Whatโs ๐ฅ in Enterprise IT/VC #430
Clay's 7 year overnight success to scaling ARR ๐ and $1.25B valuations - some ๐ learnings from the journey
This post I shared a few weeks ago struck a nerve. The startup journey is now longer than ever as it takes >8 years to even get a Series D done.
Hereโs yet another reminder of this, and hopefully inspiration for some founders and investors who are getting a bit impatient. Also a huge shoutout to my boldstart ventures colleague Eliot Durbin!
Hereโs the chart - and yes if that growth continues which is what we see, then ๐
Alex Konrad from Forbes wrote an amazing profile on Kareem and Varun Anandโs journey to overnight succcess - I highly encourage you to read it.
Hereโs the initial vision slide from original deck (click through for the Clay story from boldstartโs POVโฆ
Many think startups are always ๐ but as I always like to remind folks ๐๐ผ
Keep fighting and youโll know you get to PMF when this happens ๐๐ผ
Bolt is also a 7 year overnight success story which just raised a new $105.5M round at a reported $700M valuation๐๐ผ
Remember, startups die when founders run out of energy and Clay and Bolt (Stackblitz) are two more examples of the long journey to an overnight success.
As always, ๐๐ผ for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
Scaling Startups
#how much do founders own after what round?
#Why startups always have a chance against incumbents - either they donโt see the future and donโt believe, or organizational politics + existing fiefdoms prevent them from moving fast. Vision + speed = opportunity.
#on product strategy and how TikTok became TikTok
Enterprise Tech
#Enjoyed the wide ranging discussion w/friend + serial founder Jesus Rodriguez on
newsletter for AI builders, researchers and labsWe covered lots of ground investing from Inception, securing AI, agentic worflows, second order effects, + first principles ๐ค building AI-related startups - click through ๐๐ผ to read the full interview
#out of stealth - Grepr - Next Generation Reliability Platform for an AI-Powered World ๐ฅ
and why we invested from Inception.
#Deepseek from China dominated the news this week
#must watch video - best 2 minutes on how China innovated and used only $5M of compute to train a model as good as GPT-4 and way, way cheaper - has huge implicationsโฆ
#now that we have OpenAI, easier and easier to get good enough
#all of this while Zuck is bragging that Meta is going to spend $60-65B on data centers ๐คฏ
#๐
ABSOLUTELY HUGE for a regulated bank to roll out company wide to all 10k employees!
"The AI assitant becomes really like talking to another GS employee"full rollout to 10k employees and built internally - 2025 is the year of AI rolling to production in the largest enterprises
#we have AI Engineering but what is the future of PM, what are skills for the AI PM? ๐งต and comments super interesting
Given a clear specification for what to build, AI is making the building itself much faster and cheaper. This will significantly increase demand for people who can come up with clear specs for valuable things to build.
#most popular tools from Lennyโs โwhatโs in your stackโ survey
# ๐คฏ demand for GPUs ๐
#where Datadog is going next in AI
#second order effects as we live in a world full of agentsโฆ
#super cool story as rookie Jayden Daniels has the Commanders in the NFC Championship game - VR simulation!
Markets
#another fantastic S-1 breakdown from Alex Clayton at Meritech ๐งต
#multiples creeping back๐ from
"startups die when founders run out of energy" -- so spot on, such an important part of our job to be supportive in those moments where energy is low, demoralized, etc. I think that is when a venture capitalist can really be a partner, regardless of investment or re-investment decisions.
On the scarcity idea. Bloomberg this morning
DeepSeek and Masa Son Have Lessons for Stargate https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-01-27/deepseek-and-masa-son-have-lessons-for-stargate