What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #244

Reminder of what matters in the early days of an OSS project

Jul 3

For investors and founders 🤔 about what matters in the early days of an Open Source Project, you must watch the video from Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes on how he helped build the community and scale it.

In summary, when optimizing early metrics:

It’s not about git🌠
Issues - show people care about your stuff and use it, also can understand quality of project
PRs (Pull Requests) queue is opposite - shows interest, do people actually care enough to contribute - strong sense for health of project in early days
Create momentum, look alive and respond super fast

Why? Because…

Super fast engagement and responsive matters, in your IRC, Slack, chat, issues…instant gratification on engagement so they don’t wander off…lots of other choices - you have 2 hours before they go to another project…Really good docs, responsiveness is Issues Queues, retain the people you attract.

Also Look Alive - Great hack - early days in IRC channel, started piping all of continuous integration results in IRC channel so there was something there -create activity, look alive - eventually over time turned it off as organic activity in channel from people took off. Momentum and velocity matters. Reminds me of a founder we backed who was able to not only be super responsive in the 2 hour window but also turn some of the devs filing issues to contributors - that is voodoo magic!

And later on Brendan shares what it’s like when you go from early to 🚀 - no longer need to attract users but now know who they are. How to sustain the 🏒.

Release metrics - weekly, solid product roadmap
Community health so vital and hard to measure - lots of people with competing interests
Design for scale and formalize everything
Governance and decision making

These are many of the characteristics we found in the Testcontainers.org OSS project and why we were 🔥 up to partner with Sergei Egorov and Richard North, who started a company, Atomic Jar, to support the project they helped create and maintain.

AtomicJar @AtomicJarInc

We're happy to announce our Seed funding round led by @Boldstartvc - one of the best early-stage VCs who actually understand what we're doing and believe in @testcontainers and Shift-left integration testing 🥰 As well as @tribecap, @chalfs, @snyksec's @guypod & @PeterCMcKay, 1/

Latest News from Business Wire @NewsFromBW

AtomicJar Launches with $4M Seed Funding Round Led by boldstart ventures https://t.co/ZWqhUfzg9u https://t.co/sD2P6QLxLT

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

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Bonus:

Ed Sim @edsim

So this is finally released...

boldstart venturesDay one partner for developer first and SaaS founders.boldstart.vc

Scaling Startups

As much as folks want to believe that venture investing will be data driven and founders will opt for the highest valuations, best deal terms, and quickest to close, there will still always be a world where deep relationships matter.
Michael Grinich, founder of WorkOS, shared a 🧵 responding to a recent Information story on the legendary Benchmark Capital and how it was not selected as the lead investor.
Michael Grinich @grinich
Good morning Twitter! Just wanted to quickly give a bit more context to something written about WorkOS and Benchmark this morning in The Information. (short thread 👇)
June 28th 2021
2 Retweets40 Likes
Michael Grinich @grinich
In the case of WorkOS, Lachy’s experience with Stripe makes him a perfect fit for the API-first business we are building. On top of this, I had a close friendship with Lachy well before the round, and dozens of mutual friends including several he had previously invested in.
June 28th 2021
7 Likes
Michael Grinich @grinich
Are terms of a deal important when raising money? Of course. But the most important factor to me when fundraising is always the partner I will work with. It’s all about relationship, experience, and fit. Deal terms are secondary.
June 28th 2021
1 Retweet10 Likes
When getting started on day one, remember hands on keyboard is what matters - product, product, product
Ed Sim @edsim
Founders, who is doing the work when your newco has 4 chiefs...CEO, COO, CPO, CTO So much better when 3-4 engineers out of gate ready to build...if no product, no company...
July 1st 2021
1 Retweet34 Likes
Don’t be cute when it comes to describing what your company does
Patrick Smith @psmith
Me, a journalist: I wonder what this company does. Company "who we are" page: "Our story begins with you. We are about values. Integrity. We believe in success. And success through belief." etc etc etc etc I'm really looking for, eg, "we sell insurance."
June 29th 2021
225 Retweets3,349 Likes
Future of marketing - great 🧵 and comments - hard to rise above noise, people don’t want to feel like a piece of data, community important, authenticity, storytelling…
Ashley Mayer @ashleymayer
I'm in a marketing adjacent function so by no means an expert, but it feels like, in the startup world, the past decade's focus has been the science of marketing (data, optimization), to the point that it's now less of an advantage. Perhaps the next decade is all about the art.
June 27th 2021
120 Retweets1,211 Likes
It’s not where you start but where you finish…
Ed Sim @edsim
Persistence is starting out number 2 in your market and after five years of trying, you finally replace the number 1's marquee customer and several more of their top 10 It sucks to start a race behind, but remain focused on your key differentiators and play the long game!
June 29th 2021
2 Retweets32 Likes
How does hybrid work work? Dustin from Asana shares his thoughts
Dustin Moskovitz @moskov
Many believe that since lockdown demonstrated remote work can be productive, it follows that companies should have flexible hybrid cultures going forward. But remote-only is not hybrid, and almost none have lived hybrid. I predict few companies will be "fully flexible" by 2023.
June 26th 2021
241 Retweets1,563 Likes
And a 🧵 on how Okta will handle hybrid with an emphasis on team collaboration when in office and focus on productivity when remote
Todd McKinnon @toddmckinnon
This month @okta began our phased re-entry plan for all North American offices and a few others across the globe. 🎉 Our biggest paradigm shift? The office of the future isn’t centered only on productivity. And that’s okay!! Here’s what we’re learning ⬇️
June 30th 2021
10 Retweets119 Likes

Enterprise Tech

Bessemer’s Data Infrastructure Roadmap is out:
The modern cloud data stack is undergoing massive construction and the future of software will be defined by the accessibility and use of data.
But one category missing is this great list of companies who are building products to compute on encrypted data - nice shoutout to @CapePrivacy (a portfolio co)
There are a long list of companies working in this space, and it is growing every week. We list just some of the companies here; giving some context as to the technology they use (MPC and FHE) and the where possible the vertical markets or horizontal applications which they focus. Some of the bigger companies have efforts in multiple domains. There are many companies we have missed below, if you know one please let us know.
Speaking of data - dbt is the kubernetes of data - from humble beginnings, how an open source player 5 years later now worth $1.5B
dbt Labs @dbt_labs
Big announcement today: Fishtown Analytics is now dbt Labs! Read about our new name and $150m Series C. Why we raised a Series CFishtown Analytics– now dbt Labs– was founded to bring analytics engineering to everyone. $150m in new funding will fuel the next phase of that journey.blog.getdbt.com
June 30th 2021
19 Retweets53 Likes
When Drew and I had initially released dbt we spun up a Slack channel, and that tiny little group of humans ended up being the only (work-related) social interaction I had in those early days. The first few dozen of us just chatted in #general, no threads, zero moderation. Chaos!
(NB: If you go back in the Slack history far enough you can still see it all. I probably used to swear too much 😬)
Fast forward ~5 years and this community:
Has co-invented the practice of analytics engineering
Has supported the professional development of over 15,000 humans
Includes diverse members from around the globe who work for companies of all sizes
Even though dbt is today far more mature than it was, it still embodies the same principles: analytics as software, authored by anyone who knows SQL. The community’s principles have stayed just as consistent: friendliness, inclusiveness, and a deep commitment to paying it forward.
And super important on why raise again so quickly - independence from the big 3 cloud providers….
Here’s something we know: dbt drives a tremendous amount of usage across several of the major cloud data platforms. That makes dbt and its community very strategic for these platforms. There are currently ~5,500 companies using dbt and this metric is tracking towards ~10,000 by the end of the year. This usage drives, in our estimates, billions of dollars of spend to the major platforms.
The constant battle for developer first companies - users and find budget or budget and find users…read 🧵
Ed Sim @edsim
Central friction in developer first GTM: Orgs want command + control, policy, governance Devs want freedom How to balance the 2? Budget is from org Need dev ❤️ for renewal If go top down, how do u make sure devs buy into it? If go bottoms up, how do u migrate to find 💰
July 1st 2021
2 Retweets25 Likes
Startups 🏃🏼‍♀️faster than large cos and 👇🏼 is why the cybersecurity market will continue to grow super fast…
Kelly Shortridge @swagitda_
These nation-state attackers used Kubernetes for distributed, scalable brute forcing. My ongoing hot take is relevant here: attackers have more in common with devs and operators than defenders / traditional infosec pros. Think in systems or stay stuck in Plato’s cave ✨💁
Katie Nickels @likethecoins
New report from NSA, CISA, FBI, and NCSC on a GRU brute force campaign https://t.co/adTyhN3vV8 https://t.co/XKlB6Ug4kg
July 1st 2021
90 Retweets328 Likes
and it will only get worse “Hackers are investing in each other’s operations—just like VCs invest in startups”
What AWS Tells Us About Heroku 2.0 - Another beauty from RedMonk, this time Stephen O’Grady, “does developer experience trump breadth of offerings and how AWS has been closing the gap”
And yet, for all that it got right, the Heroku self-contained developer experience never took over the world. The AWS DIY-from-primitives model did. Even granting that AWS had an eleven month headstart chronologically, the story of why IaaS triumphed over PaaS is long, complicated and will vary depending on who’s telling it. And, it must be said, is far from complete.
In the aggregate at RedMonk, we’ve seen more discussion of Heroku over the last year or two than the previous decade combined. There are many reasons for this, but most come down to the basics of the Developer Experience Gap: the more pieces that have to be wired together, the more difficult an environment is to stand up, operate and debug. Primitives were the preferred approach when there were fewer of them. In a world where there are hundreds if not thousands of services to pick from, this experience begins to break down and abstractions begin to look increasingly attractive.
Yes, GraphQL is real…🎩 @shomikghosh
Ilya Grigorik @igrigorik
Shopify's GraphQL API is serving 1M+ QPM -- yep, that's 17K requests per *second*.
加藤英也(Hideya Kato) | コマースアーキテクト(Shopify) @jazzyslide
GraphQLについて #Shopify #ShopifyUnite https://t.co/RgqzVLM5l9
June 29th 2021
46 Retweets336 Likes
😲 Talkdesk could be joining private $10B 🦄 club (The Information)
The filing shows the company plans to raise up to $210 million at a share Series D price that is 3.2 times higher than its Series C round. Talkdesk said in July it was valued at more than $3 billion from the Series C round. The proposed valuation is more than 50 times Talkdesk’s annual recurring revenue (the revenue it expects to generate in the next 12 months), according to a person with direct knowledge of its business.

Markets

Reminder that growth at over 100% YoY and Net $ Retention over 130% for best in class public software cos
Jamin Ball @jaminball
Net retention is one of my favorite SaaS metrics. As Q1 earnigns season comes to a close, we can look back at all the cloud companies to report the metric. Anything >130% is top decile
June 29th 2021
39 Retweets244 Likes
Cybersecurity is on🔥 - SentinelOne soars in IPO to a market cap of over $10B and ends day as largest cybersecurity IPO in history (CNBC)
Shares of cybersecurity company SentinelOne closed up more than 20% in its market debut Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange, going public under the ticket symbol “S.” Shares closed at $42.50, giving the company a market capitalization of more than $10 billion.
SentinelOne priced 35 million shares at $35 apiece on Tuesday, above its initial $31 to $32 target range. The company raised $1.2 billion at an implied valuation of $8.9 billion, surpassing CrowdStrike’s $6.7 billion market debut in 2019, and a previous era’s cyber defense IPO big winner, McAfee, to become the highest-valued cybersecurity IPO in history, according to data from CB Insights.