and led the initial round:
Eliot Durbin, general partner at Boldstart Ventures, says that he began talking to Jones a couple of years ago when she was at Netflix just to learn about this space, and when she was ready to start a company, his firm jumped at the chance to write an early check, even while the startup was pre-revenue.
“When we met Nora we realized that she’s on a lifelong mission to make things much more resilient […]. And we had the benefit of getting to know her for years before she started the company, so it was really a natural continuation to a conversation that we were already in,” Durbin explained.
Great summary from Ben Tossell on Open AI Dev Day (long 🧵)
Open AI’s dev day was terrrrriffic. Sam Altman launched a new language model, with tons of added powers. Then announced a bunch of other models to API. Took some sweet time to chat with Satya (and poke him about OpenAI and Microsoft’s relationship). Went all philosophical before dropping the big bomb.
What’s going on here? Nothing, just Open AI slaying (literally for wrappers) at its first dev day.
Have to agree with this one 👇🏼
The AI assistant travel app in @OpenAI's DevDay keynote today has got to be one of the most impressive live demos I've ever seen. Brilliant presentation by @romainhuet + stellar design & engineering work by @simonpfish
& @karoliskosas behind the scenes 👏🏼
And finally, here’s what else is possible - 12 of the craziest things people have built already since OpenAI Dev Day
There is no WASM in production with observability for WASM - it’s here now from Dylib.so, a portfolio co, in partnership with Datadog
Markets
Datadog FTW!!! As punishing as the stock market can be for guiding down even if you beat your Q3 (Confluent last week), it can also be rewarding for doing the opposite! “Datadog stock surges 30% after cloud company beats estimates, revises guidance up”
-Datadog surged nearly 30% in Tuesday trading after the company reported stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings and full-year guidance.
-Co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel told analysts on a conference call that “AI-native customers” contributed 2.5% of Datadog’s annualized revenue during the quarter.
-Datadog builds cloud monitoring and security products for large- and small-scale enterprises.
🇮🇱 cybersecurity exits continue despite the war - Palo Alto completes acquisition of Israeli cyber company Talon for $625 million
The deal is expected to close on Monday; Last week, Palo Alto purchased Israel's Dig Security for $315 million; 130 Talon employees will receive, according to estimates, about 370-80 million from the deal
AngelList/Brex in their state of VC Q3 report show that Open AI has stormed into the top 10 top merchants by prevalence among pre-seed(#7), seed(#7 and later stage(#8) companies. Check it outif you haven't already.