What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #303

Sustaining momentum once you launch and "hello world"

Aug 20

While there is a constant stream of news on TechCrunch and Twitter about new funding rounds, including this pre-seed deal from a16z this past week, what happens

Greg Caplan 🚶🏻‍♂️ @gdcaplan

The recession is now technically over. Adam Neumann raised $1bn pre-seed round from @a16z to ‘revolutionize real estate’

to companies post funding?

Seeing this tweet from liveblocks, a boldstart portfolio co, this past week got me 🤔 about the often missed importance of sustaining momentum once you “hello world.”

Liveblocks @liveblocks

📝 Introducing our open-source collaborative block text editor! Interested in building a multiplayer note-based app? We've built the foundations to make your project a reality. Add multiple types of blocks, and see them shared in real-time ✨ 🔗 liveblocks.io/examples/block… Info 👇

While I won’t debate the merits of when and how to announce your funding and product launch, let me show you a few examples of what liveblocks has shipped from a content and product perspective since its funding announcement. IMO, the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of your launch is not the day of launch but every day after! If you don’t have a plan and a content calendar of original content and product releases planned for after you launch, then you’re likely not ready to announce.

What’s clear is that liveblocks knows its audience and goal for each and every post - get more developers to understand how and why to use the product. Besides being consistent, liveblocks also keeps setting a new level for what interactive tutorials should look like for developers. You can see that evolution from the initial announcement of storage block in March to the latest sample gallery included below.

Here’s the initial funding announcement from March 2022 🧵.

Liveblocks @liveblocks

It's a big day for us: 1. We’ve raised a $5M seed round from Boldstart, Atlassian, Seedcamp, and more. 2. Storage block is now available for everyone. 🚀 liveblocks.io/blog/liveblock…

Liveblocks raises $5M in seed funding from Boldstart, Atlassian, Seedcamp and more - Liveblocks blogToday, a year into our journey, I’m thrilled to announce that we have raised a $5M seed round from Boldstart, our lead investor, as well as Atlassian, Kima Ventures, Seedcamp and more.liveblocks.io

In June, it followed up with a detailed post for engineers focused on the age old problem of undo/redo and how to realize and sync offline and online. It also generated some nice buzz on hacker news.

All of this resulted in accelerating growth as the company passed the 2 million connections mark in June. Of note, it took 5 months to get to the first 1 million and only 2 months for the second.

In July, Chris, who heads up devrel, wrote a tutorial on how to animate multiplayer cursors.

Finally, this past week, liveblocks launched Examples Week where it released a new example each day and showcased an interactive gallery so devs could check out the code and play with live demos.

Marc Bouchenoire @marcbouchenoire

Yesterday we released our new examples gallery and its multiplayer header background. 🏁 Give it a try → liveblocks.io/examples

Not only did liveblocks launch the ability for devs to build their own Notion like clone (see above) but it also showcased an interactive spreadsheet on Friday.

Net net, launching is great, but unless you plan ahead with a full 📆 of content and releases over time, your launch may be wasted.

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

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Scaling Startups

Setting stage for product walkthroughs vs. feature by feature - great advice 🧵
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Another day, another pre-seed founder telling me they are taking a $50k check from a $500m series A fund because the fund has been ‘soooo helpful’ already. Sigh.
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Notice, Nat, former CEO of Github, led the round. Seeing more and more angels actually lead rounds at seed and even A - interesting trend to 👀
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The leap from PLG and SMEs to large scale enterprise is a huge opportunity but also fraught with peril - read more on why AirTable views itself as more competitive with ServiceNow and Salesforce than a Monday.com or Asana. Will need to leverage bottoms up motion with a top down one as well, provide all of the security, SSO…to be enterprise ready (see guide here). Easy to say but will require a mindshift and infusion of enterprise DNA.
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Markets

In case you are wondering what is happening in the market, this Goldman Sachs research blurb hits all of the highlights
The S&P 500 index has catapulted 17% in eight weeks to reach our year-end target of 4300 as investors have embraced the view that the Fed will pivot and the economy will achieve a soft landing. Performance at the index level and within the market resemble both bear market rallies and the end of Fed hiking cycles, but the 2000 experience illustrates the risk that the market could decline even after hiking stops if the US economy enters a recession. By contrast, if inflation surprises to the upside and requires the Fed to tighten more aggressively than our economists forecast, we would expect equity valuations to compress. Given this macro backdrop, upside seems limited while downside risks loom.