Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #347
I have to admit, that things were slow on my end for a couple of quarters in terms of making new investments. It’s not for lack of trying as our deal flow remained the same or higher the last 6 months versus the same period the last couple of years. That being said, as we primarily focus on enterprise infrastructure, developer tools, cybersecurity…there has simply been way too much 💰 chasing incremental ideas or features. I do worry about this in AI infra as well as the amount of 💰 pouring into companies in a fast evolving stack means many founders will get vaporized. That being said, the last month has been 🔥 for us. Not sure what’s in the water, but we are seeing so many experienced founders coming back with big and bold ideas to reinvent how things work from code to cloud. I’m not talking another plugin to an IDE but fundamental changes around how developers code, deploy, monitor and secure their applications. More on 🧵 below… If you believe in creative destruction, then it’s time. I remember when we led the initial round of Snyk at company formation in October of 2015, that the only relevant public developer infra co at the time was New Relic and as you see in our memo “Snyk is creating the New Relic for Security (market cap $1.9B)”. Now we have Hashicorp, Gitlab, Datadog and many other companies which are >10 years old with market caps 5-15x New Relic in 2015 and up for reinvention. We’re seeing a number of founders come back with a first principles approach similar to how Guy questioned current wisdom on how things are done today vs. how things can be more efficient tomorrow. As of the last few months, you have companies like Poolside (from Jason Warner, ex-CTO Github), System Initiative (reinventing DevOps from one of pioneers, Adam Jacob), Render which just raised $50M to go after AWS in a more focused manner (see below for pitch deck), and Warp which is reinventing the CLI 🤯! If a founder is 🤪 enough to do this, one 🔑 challenge of going after incumbents is the bar to product MVP is much higher than new category creation. First, as a founder, you need to have a unique insight with a technical underpinning that is the reason for disrupting the existing solutions. But, in order to get any one to swap out an existing tried and true tool they use but don’t love, you still have to get at least 80% feature parity to existing solutions in order for developers to take the leap of faith to try your 10x product. That takes time, effort, and money. From a go-to-market perspective, you also have to hone your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and organization to determine your key entry or insertion point. Do you start with one specific feature to 10x a developer’s time or do you start with something bigger off the bat? My strong suggestion is that whatever you do, make sure the user and buyer does not have to do a forklift upgrade of an existing product in order to try yours. In terms of opportunity, despite all of the dev tools that exist, a recent survey from Forrester (via The New Stack) shows there is still a gap around developer productivity and experience. To that end, we are stoked to have invested in 2 big swings as of late and have a few more insane founders ready to go. As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues. Scaling Startups
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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #346
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Do professional developers 👩🏼💻 use and trust AI (Github, StackOverflow surveys)? What does it mean for devtools startups?
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #345
Monday, June 12, 2023
Developers + buyers aka "Users and Choosers" - Hashicorp sandwich 🥪 model + practical advice selling dev tools in 2023
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #344
Saturday, June 3, 2023
The seed to A fundraising log jam and the importance of Big Mo
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #343
Saturday, May 27, 2023
How JPM Spends $15B on IT + collaborative doc template for super efficient board meetings
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #342
Saturday, May 20, 2023
Our first NEW AI investment...Kustomer 2.0, post-Meta spin out
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