As you know, I like reading the tea leaves and learning from investor day presentations and earnings transcripts from the leading enterprise software companies to get a glimpse of the future. Along those lines, one of the best storytellers in the business is Salesforce and their Investor Day 9 days ago did not disappoint.

In fact, investors ate this up as the stock shot up 8% the day after even though they only raised 2022 revenue guidance by 1%. Stories matter! So what is the big story from Salesforce?

The whole theme of the presentation is the New World. If you have time, take a look at the whole deck as it truly lays out the scale of opportunity on the IT spending side for all enterprise software companies. Also I encourage you to watch the Q&A with Bret Taylor, President & COO, who goes deeper and shares what’s ahead for the future.

We’re living in a New World and the opportunity is MASSIVE!

HOLY TAM 🤯

Product Matters!

We’re still innovating at a ridiculous pace!

Insanely fast growth for a company of this size…

Finally, I would argue that Salesforce has done this better than any public company out there.

Ed Sim @edsim

Absolutely best in class M&A @salesforce! With the influx of 💰💰💰 for all of these private 🦄, the ones who start early & build a M&A playbook will be well set up to dominate in the future. Challenge is trying to find the founders before they are offered VC money!

September 26th 2021

56 Retweets373 Likes

Storytelling matters!

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

Scaling Startups

1. Founders…keep grinding, you see the future better than investors

   John Henry @JohnHenryStyle

   LOOP Seed vs Series A stats: Seed - 77 VCs - 134 meetings - 100% outbound - 4 mo to close Series A - 5 VCs - 13 meetings - 100% inbound - 30 days to close Anyone facing rejection right now: Keep executing. They all become believers in time. 🙏🏾

   September 30th 2021

   86 Retweets739 Likes

2. Pure gold from Scott on what best product leaders do 🧵

   scott belsky @scottbelsky

   You know that iconic scene, at the end of The Matrix when Neo suddenly “gets it” and picks bullets out of thin air as if they are cute and curious little things? Been thinking: what’s the equivalent of “seeing the matrix” for product leaders? 10+ Realizations that come to mind:

   

   September 24th 2021

   174 Retweets1,232 Likes

3. 💯

   ɹǝʞɹɐd ʍǝɹpuɐ @andrewparker

   "But what if Google does this?" Four examples where Google was already in market with a free alternative, and a startup's better strategy & execution won: GitHub vs Google Code Amplitude vs Google Analytics WhatsApp vs Google's 7 diff attempts Zoom vs Google Hangouts

   September 29th 2021

   218 Retweets1,377 Likes

Enterprise Tech

1. 💪🏼 onboarding developers is still a huge problem at many companies and I’m excited for Codesee to come out of stealth to help developers get up to a speed a bit faster with maps…try it out at OSS Port which is helping open source maintainers help contributors get more productive, faster

   Ed Sim @edsim

   👏🏼 @Codeseeio out of stealth! Huge congrats @ShaneaLeven @thejosh! Helps developers visualize codebases + ship better code, faster! Excited to have @Boldstartvc co-lead this with @uncorkcap @Bandrew + including @PrecursorVC @DCVC @SalesforceVC techcrunch.com/2021/09/30/cod…CodeSee launches OSS Port open source project to help developers visualize code base – TechCrunchThe larger a coding project gets, and the more people become involved, the harder it becomes to get a big picture view of how the entire project fits together, and this is especially true for distributed teams. Today, CodeSee, an early-stage startup that wants to help development teams understand th…techcrunch.com

   September 30th 2021

   10 Retweets40 Likes

2. It’s out - Matt Turck’s (FirstMark) MAD landscape (ML, AI, Data) - way too many companies here!

   Matt Turck @mattturck

   Here it is! 🔥 After 100’s of hours of research and writing, excited to release the 2021 ***MAD*** landscape (Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence and Data) - with my colleague @john_d_wu A crazy, intense, and fun year in the ecosystem 👇👇👇 mattturck.com/data2021/Red Hot: The 2021 Machine Learning, AI and Data (MAD) LandscapeFull resolution version of the landscape image here It’s been a hot, hot year in the world of data, machine learning and AI. Just when you thought it couldn’t grow any more explosively, the data/AI landscape just did: rapid pace of company creation, exciting new product and project launchmattturck.com

   September 28th 2021

   106 Retweets465 Likes

3. Cloud Wars - Cloudflare going after AWS cash cow S3 and Google dropping a bomb by reducing marketplace take rate from 20% to 3% 😲

   Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota

   Fun fact: AWS hasn’t reduced the price of S3 since December 2016. 🤔

   September 28th 2021

   76 Retweets1,059 Likes
   Cloudflare @Cloudflare

   Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees. cfl.re/3zMkJwi #BirthdayWeek🎂

   September 28th 2021

   174 Retweets680 Likes

4. 💯👇🏼 - must read

   Chris Dixon @cdixon

   Why Web 3 matters 🧵

   September 26th 2021

   6,631 Retweets22,312 Likes

5. Informatica filed S-1, the “intelligent data mgmt ☁️ platform” - shows a company transitioning from a license, on-prem data infra provider to “☁️ 1st, data always”

1. Markets

1. 130% is still best in class

   Jamin Ball @jaminball

   Updating one of my favorite charts - Net retention is one of my favorite SaaS metrics. As Q2 earnigns season comes to a close, we can look back at all the cloud companies to report the metric. Anything >130% is top decile

   

   September 28th 2021

   5 Retweets73 Likes

2. Amplitude, product analytics platform, goes public via direct listing - also origin story quite interesting as it involved an early pivot - many startups never go in a straight line…