Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #418
What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #418Who wins in AI? The Incumbent, the AI Native Startup, or...the Goldilocks Startup? The future is here: WORK BASED PRICING! No MORE SEATS - anatomy of the Kustomer relaunch🤯 so much happened this past week! We had new product announcements from GitHub Universe, cloud earnings from the Big 3 (demand outstripping supply, reacceleration and AI demand is strong), and something near and dear to my ❤️, the relaunch of Kustomer and its new agentic platform with 100% work-based pricing!!! Given that Kustomer is company that I’ve had the pleasure to work with twice, first from Inception to $1B+ exit to Meta, and post-Meta spinout, I wanted to share the anatomy of its relaunch. In particular, I want to use this as an example of what startups must do to break above the noise when they’re not the Incumbent 🦍 like Salesforce, the fast-moving AI native hot startup from YC, but that company which was a market leader but folks kind of forgot about. This is what I call the Goldilocks startup, not too big, not born today, but just right - usually 5+ years old, have a sizable customer base with a substantive data moat, and still has the tenacity and product vision to ship something beautiful fast - companies like Kustomer. These companies also face an interesting challenge - how aggressive should one be when relaunching - product, brand, and pricing? One wrong misstep can lead to a death spiral, especially with pricing. At the same time if you’re a Goldilocks startup and just choose one vector to relaunch or just ship incremental features, then you’re also dead in the long run. Let’s break it down! First, here’s the new brand - gets me 🔥 up! The new tagline also plays to Kustomer’s strengths:
Second, it created a mission - #EndBadService. The company gathered stories from frustrated users and posted it on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square and all over social. I forgot to mention that Kustomer also brought in new talent for the next phase, leaders like Doug Hanna as President and who previously helped scale Grafana to hundreds of millions of revenue as COO. On pricing, it commissioned the State of Pricing in Customer Service report which you can find here. Customer wise, it got several testimonials including this one from Vuori on the power of its agentic platform - 40% of all conversations are fully automated!!! Product wise, Kustomer made the hard decision 6 months ago to have one of its key founders Jeremy Suriel create a small team to reimagine the future of customer support which you now see unveiled below. Leveraging its strengths, the Goldilocks advantage with a sizable customer base and massive data moat, Jeremy and team created the new agent-based Kustomer offering its customers a team of AI agents each with specific roles coordinating work for you. Automations are no longer rules based but agent-based, and if that wasn’t enough, it added native voice agents. Take a look 🤯 All of this was unveiled in a livestream on LinkedIn where over 1,100 folks were watching at one point in time. Finally, the biggest unveil was in pricing. Kustomer just went for it - NO MORE SEAT BASED PRICING - WORK-BASED PRICING IS FINALLY HERE - no platform fees, just conversations! Let’s go! BTW, I can’t tell you how energizing it is when founders like Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel are on customer support startup #4 (if u include the spinout from Meta) with the energy and passion from startup #1! 👏🏼 to the entire Kustomer team and Gabe Larsen CMO for this incredible relaunch. And by the way, did I mention agents? And yes, Silicon Valley loves agents 🤣 but who else is going to join the movement on work-based pricing! And if you are a Goldilocks startup, you can’t just do the below 🤣 You have to go ALL-IN like Kustomer, reimagine what’s possible, rethink the product, leverage your data moat and go deeper than having bolt-on AI. You also can’t be afraid to completely disrupt your own business model and also that of others - the future of work-based pricing is here and super pumped 💪🏼 to watch Kustomer roll this out. Don’t be afraid to price the way the world will eventually move towards - work to be done! As always, 🙏🏼 and please share with friends and colleagues! Scaling Startups#So where’s boldstart investing in the AI Stack? Listen in to this 1 minute clip as it's been shifting over the last few years from super heavy enterprise infra to more balanced with app layer #Suhail who has a much wider following than myself 🤣 nails the app layer point home #Vision or data round? #great advice as budget season rolls around for 2025 planning Enterprise Tech#from GitHub universe this week comes GitHub Spark - just tell it what you want, i.e., “create a flash card app to help me learn Spanish” - build apps in natural language, nice abstraction layer over code but still requires lots of thinking, clickthrough to watch #speaking of AI code assistants, super cool 🧵 on what hackers built in 24 hours 👇🏼 - also cool to see some of the hackers use portfolio co CrewAI #2nd order effects - more code generated by AI, more code to review - check out Baz, AI-assisted code review (full disclosure - a boldstart investment) - from one of co-founders of BridgeCrew, sold to Palo Alto Networks #AWS - more demand than supply - click and listen #AWS AI business 📈 #Microsoft AI business - ouch that hurts - real demand from enterprises and not just VC 💰 🤣 with this growth #🤯 225x trailing ARR and $4.5B valuation for Sierra, Brett Taylor’s AI agent customer support startup (Reuters)
#Python rides rise of AI and hits #1 for first time over Javascript as most used language on GitHub #your first deepfake security market map is here from Norwest Venture Partners - more from blog with coverage from Axios Codebook
#GenAI usage in the workplace survey from Wharton and GBK - “Growing Up: Navigating Generative AI’s Early Years – AI Adoption Report” - up across the board! #Gartner IT spending forecast - AI, AI, AI as software poised to cross $1.2 Trillion in spend in 2025 growing >14% YoY - accelerating!!!
#Cost is as big an AI risk as security - Gartner Analyst (CIO Dive)
#More from Gartner’s IT CIO Symposium - agentic workflows!
Markets#great 🧵 on why Nvidia will keep going 📈 - inference compute and continuous learning… #General Catalyst closes an $8B venture fund 🤯 and this is in line with a tweet I sent out on X a couple weeks ago - will do buyouts and then use AI to change cost structure 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. |
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What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #417
Saturday, October 26, 2024
What happens when hundreds of thousands of agents with read/write access run amok in an enterprise - "like hornets fleeing a nest" according to Bill McDermott ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #415
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Old school enterprise sales + delivery needed to solve the last mile problem in the enterprise - yes, services needed! ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #416
Sunday, October 20, 2024
8 years of What's 🔥 🙏🏼 - more on Palantir's model from services (FDE) to product and now product + some services + why every startup will have to provide some bodies to deliver to the ente ͏ ͏
What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #414
Saturday, October 5, 2024
VCs giving 💰 back - dot.com vibes or AI vibes - will there be more or less $10B outcomes? ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #413
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Seeing, catching and riding big waves 🌊 - signs of early success + framework for building in net new markets vs. existing ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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