Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #305
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #305Forget everything you learned the last 2 years, what's ahead for venture + startups in the fall
I can’t believe it’s already the last weekend of summer. It went by way too fast and in other ways too slow. Having been in the industry for over 26 years, what this really reflects is a return to normalcy. Charles Hudson from Precursor captured it succinctly. For most of my venture career, July and August were dead zones for fundraising - it was a known thing in the industry. Zoom + COVID broke that pattern for two years - in 22 it snapped back to status quo and I get why founders who only knew the last 2 years were caught off guard. While I don’t fully subscribe to the dead zone idea as deals have always gotten done over the summer and over holidays, what I can say is that the FOMO and speed at which investments were made in the last two years will not be replicated for quite some time. As we head into the Fall, this reminds me of the advice I shared with my team earlier this month at our partner offsite, “Forget everything you learned the last two years.” So if that’s the case, what is the Fall going to look like?
And for those ready to start a new company, forget about all of the myths in Silicon Valley around the need to be “first to market” and the idea that many of the best companies were always 🚀 from day one. So many 💎 in this 🧵 from Mitchell, co-founder of Hashicorp one of the leading infrastructure automation cos which just had a killer Q2 with over $113.9M of revenue. 1/4 I've seen some internet commentary claim Terraform was "first to market" (and a key reason for its popularity). This is not true... even if you omit cloud vendors. Terraform competed quite a bit early on with Docker Machine, Chef Metal, Puppet AWS, and others. Startups are F8%&ing hard, don’t be afraid of competition 2/4 Terraform's rise may feel obvious now, but in those early 12 to 18 months, it did not feel that way. I spoke at many conferences alongside representatives from competitors, and it was not at all clear Terraform would "win." I had to do a lot of convincing those early months. Focus on product, product, product 3/4 From a product perspective, I pushed key differentiating features to try to convince people: terraform "plans", automatic ordering, multi-provider workflows, features like "create before destroy", etc. These were mostly novel at the time (circa 2014). Developer and infra startups take a LONG time to bake and mature to build the community and groundswell 4/4 Terraform growth took awhile. We even had a meeting at one point in 2015 about shutting the project down. So, we weren't first to market, and our success was not inevitable. It felt like a battle and it was tough! Video history we did for the 1.0 here: And as I’ve long witnessed… Infrastructure startups take time to bake and mature - building a bottom up developer community takes time, iterating on product takes time, expanding from one dev to team to enterprise takes time - patience is a lost virtue, one that I'll hope we rediscover during this time As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with friends and colleagues! Let’s get ready to crank it up this Fall! Scaling Startups
Enterprise Tech
Markets
If you liked this post from What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC, why not share it? |
Older messages
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #304
Saturday, August 27, 2022
State of cybersecurity market through 👀 of Palo Alto Networks - ☁️ huge + developers 🔑
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #303
Monday, August 22, 2022
Sustaining momentum once you launch and "hello world"
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #302
Saturday, August 13, 2022
☁️💯, PLG + Dev First dominate, breaking down the Top 20 for 2022
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #301
Saturday, August 6, 2022
On hiring pre-product market fit and focusing on the job to be done now
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #300
Saturday, July 30, 2022
What recession? If u can't sell dev tools now, it's not the market as 💰 is there
You Might Also Like
🚀 Virgin To Face Delisting
Friday, April 19, 2024
Plus Q1 earnings kick off, SpaceX exec launches a new VC firm, Tether invests $30M in $SATL and more! The latest space investing news and updates. View this email in your browser The Space Scoop Week
10words: Top picks from this week
Friday, April 19, 2024
Today's projects: Spheria • Narration Box • OnTheFly • AnyCheese • Dumbbe • HASTY • lockrScan • IdeaAize • Mailmo • ProSolvio • GigHunterBot • WeekToDo 10words Discover new apps and startups in 10
[Replay] Building a million dollar beauty brand
Friday, April 19, 2024
Free summit replay extended Hey - great news! We've extended the summit replay for 24 more hours. Watch it here free >> And, I want to highlight one of the inspiring founders, Alicia Scott.
Put it on paper
Friday, April 19, 2024
In case you missed it, here is the full recording of the 668 person workshop I co-hosted yesterday "how to build products of the future". It's completely free to watch here. Put it on
7 prompts for your B2B company’s next LinkedIn post
Friday, April 19, 2024
Plus, tips, news & Buffer updates for your social media journey Image Hey folks 👋🏾 It's been an interesting week in social, with the launch of TikTok Notes (their take on a photo + text
Challenges of Offering an API — The Bootstrapped Founder 313
Friday, April 19, 2024
When you sell access to an API, what should you keep in mind? How would you protect your data but still make it easy to use?
12 hours to go! 🐣
Friday, April 19, 2024
Catch the super early bird rates before they expire! View this email in your browser. 1200 x 380 (Desktop & Tablet) (8) Hey there, There are just 12 hours to go before Summit Summit ticket prices
Why I Switched My Blog to Ghost (and Why You Might Love It Too)
Friday, April 19, 2024
Tired of slow, clunky blogging platforms? I was too! Find out how Ghost changed my blogging life (and my company!), and why it might be the upgrade you need. Salehin Khan Salehin Khan Why I Switched My
Latvia's startup financing gets creative
Friday, April 19, 2024
We visit Riga to explore Latvia's tech scene, layoffs at Stability AI and why climate tech's latest phase will be built on debt. View in browser Notion flagship logo final Good morning there,
How Meta is paving the way for synthetic social networks
Friday, April 19, 2024
Five ways of thinking about Llama 3, its latest large language model Platformer Platformer How Meta is paving the way for synthetic social networks By Casey Newton • 18 Apr 2024 View in browser View in