What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #243

A Confluent of events with 🔥⚡and ❄️ shows why Data Space on 🔥

Jun 26

If you’re wondering why 💰 continues to pour into the data infrastructure space, this week is a wonderful reason why.

Confluent had a massive IPO raising over $800M and ending the day at over a $11B market cap, Snowflake shared an ambition plan to get to over $10B of revenue, and upstart Firebolt, a next gen Snowflake raised a $127M Series A.

If you’re interested in the Confluent story, there is no better place to start than founder Jay Kreps 🧵 on the journey to IPO.

Jay Kreps @jaykreps

1. A quick reflection on Confluent's IPO today and the journey so far (a thread!).

Going from OSS to ☁️ was huge but also consumed whole company…

Jay Kreps @jaykreps

11. The transition to Confluent Cloud has been was an all out effort for the entire company for years, but it was ultimately successful. We now have something that is just better, faster, and cheaper than trying to do it yourself.

Next up, read Snowflake’s recent Investor Day Deck as you have to ❤️ the ambition and confidence of ❄️ as it lays out a plan to get to $10B of product revenue when they are at $554M today. There are lots of areas of future investment which I’m sure will attract tons of VC 💰 in the coming year.

Ed Sim @edsim

😲 what do you do when you have NRR>160% + $554M of Revenue? You put together an analyst day showing the path to $10B in revenue! Pitch the data cloud + future of data collaboration + monetization! Let’s go @HarbrData Slides for @SnowflakeDB here: s26.q4cdn.com/463892824/file…

Two 🔑s to continued growth will be in continuing to land and expand and add more products. The next big thing at Snowflake is the concept of the data cloud which is all about data sharing as you can see from the graph below.

Area #2 for the future is a step towards one day, perhaps, entering the transactional data space, yes transactions and not just analytics. From a recent Deutsche Bank Research Report (June 11):

Hybrid transactional analytical processing
We think Snowflake could move into hybrid transactional analytical processing. Here, transactional processing and querying occurs in the same data store. This enables decision making can occur on the fly rather than as a separate activity post factum.
We think Snowflake could launch functionality to support processing for workloads that fall between a data warehouse and transactional database e.g. those that involve a significant analytical component, few INSERTs/ UPDATEs/SELECTs functions and do not require sub second response times. This opens up the ability for Snowflake to capture some OLTP spend longer-term, a market we size at $29B in 2020 growing to $71B by 2028

Given this context, it’s no surprise that Firebolt raised a massive $127M Series A round this past week as it has been pegged as a Snowflake killer with a focus on speed and a way better developer first experience.

Techmeme @Techmeme

Firebolt Analytics, which builds a cloud data warehouse designed for rapid analysis of large data sets, raises $127M Series B led by Dawn Capital and K5 Global (@Mike_Wheatley / SiliconANGLE) siliconangle.com/2021/06/24/fir…

Firebolt Analytics, which builds a cloud data warehouse designed for rapid analysis of large data sets, raises $127M Series B led by Dawn C…By Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE. View the full context on Techmeme.techmeme.com

Firebolt is taking on more established cloud players such as Snowflake Inc. as well as traditional on-premises data warehouses, which are a combination of hardware and software that unify data from multiple sources and execute queries on it.
Firebolt’s cloud data warehouse is designed for extremely rapid analysis of large data sets. The company reckons it can provide subsecond performance for queries carried out on terabytes or even petabytes of information, thanks to its ability to crunch data up to 182 times faster than alternative data warehouse services.
The company explains that its fast performance is derived from a number of internally developed technologies that power its cloud data warehouse. They include a customized, cost-based optimizer that tweaks Structured Query Language queries its users enter to improve their speed. It also uses a technique called sparse indexing to reduce the amount of unnecessary data that queries retrieve, thereby eliminating superfluous computations.
Another advantage of the Firebolt platform is that the company says it’s built specifically with developers in mind. It allows 100% programmatic control of the platform via application programming interfaces and software development kits, which makes it much easier to create rich data applications based on it, the company asserts.

Bonus from this week is OSS database company Couchbase’s recent S-1 filing and Neo4J’s $325M Series F funding for its graph database.

According to Gartner, "By 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations, up from 10% in 2021, facilitating rapid decision making across the enterprise.” Source: Gartner, Top Trends in Data and Analytics for 2021, Rita Sallam et al., 16 Feb 2021.

As I like to say there a few certainties in life, death, taxes, and the growth of data.

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

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Scaling Startups

Must read 🧵 on Notion playbook…patience required 😃
Ryan Kaufman📈 @growth_student
If you’re a SaaS founder, you need to study Notion The growth strategies used become a $2B startup and reach 1M users after a single seed round A thread👇
June 25th 2021
442 Retweets2,746 Likes
Speaking of PLG…
Ed Sim @edsim
There's no product-led-growth without the "product" - can't retrofit a friction-filled user experience with a PLG motion - product and GTM must go hand in hand in very beginning.
June 21st 2021
9 Retweets47 Likes
How to 🤔 about joining your next startup - great 🧵 from Andreas Klinger
It takes a village to raise a startup and all founders should consider using this👇🏼
Ed Sim @edsim
Surprised more founders don’t use this. 1 of greatest inventions 4 cap tables in long time. Best of both worlds: amazing angels invest w/out having to chase down 15+ signatures which can be 🤯. Startup should cover $8k + elect 1 angel to sign 4 all. angellist.com/ruv Roll Up Vehicles | AngelList VentureRoll Up Vehicles allow founders to efficiently raise capital from up-to 250 accredited investors with a single entry on the cap tableangellist.com
June 24th 2021
3 Retweets34 Likes
Designing for Flow - why Superhuman ( a portfolio co) users are so engaged
1. Make the next action obvious
Hesitation is the flow killer.
When somebody uses your product, their next action should always be obvious — and it should be obvious how to do it. Make functions visible, and limit alternative actions.
Example: When you archive an email in Superhuman, you immediately see the next one. There is minimal room for decision fatigue: you simply process one email at a time. This creates flow. When you archive an email in Gmail, you go back to the inbox. You now have to decide what to do next, and you have to do this every single time. This destroys flow.

Enterprise Tech

👇🏼🦄🦄🦄
Ed Sim @edsim
Pitch decks of startups before becoming 🦄 - oldies in OSS including @MySQL, PLG with @pendoio, and one of ours @Boldstartvc - @snyksec here's direct link: medium.com/boldstart-vent…
CB Insights @CBinsights
Nailing a #pitch is no easy task. That’s why we’ve gathered the early pitch decks of 25 #startups—from @Coinbase to @Uber to @Airbnb—before they became billion-dollar #unicorns. Check them out here. https://t.co/W40Paz93tu
June 20th 2021
2 Retweets5 Likes
PLG also on 🔥 as Figma raises $200M at over $10B valuation 🤯 - more on Figma’s story here in a prior newsletter. And if you’re wondering how Figma will spend the capital: “Field also said he is looking to acquire both strategic assets and talent.”
Dylan Field @zoink
Figma’s vision is to make design accessible to all and I truly believe we're just getting started in pursuit of that vision. In addition to doubling down on our core product, Figma will expand into the entire design process: brainstorm -> design -> production. (2/5)
June 24th 2021
4 Retweets96 Likes
Huge 👏🏼 to Atomic Jar, a new portfolio company…more here on why we invested
Ed Sim @edsim
🔥 up to announce our investment in the founding round of @AtomicJarInc which is creating a company behind the open source project @testcontainers to shift ⬅️ integration testing 🙏🏼 for @Boldstartvc to be partnered w/ @bsideup + @whichrich More here.. boldstart.vc/resources/shif…Shifting Integration Testing Left, Welcome AtomicJar to boldstart - boldstart venturesopen source, testcontainers, seed round, Atomic Jar, boldstart, venture capitalboldstart.vc
June 25th 2021
7 Retweets34 Likes
Lest we forget about the opportunity ahead for us in the next 10 years!
Aaron Levie @levie
Just over a decade ago, there were only tens of millions of users addressable by cloud-based enterprise software. Now there are billions. The opportunity today for modern, user-centric, collaborative software is mind-bogglingly large. Lots of change left to come.
June 25th 2021
50 Retweets387 Likes
Infrastructure as Code Automation is just getting started as Env0 (a portfolio co) raised $17M led by M12, Microsoft’s VC Arm…
Ohad Maislish @DevOpsOhad
Great day at @envZero on our journey to automate Infrastructure as Code!!! Today we announce our Series A of $17M led by @M12vc along with existing investors @Boldstartvc, @GroveVentures, and Crescendo. Env0 lands $17M Series A as infrastrucure as code control plane gains traction – TechCrunchAs companies deliver code ever faster, they need tooling to provide some semblance of control and governance over the cloud resources being used to deliver it. Env0, a startup that is helping companies do just that, announced a $17 million Series A today. M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, led the round…techcrunch.com
June 24th 2021
2 Retweets23 Likes
Check out “Software Snack Bites”, substack from my colleague Shomik Ghosh as he interviews Adam Gross, PLG for developer first cos extraordinaire and ex-CEO Heroku and VP Sales & Marketing at Salesforce + Dropbox - here’s a 💎 which resonates so well for me!
3 Modes of Selling: Oracle Model, Salesforce Model, End User Adopted. Oracle Model - relationship selling. Salesforce Model - teams are using the product and getting collaborative multi-player value. End User Adopted - individual users adopt the product and spread the product around the customer.
Successful Product Led Growth companies have all three of these models working together at scale. Need to move the customer along these 3 models. The timing behind when you engage in each motion is important. Need to make sure balancing each when serving individual users but also prioritizing features for the enterprise. More on this topic can be found in this excellent hour long talk by Adam here.
Can’t wait for this…
Mehdi Boudoukhane @mboudoukhane
Shipping the best drag & drop experience out there... Challenge accepted 🥰 It's live on @CycleProduct!
June 21st 2021
5 Retweets59 Likes

Markets

Not all SaaS stocks go to the 🌝 on their IPO - Sprinklr Raises $266M in Downsized US IPO - bottom line, growth matters - top line revenue was $387M vs $324M a year ago, significant scale but slow growth of 19.4%
Sprinklr, a customer experience software maker, raised $266 million after pricing its U.S. initial public offering below a marketed range and cutting the number of shares sold.
The company priced 16.6 million shares on Tuesday at $16 each after marketing 19 million shares for $18 to $20 apiece, according to a statement.
At $16 a share, Sprinklr has a market value of about $4 billion based on the outstanding shares listed in its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Four Silicon Valley VC firms notched billion-dollar IPO wins on Thursday (CNBC)