What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #254

What does the day one launch of an $8.5 Billion developer first company look like and why developer experience matters?

Sep 11

For followers of this newsletter, you’re quite familiar with my journey with Snyk from day one in middle of 2015 and the fact that we’ve invested in every single round since then. The book is still being written but I learn so much every day as the company continues to grow and scale and I love sharing the lessons learned along the way. With that, a heartfelt and huge 👏🏼 to Guy Podjarny and Peter McKay and the entire, amazing Snyk team on this milestone.

Snyk @snyksec

Today we’re thrilled to announce our Series F funding at an $8.5B valuation! We’re excited to continue our journey of advancing and leading #DeveloperSecurity. Thank you to our investors and community for supporting our vision. ✨ 🔗: bit.ly/3C0xHIj

To be honest the best founders don’t set out to build $10B companies, they start with solving a nagging problem that they believe needs to be fixed and bring a unique TECHNICAL insight to solve that problem 10-100x better. For Guy and team it was to build a “developer friendly security” platform starting with OSS code and third party packages, to make it so easy for developers to not only test but also FIX and constantly monitor the packages they are using. Sounds simple but the developer experience was so 🔑 and something they still maniacally focus on today. And if you want the full playbook, I shared that in What’s 🔥 earlier this year.

Here is the original launch of Snyk at the Velocity Conference, 10/29/15 with co-founders Guy Podjarny and Assaf Hefetz (missing Danny Grander). It’s a must-see video because at the time many were not convince of the need for “developer friendly security” and the team knew that part of their mission was simply educating the market on the why. Building a movement takes time! I remember it took a couple years for this to truly take hold and hit the 100k a month download mark.

And bravely they did a live demo with code - can’t be dev first without the code!

Started with individual developers and eventually expanded to some of these early teams…

The coolest part of all of this is the product north 🌠 and message continue to be the same - “developer friendly security.”

Here’s Guy from his post last week reiterating the why and the how

Which gets us to the last and most important point — developers.

Digital transformation hinges on independent developers working continuously and rapidly. Businesses live or die depending on how well — and how quickly — their dev teams are able to build new functionality, get it to customers, and adapt to what they learn. Cloud removes barriers, giving developers more control over the underlying infrastructure, and accelerating the deployment of new updates.
Developers are also the only way we can scale security. From writing safe code to updating a vulnerable open source library to configuring infrastructure correctly, developers are the ones making the decisions that decide how secure the app is. If we equip them with the right tools, and give them the mandate and process to use them, they can build security in and stay ahead of the attackers. If we don’t — we’re never going to keep up.
And so, I would repeat the question — how can developer security be anything but an enormous market? How can we afford, as an industry and a society, to not invest in developer security and do all we can to accelerate its adoption?
At Snyk, we are committed to doing precisely that — get developers to embrace security, and build it into the fabric of software development

Believe it or not, the hardest part as you keep growing is to maintain focus and to be relentless on not forgetting the product north 🌠 that got you here in the first place. Snyk has continued to focus on that developer experience and now

is already used by millions of developers and more than 1,200 customers worldwide, including Asurion, Google, Intuit, MongoDB, New Relic, Revolut and Salesforce. Snyk customers and users collectively have run more than 300 million tests in the last 12 months and fixed more than 30 million vulnerabilities in the last 90 days.
Snyk creates a seamless developer experience for security that embeds application and security intelligence in a SaaS platform with products that directly address both the needs of legacy as well as modern technology stacks, including open source, containers and infrastructure as code.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues. Also, “never forget” 9/11 and please take a moment to reflect on that time…

Share What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC

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Enterprise Tech

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and 😲
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