What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #470

Can This Really Be the UI of One of the Hottest AI Enterprise Companies?

Nov 01, 2025

Move over Mag7, ServiceNow is claiming we now have the Super Eight.

By all measures ServiceNow should be included in the discussion, and what’s even more amazing is their UI has not changed in years - see below👇🏻.

That is the UI for one of the hottest public AI enterprise software companies, and here’s a look at the IT Service Management agent workflow builder.

Yes, not the prettiest, super complex, and yet, ServiceNow continues to crush earnings! It turns out that being the system of record, system of intelligence, or whatever you call it, a dumb database, is still a powerful moat, especially when tens of millions of dollars have been investing in application specific workflows. One other secret weapon for agentic sales has been its increasing use of FDEs. Yes, forward deployed engineers like Palantir and every other startup in AI because you guessed it, my mantra is coming - “the last mile in the enterprise is the longest.” Customers don’t have enough talent or expertise to just get it done and wants a product to deliver immediate time to value.

Finally, there is no AI or agentic in the enterprise at scale without security and guardrails - control tower growing super fast for ServiceNow.

BTW, I still think ServiceNow and many of the incumbents are absolutely ripe of disruption! First need the wedge to get started and then need to build from there, eat at 1 of dozens of products first. Game on!

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Scaling Startups

#congrats you made it to your B round…from Peter Walker Carta

#great post on biggest challenges of building startups post product market fit from ex-CEO VMware

That’s because once you’ve found product-market fit, the rush is on to staff up your org in order to keep growing. You’ll hire managers and employees from different companies: maybe a couple from Databricks, a handful from Google, a few from a startup—you get the drill. Each hire arrives with their own ideas about how to work with customers, each other, and management. If you don’t give these hires a framework for understanding how your company does business, your culture will start to look like the United Nations of Silicon Valley—making it easy to slip into tribalism that can undermine your foundation and threaten your execution.

#how are secondary shares of those ZIRP-era unicorns trading? (WSJ - paywall)

Nearly a third of companies that trade on the secondary trading platform Forge Global last held a venture funding round in 2021. The median going price for those companies is 62% below the price they commanded in their previous funding round, according to a report published last week by San Francisco-based Forge, which captured trading data through the third quarter. Startups that last raised funding in 2022 have also seen a steep 59% price drop.
While company shares on secondary markets typically trade at a discount, 2021 and 2022’s price cuts are steep, said Andrew Alden, vice president of quantitative research at Forge. For instance, companies that last raised money in 2024 have been trading at a median discount of 8%.

#How LPs think about future venture returns…

#pretty cool to see Superhuman live on as the “brand” for Grammarly and Coda with a $800M+ ARR and profitable business…I think we paid $50k for the domain

and this is awesome, all the thought that goes into making a brand live

Enterprise Tech

#Insight Partners AI Agent Security Market Map 👀 - lots of funded companies!!! I spy a number of our boldstart portfolio cos with Reco in 3 categories, Keycard, CrewAI, agentuity,

graphical user interface, text, application

#who has the top models? China overtakes US - Qwen rising!

#autonomous AI cybersecurity? (Axios - AI is about to supercharge cyberattacks)

What to watch: Autonomous AI-driven cybersecurity could soon help identify vulnerabilities that no human could ever find on their own, according to Jen Easterly, former head of the federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

It could also spot cyber intrusions before they happen, deploy countermeasures in milliseconds — and then learn from those actions to improve for next time.

“If we get that right, frankly we can ensure that the balance tips to the defenders,” Easterly says.

#theme of the day - the crazy part is that these are more announcements and convenient narratives to let people go versus true automation.

The autonomous enterpise is coming and yes, I’m LT bullish on automating rote tasks and for people to do more with less, but it’s still so early. So much room room for improvement - more accuracy, less hallucinations, improved security, easier to build, deploy and eval

Question is what does this all look like 1-3-5 years from now? Who becomes the senior leaders of tomorrow? What skills become most important? So much opportunity and also fear at the moment...

#speaking of still so early, notice the companies with the most stuck in pilot phase are the largest Tier 1 enterprises with revenue >$2B with Too Early to tell/Pilot for 25% of those firms which is 2.5x the other size companies - it’s still early in the enterprise, the bigger the co the harder to get stuff done, and perhaps, there is more security, etc needed…