Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #375
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #375The come to Jesus moment for founders, investors, and boards - either you're early and lean, growing efficiently + lean with cash in bank or access to cash, or you need to find a home or die...Happy New Year! I may sound like a broken record this year but want to reiterate to founders building in 2024, forget everything you used to know during the ZIRP era, and put your 🪖 on for a fiery 2024. We are back to basics, building startups the way they were supposed to be built, lean, mean, and capital efficient! Either you are early, growing efficiently with cash in the bank or access to capital, or need to find a home or die - that’s it. To that end, here’s a cautionary tale for you. There has been lots of discussion (see Hacker News) this week around Airplane being bought by Airtable and the product being officially sunset on March 1. Many are shocked because Airplane was a hot Silicon Valley startup having just announced a $32M Series B round 16 months ago led by Thrive Capital and Benchmark Capital with a product to go after Retool. So what happened? While no one knows for sure, Daniel Chesley highlighted some comments from Hacker News and if true, 61 employees with <$1M ARR seems out of whack. On the flip side, others believe the numbers were wrong and Airplane was still flush with cash. Here’s OnlyCFO chiming in:
Regardless, this is where we are today: Jamin Ball eloquently chimed in as well: My hope is that every board of founders and investors can have that “intellectually honest” conversation sooner rather than later. Regardless of what story is true, this is not a great ending for a company that raised $40M. Companies die because they run out of cash and IMO can also die because they are suffocated with cash. As we get more of these lessons in the next couple of months, I do believe that founders and investors are finally getting the religion and this class of startups in 2024 will be 🔥. Case in point. Here’s friend Jeff Yoshimura’s recent post on his transition from Operator to Founder. He was formerly CMO Snyk and prior to that Elastic, and IMO nails it when it comes to making that transition from scale operator to founder. I encourage you to read here: As you know, this aligns 💯 with my Google Doc I’ve been sharing on “Back to First Principles Building Startups from Inception” - see Outline below and you can get the latest version here. Let’s brace for an interesting 2024 and the year of creative destruction with all of the good and bad is upon us! As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues. Scaling Startups
Enterprise Tech
Markets
What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. |
Older messages
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #374
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Predictions for 2024 and scoring 2023
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #373
Saturday, December 23, 2023
Thoughts on M&A in light of Adobe Figma, what's the right number of founders to start a company, + Top 5 What's 🔥 Posts in 2023
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #372
Saturday, December 16, 2023
On pattern recognition in venture and startups
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #371
Saturday, December 9, 2023
Back to First Principles Building Startups from Inception, hands on keyboard ⌨️ - get the Google Doc now
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #370
Saturday, December 2, 2023
The End of an era - the extinction of "Hypergrowth" public enterprise software cos, >40% NTM Revenue 📈 - Guggenheim Partners
You Might Also Like
Investor relations going sour?
Monday, April 29, 2024
We dive into the results of our latest survey, IBM goes to court and unexpected UK royalty in Dubai. View in browser ITA We make future final Good morning there, Wow, founders are going through a
📈 What’s getting funded now
Sunday, April 28, 2024
The Lightcone crew dives into the trends they're seeing from the latest YC batch. | This Week at YC April 28th, 2024 What a week! The deadline* for Summer 2024 applications was on Monday, which
Mailbob, Athina AI, Style AI, and Formula Wizard
Sunday, April 28, 2024
WebsiteGPT to make fully customizable websites in seconds BetaList BetaList Daily Mailbob Exclusive Perk publish and manage your email newsletter with ease Athina AI Exclusive Perk Monitor and Evaluate
Initiator Creator - Issue 140
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Initiator Creator - Issue #140 - ( Read in browser ) By Saurabh Y. // 28 April 2024 Presented by DesignThingy This Week's Notes: Directionless bull All our efforts get wasted when we get stuck
Knowing is not enough
Sunday, April 28, 2024
you must apply , The Start Your Ecommerce Business 2024 was a huge success thanks in part to you. We hope you left feeling inspired and equipped with actionable strategies from our expert speakers. But
#177 | Request for Startups, Real Estate Tech Themes, & more
Sunday, April 28, 2024
April 22nd–28th | Insights from Crossbeam, Altimeter, Ansa, Scale VC, and others ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
The $4M SaaS nobody knows about
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Starter Story's Sunday Breakfast #90 ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer…
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Kayvon was the longest-serving head of product at Twitter and was GM of Twitter's consumer division until the platform was acquired by Elon Musk. He originally joined Twitter in 2015 through the
Parea AI, Notion to Calendar, and VisualInvoicer
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Simplest way to create invoices BetaList BetaList Daily Parea AI Exclusive Perk Developer tools for evaluating, testing and monitoring LLM-powered apps. Notion to Calendar Put your Notion Databases in
From 0 experience to 160 orders for her business
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Read foundr+ student wins , Here at Foundr, we can't get enough of our student wins, both big and small. (These student wins are just the tip of the iceberg when you join foundr+.) Whether it was