What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #250

☁️💯, PLG + Dev First Rule, breaking down the Top 20

Aug 14

This week is all about the ☁️ 💯 list of the Top Private Companies from Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Forbes and you can read more about it here👇🏼

Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad

Excited to share the sixth annual #Cloud100 list is now live! This year's list features 29 newcomers and a top 10 valued at a combined $190 billion --in large part due to No. 1 Stripe and No. 2 Databricks. See the full list of 100 cloud standouts here:

The Cloud 100 2021A funding frenzy helped catapult 34 new companies onto the list and boost their combined market value to $514 billion, nearly double the total of a year ago. The No. 1 company on the list, America’s most valuable startup, accounts for nearly one-fifth of that sum.forbes.com

Salesforce Ventures took another slice at the data and some of these stats are 🤯 😲:

Private cloud company valuations have been on a similar trajectory: every company on the 2021 Cloud 100 list carries a valuation of at least $1 billion, with an average valuation of $5.2 billion. This represents 420% growth from 2016. The total value of the 2021 list is a staggering $518 billion — nearly double last year’s level.

Similar to last year, I spent 10 minutes and used my best guess to understand the primary business model and sales motion of The Top 20 Cloud 100 companies and as you can see below, dev first models (including OSS) account for 30% of the list (down from 40% last year)!

Winning the ❤️ and 🧠 of developers to win the enterprise continues to pay off for those who stick with it. In addition if you include Product Led Growth Companies + Dev First which are primarily bottoms up models, 70% of the Cloud 100 (vs. 60% last year) use a frictionless GTM which is also insane! The lone enterprise models in Samsara and Celonis account for 10% vs. 25% last year and are the bottom 2 of the Top 20.

Congrats again to portfolio cos Snyk and BigID for 2nd year in a row on Cloud 100.

Ed Sim @edsim

💪🏼Huge congrats to @Boldstartvc portfolio cos for 2nd year in a row on @cloud100 @snyksec #39 developer first security @bigidsecure #88 data management + PII discovery Great to be surrounded by amazing company!

Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad

Excited to share the sixth annual #Cloud100 list is now live! This year's list features 29 newcomers and a top 10 valued at a combined $190 billion --in large part due to No. 1 Stripe and No. 2 Databricks. See the full list of 100 cloud standouts here: https://t.co/X6J1E1AyXG

🙏🏼 as always for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

Share What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC

Scaling Startups

Treat all founders the same on the way down and the way up - life is long!
Ed Sim @edsim
Remember to play the long game. There is no better NPS score for VCs than repeat founders coming back to you first to socialize their idea. In fact, many of the best founders may have had a subpar exit + with their learnings ready to go big on the next one.
August 11th 2021
6 Retweets70 Likes
Anatomy of the best startups as told by Nora Jones, co-founder and CEO of Jeli (a portfolio co) 🧵 - passion, mission oriented founders and team, ❤️ what you do!
Nora Jones @nora_js
I genuinely get excited for work on Mondays. Startups are hard, no doubt. But, I am building a product for the thing I nerd out about the most (learning from incidents) AND I am getting to do it with a team of truly wonderful humans that also nerd out HARD about this same topic.
August 9th 2021
4 Retweets64 Likes
💯
Shane Parrish @ShaneAParrish
When you avoid failure, you also opt-out of greatness.
August 8th 2021
70 Retweets461 Likes
How to hire and structure a growth team for product led growth (OpenView/TechCrunch) - yes, PLG should sell itself but over time you can’t scale without a team and agree that growth teams should have an owner who wakes up every day only thinking about this vs. a collection of leaders from cross functional teams - trust me, I’ve seen it many different ways
The pluses and minuses of remote work…
Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct
Pretty good article on the future of work from Cloudflare, which details many benefits of remote work (better productivity, more participation, more diversity etc.), but also the problems (osmosis!). bit.ly/2UbUUHa Also the plan to tear down SF/London offices entirely.
August 11th 2021
23 Retweets118 Likes
On quotas and your first sales reps…
Ed Sim @edsim
Founders, don't be penny wise, pound foolish You want your first sales reps making lots of 💰💰💰 As you figure out PMF, higher commissions + lower quotas in early days r secret to success U want your startup to be the best place for best reps to make 💰 - quotas can 🔼 later
August 9th 2021
9 Retweets57 Likes

Enterprise Tech

What is the API lifecycle?
API Evangelist @apievangelist
Enabling the API Lifecycle with the Postman Platform - apievangelist.com/2021/08/05/ena…
August 5th 2021
9 Retweets50 Likes
GraphQL for the win 🧵
Kurt Kemple @theworstdev
Trying to get buy-in to adopt #GraphQL can be challenging when there are voices in the room providing inaccurate information about things like security, how GraphQL queries work, and more. Gather 'round the campfire folks, let's talk about common GraphQL misconceptions. 🧵
August 9th 2021
21 Retweets90 Likes
Kurt Kemple @theworstdev
"GraphQL is only for startups or small teams" - there are small to enterprise-size companies in every vertical (travel, hospitality, healthcare, commerce, etc.) using GraphQL successfully. As a matter of fact, GraphQL has made it into Windows 10 operating system and even space!
August 9th 2021
12 Likes
Great 🧵 on the decentralized web - still thinking through what, if any, enterprise ramifications there are…
Chris Dixon @cdixon
1/ Topic: Going from Web 2 to Web 3 - “Your take rate is my opportunity” 🧵
August 12th 2021
909 Retweets3,030 Likes
How do data mesh principles apply to the modern data stack 🧵 - lots of dbt and Snowflake?
Seth Rosen 🇺🇸 @sethrosen
Taking what I understand about data mesh and applying portions to the modern stack - Domain teams own their data end-to-end - Teams choose tools/process but standardize on dbt/warehouse - Teams produce marts and docs, treated as a product - cross mart joins are trivial, no APIs
August 11th 2021
8 Retweets91 Likes
What I ❤️ most about GitHub Codespaces is the philosophy and focus on developer experience:
These two changes, along with a handful of app and service level optimizations, took GitHub.com codespace creation time from 45 minutes to five minutes. But five minutes is still quite a distance from “instant-on.” Well-known studies have shown people can sustain roughly ten seconds of wait time before falling out of flow. So while we’d made tremendous strides, we still had a way to go.
Nat Friedman @natfriedman
Thanks to the hard work of the Codespaces team, GitHub engineers can now bootstrap their dev environments in the cloud in <10 seconds (35gb image 😱). Today we're making Codespaces available to more teams to move their own development to the cloud.
Cory Wilkerson @corywilkerson
I helped lead the https://t.co/RuDrvKnpnP migration from local macOS dev to Codespaces and went from skeptic to believer along the way; cloud-based development is the future. https://t.co/k02dANiAAq
August 11th 2021
106 Retweets706 Likes
Go LaunchDarkly and Edith Harbaugh and team - another dev first company hitting the $3B valuation - by the way it took 7 years to get here! (Forbes)
Feature flags are like on-and-off toggles used for deploying new or risky sections of code. In other words, it’s a way to dark launch. It gives DevOps teams control over the software development process by allowing developers to decide which users, as well as how many, can see or use a new feature. For instance, instead of introducing a new feature to everyone, it can be teased to a small percentage of users or users in one specific region, testing the waters while the main operation continues to run.
While feature flagging is a common practice in software development, feature management, which allows collaboration across different silos of a company, is a new tool. The next step for Harbaugh was to fill in the gaps by joining forces with her former classmate Kodumal and starting their own company.

Markets

Axios asks if startups especially at the mid-to-late stages are the new stock market?
While Softbank's first Vision Fund was all about "picking winners" in a sector and arming them with a lot of capital to fend off their rivals, the Japanese giant's second Vision Fund has a different strategy: backing as many worthy startups as possible, as early as possible.
Why it matters: Diversified portfolios have been a fixture of seed investing for a while, but with the entrance of investors like Tiger Global into the startup scene, it’s a strategy no longer confined to the earliest stages of venture.
By the numbers: Last quarter SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 invested in 47 startups ($14.2 billion including follow-on capital from VF 1), and has already backed another 27 since July 1.
"You'll see more diversification — [SoftBank's Vision Fund 2] is coming in at earlier stages. ... The idea is to be earlier in the cap table and be able to participate in the next round," one person familiar with the Vision Fund's thinking told Axios.
July🔥🦄 - 53 startups hit $1 billion valuations in July as 'hot unicorn summer' rages. Here are all of them.