What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #410
Speed mode + also, is the great unbundling of SaaS powered by agentic workflows?
Not sure what “founder mode” is but Chamath captures the essence - just be smart and be involved. There is a balance and the pendulum during ZIRP moved too far to the right on scaling and hiring ahead of growth. Seems like some companies still need an extreme jolt with the idea of Founder mode but the reality is the answer lies somewhere in the middle left with founders still driving the right value. Professional managers can also deliver value and be in founder mode if they have “true agency.”
And IMO 👇🏼 founder mode should have never left the building - keep the gas pedal down and focus on speed mode.
There is no ONE RIGHT WAY to build a company. There is so much chatter and “how tos” on twitter and blog posts but in the end, be original, take the best ideas from others and find your own path.
Alex Yampolskiy, co-founder and CEO of Security Scorecard which crossed the $100M ARR mark last year (a boldstart port co) wrote a super thoughtful post on how he thinks about being a Founder CEO, how he operationalizes his style, and what he has learned. It is amazing for me to see this written so clearly as I remember when he and co-founder Sam Kassoumeh were sharing a small office with my partner Eliot Durbin and I when they were just getting started. What is most evident to me is the incredible growth mindset that Alex has and how he is constantly evolving. Once again, this is not gospel, just another view into “founder mode.”
Pros and Cons of "Founder Mode" by Aleksandr Yampolskiy CEO
September 4, 2024
I recently came across an article by Paul Graham "Founder Mode" – it resonated with me, as with many fellow founders and CEOs. Like everything, there are nuances to this mode of operation - and it can either work or backfire - which I've both experienced first-hand in the past 10 years, as we scaled SecurityScorecard from $0 to a multi-billion dollar company, now trusted by 3,000+ customers to measure and communicate risk.
My Experience: Two Sides of the Coin
I've seen both sides of the equation:
1) Hiring Executives and Giving them Space to Manage: In the past, I hired polished executives who advised me to step back, saying I was micromanaging too much and that I wasn’t “CEO material.” So, I did. I left them alone for a few months... and the results were disastrous. They were well-liked, engaged in politics, but they didn’t drive change. We had to let some of them go, which can lead to turnover and a culture of fear, while they happily moved on to their next career gig.
I kept asking myself: Am I failing as a CEO?
But then, we'd promote an up-and-comer or hire someone else, and the results were phenomenal. In hindsight – I should’ve trusted but verified, micromanaged appropriately, and acted faster to part ways with them.
2) The Downside of Overstepping. On the flip side, I’ve learned that stepping on people's toes and inserting myself into every project creates chaos and a culture of fear. There's a delicate balance; sometimes saying that you “Operate in Founder mode” is just an excuse for a founder/CEO to avoid personal growth. As the company scales, you have to make yourself dispensable and it starts by hiring the right team and relentlessly training and aligning them (the job of a manager).
The Role of the Founder
The founder’s job is to provide vision – to see around corners in ways KPIs and obvious “customer feedback suggestions” can't show. You must also be a credible ambassador for customers and have enough conviction to challenge your Executive team and the Board when needed. Too often, even top VC investors are reactive, making decisions based on short-term fluctuations, like revenue dips or spikes. If you see a dip - things are bad - let’s sell the company. And if you closed a big deal “oh my god things are great”. In reality - even when revenue is up you could be in deep trouble, because the market has changed - and conversely “whatever problems you experience today are caused by your mistakes from 6 months ago”.
The challenge with most advice in the Books or from non-CEO executives is that while it sounds good, it doesn’t explain how to implement it. The nuances matter. When you hire smart people, how do you build a team and how do you direct them without micromanaging?
Building the Team...
Read the rest of the post here with clear frameworksAnd if interested in how you never let founder mode leave the building, I encourage you to check out my ever evolving working draft of how to go back to basics when building a startup from Inception - everything you do with the first 5-10 hires becomes part of your culture! Click below for the the Google Doc:
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
One last thought, summer’s over but ponder this…
Scaling Startups
#the constant reminder of be careful how much you raise…
#founder mode - insane 🤯 - 122 days to build the most powerful AI training system in the world
#💯
#preach - you know my saying - all roads lead to enterprise sales and steak 🥩 dinnahs!
#JKS
#from James Clear, on dreams and going for it (h/t Coach Plotkin)
"Dreams are fun when they are distant. The imagination loves to play with possibilities when there is no risk of failure.
But when you find yourself on the verge of action, you pause. You can feel the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Thoughts swirl. Maybe this isn't the right time? Failure is possible now.
In that moment-in that short pause that arises when you stand face to face with your dream-is the entirety of life. What you do in that pause is the crucible that forges you. It is the dividing line between being the type of person who thinks about it or the type of person who goes for it.
When I really think about it, I want that moment to be my legacy. Not that I won or lost. Not that I looked good or looked like a fool. But that when I had something I really wanted to do, I went for it."Enterprise Tech
#the great unbundling is going to accelerate especially as platforms get bigger and bigger and customers don't want to be saddled with an everything in one platform and pay for things they don't want - from co-founder and CEO of Noded AI, a boldstart port co.
#add some powerful agents to the mix and the idea of DIY becomes more powerful - the SME market is most vulnerable IMO, the folks who are the most cost-conscious
#here’s another example - agents in action - think of all of the use cases similar to this and where you can cut back on some spending from port co CrewAI (watch)
Adding to this thought, as Marc Benioff transforms Salesforce to be all about agents, it strikes me that the very idea he is pushing is one that could put Salesforce at existential risk. Yes, it’s all about the data and Salesforce is the system of record for sales and many other applications but one will no longer need to go to Salesforce as the front-end and UI gets reimagined with AI. We now have AI pinging a database, training and getting smarter and then an agentic workflow can stitch together other various apps and systems of record over time. Once the front-end where the user changes, one can easily see an end around in which the application becomes just a database/system of record and customers migrate to the cheaper, faster, more agile system with best-of-breed components. Just 🤔 out loud! This is also where many a startup like Clay in our portfolio and Attio and others are going around and eating at these large businesses at Salesforce with little innovation.
# Fortune Cyber 60 - great list of early, early-growth and growth stage cybersecurity companies - congrats to port cos Protect AI and Snyk who are on this list
#great 🧵 and comments - lots of ideas
#🤯 and add Net $ Retention 📉 to this as well
#now that’s an Inception round - ex-OpenAI co-founder Ilya raises $1B for new AI startup (Reuters)
Exclusive: OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's new safety-focused AI startup SSI raises $1 billion
* Three-month-old SSI valued at $5 billion, sources say
* Funds will be used to acquire computing power, top talent
* Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital#holy 🦙!!! Meta shares Llama open source model numbers and it’s 📈
Llama models are approaching 350 million downloads to date (more than 10x the downloads compared to this time last year), and they were downloaded more than 20 million times in the last month alone, making Llama the leading open source model family.
Llama usage by token volume across our major cloud service provider partners has more than doubled in just three months from May through July 2024 when we released Llama 3.1.
Monthly usage (token volume) of Llama grew 10x from January to July 2024 for some of our largest cloud service providers.With some real-world customer case studies:
Customer care is an area of focus for AI-powered innovation at AT&T. Through fine-tuning Llama models, they’ve been able to cost effectively improve customer care by better understanding key trends, needs and opportunities to enhance the experience moving forward. Overall, Llama and GenAI have driven a nearly 33% improvement in search-related responses for AT&T customer care engagements while reducing costs and speeding up response times.
DoorDash uses Llama to streamline and accelerate daily tasks for its software engineers, such as leveraging its internal knowledge base to answer complex questions for the team and delivering actionable pull request reviews to improve its codebase.
Goldman Sachs AI platform, known as the GS AI Platform, allows Goldman engineers to use Llama models for various use cases in a safe and responsible way, including information extraction from documents.#so agree - from VP Product Honeycomb, formerly VP Product Vmware and Pivotal - here’s the conclusion
#Are IDPs (internal developer platforms) the future for platform eng teams? We have Backstage from Spotify, the open source platform, but others like Cortex and Port are building their own - Cortex just announced a $60M Series B led by Scale (Silicon Angle)
Productivity platform startup Cortex Applications Inc. announced today that it has raised $60 million in new funding to grow developer awareness around its internal developer platform and further its platform capabilities with enhanced workflows, engineering intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2019, Cortex offers an internal developer platform that is designed to help companies catalog, score and assign actions to improve service quality and velocity, with the goal of allowing developers to prioritize work that drives a business forward.
At its core, Cortex is designed to assist engineering teams in managing their software development processes and does so by acting as a centralized information hub. Cortex provides a single source of truth that allows teams to quickly access information about software ownership, operational status and resource allocation, eliminating time wasted searching for critical data. By centralizing things such as service catalogs to compliance metrics, Cortex helps organizations maintain better visibility and control over their development environment.#why not all SaaS - will AI accelerate this where folks only pay for what they want and not what every SaaS co makes them buy in a bundle?
#another AI acquihire 👀 where news dropped Friday evening of Labor Day weekend 🤣 - “Amazon hires Covariant founders, inks licensing deal with AI startup in latest ‘reverse acquihire’” (Geekwire) - FWIW, the company has raised over $220M of funding thus far
Amazon is hiring three of the founders from Covariant, a Bay Area startup that develops AI for advanced warehouse robotics systems.
As part of the arrangement, Amazon will receive a non-exclusive license to Covariant’s AI models. The news was announced late Friday, just before the long holiday weekend in the United States.
Covariant will continue to operate on its own, but the three co-founders — former OpenAI researchers Peter Chen, Pieter Abbeel, and Rocky Duan — and about a quarter of the company’s employees are expected to join Amazon#want to write better prompts?
Anthropic's recent AI Prompt Engineering deep dive is a must watch!
Here's Claude's summary of the mentioned prompting techniques and tips:
Rest here...Markets
#can AI reaccelerate growth and profitability? Yes it damn well can!
#Salesforce is back and acquiring companies - Salesforce acquires data management firm Own for $1.9B in cash - amazing exit even if valued at a down round from 2021 price of $3.35B (TechCrunch)
Own, launched in 2015 as OwnBackup (the company rebranded last October), provides a range of enterprise-focused data backup tools and services such as automated backup and disaster recovery.
The initial idea was to use software-as-a-service vendors’ open APIs, including Salesforce’s, to extract and back up data from a company’s applications. Beyond Salesforce apps, Own supported SaaS apps hosted on AWS and Microsoft.
Founded by Ariel Berkman, Daniel Gershuni and Eran Cohen, Own managed to raise $507.3 million from investors including Tiger Global, BlackRock, Insight Partners, Vertex Ventures and Salesforce’s own Salesforce Ventures prior to today’s buyout (per Crunchbase).
As of August 2021, Own was valued at $3.35 billion.#for those venture investors, remember this - slugging %
