What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #261

🤯 ☁️ + 73M developers on Github with 84% of Fortune 500 using

Oct 30

While this week seemed to be all about Meta, the big ☁️ stocks did not disappoint as growth is still accelerating.

Nevermind I am going to beat @jaminball to the punch. (This Q vs last Q) * AWS is growing +39%, accelerating from +37%. * Azure is growing +48% CCURR, accelerating from +45%. * Google's Cloud segment is growing +45%, decelerating from +54%

One of my favorite things to do is dive into Satya’s quarterly earnings transcript and this quarter provided a number of usual gems as to what is happening in the world of enterprise tech (transcript here).

Edge is real and coming fast
“We’re partnering with mobile operators from AT&T and Verizon in the United States to Telefonica and BT in Europe, Telstra and Singtel in Asia-Pacific as they embrace new business models and bring ultra low latency compute power and storage to the network and the enterprise edge.”
“And I think that the multi-cloud, multi-edge world is sort of really how we built Azure in the first place and I think we’re still very early in all of that playing out, but we feel well positioned.”
Azure Arc (hybrid/multicloud) is big and here today
“78% of the Fortune 500 use our hybrid offerings and with Azure Arc customers like Nokia, Royal Bank of Canada and SKF can deploy and run applications at the edge or in multi-cloud environments.”
Developers, developers, developers
“From GitHub to Visual Studio, we have the most used and loved developer tools to build any app on any platform. GitHub is now home to 73 million developers up 2 times since our acquisition three years ago. More and more businesses are choosing GitHub Enterprise to provide their developer teams the most advanced platform to build, ship and maintain software. This quarter alone, we introduced more than 70 enterprise features, 84% of the Fortune 100 use GitHub and we are seeing growing usage from digital native companies and the world’s most established firms from Pinterest to Procter and Gamble from Stripe to Societe Generale.”
Teams and collaboration 📈
“Usage has never been higher. 138 organizations now have more than 100,000 users of Teams and more than 3,000 have more than 10,000 users. Updates to Teams rooms, including new AI powered cameras and spatial audio ensure every meeting attendee is always a first-class participant.”
Cybersecurity - true passwordless security is here and >$20B will be invested in cyber
“In identity, Azure Active Directory now has more than 500 million monthly active users and we have seen usage of third party apps increased 1.5 times year-over-year. And the future of security is password less. Nearly 240 million users have adopted password less login to date and consumers can now completely remove passwords from their personal Microsoft accounts. And we’re not stopping there. Over the next five years, we’ll invest $20 billion to advance our security solutions and protect customers.”

Given this growth across all enterprise software categories, it’s no surprise that VC money continues to pour into all of these segments. As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friend and colleagues!

Share What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC

Scaling Startups

💯
hiten.eth @hnshah
Most startups build too much product, too fast.
October 19th 2021
83 Retweets863 Likes
Why more isn’t always better when onboarding your first few users/customers 🧵
Ed Sim @edsim
1/ One mistake I see many founders making when onboarding their first customers is the idea that “more is better” when the real goal should be to get a few folks to absolutely ❤️ your product, can’t live without,+ be referenceable before moving to next cohort
October 25th 2021
3 Retweets42 Likes
Remote first = huge advantage in hiring
Suhail @Suhail
If you believe in the trend of early adopters, I think this is an unstoppable trend (at least in tech). I don't see this trend abating because you'll have to compete with me (and others) in the war for finding great talent wrt remote-first companies.
October 24th 2021
99 Retweets742 Likes
👇🏼💪🏼
Aaron Levie @levie
If you’re raising capital, raise when it’s cheap, but operate like it’s expensive.
October 24th 2021
134 Retweets1,272 Likes
top down view of why this bull market may still run fast
Semil @semil
From recent @theallinpod, fascinating statistical POV by @friedberg on recent huge VC liquidity measured against forthcoming disruption of global public equities:
October 24th 2021
92 Retweets596 Likes

Enterprise Tech

Inside the numbers for OSS project Supabase (open source firebase with a PostgREST twist) $30M Series A funding led by Coatue
Database growth - 0 to > 50k
Developers > 40,000
Discord > 4,000 members in less than 3 mos
Inside the numbers for Alchemy (developer platform for Web3) $250M Series C at $3.5B led by a16z - underlying platform for many of the NFT platforms
Nikil Viswanathan @Nikilster
Super excited to share Alchemy Series C! 🎉 Past 6 mo: 📈 15x growth 💰 Now >$45B tx volume 🤝 $505M -> $3.5B valuation So pumped to welcome @alive_eth @cdixon and @a16z to the family! ❤️
Alchemy | We're Hiring! @AlchemyPlatform
1) 🎉We’re incredibly excited to announce our $250M Series C, led by @a16z, valuing us at $3.5B! 🎉 A 🧵 on where we’ve come from and where we’re going👇 https://t.co/XmNfirUw4B
October 29th 2021
21 Retweets307 Likes
Metaverse = more spend on infrastructure (WSJ)
“Facebook’s total company expenses could jump as much as $27 billion next year, reaching $97 billion, the company said, as it spends on people and infrastructure. Capital expenditure on items such as network infrastructure and data centers is expected to jump almost 80% next year, the company said.”
Speaking of, I know this is an enterprise newsletter but it’s always important to see what is happening outside of our narrow world and checking out Zuck’s video on the metaverse is worth 8 mins
Raoul Pal @RaoulGMI
The Zuck video today for Meta might well have been cheesy but it was incredible important...maybe one of the most important things I have seen in years (although something I have expected and written about for a long time). 1/
October 29th 2021
853 Retweets3,801 Likes
❤️ this and great to know that Jit Security (a portfolio co) is ahead of this trend with their MVS platform (minimal viable security)
“Google and Salesforce have announced the creation of a vendor-neutral security baseline called the Minimum Viable Security Product (MVSP), which they said was an effort to "raise the bar for security while simplifying the vetting process."
MVSP was developed and backed by Okta, Slack and more. Google vice president of security Royal Hansen said it was "designed to eliminate overhead, complexity and confusion during the procurement, RFP and vendor security assessment process by establishing minimum acceptable security baselines."
Great slides/talk from Gareth Rushgrove (VP Product, Snyk) on open source distribution and GTM
Software supply chain security is way more than scanning - take a look at Slim.ai’s Top 100 Public Container Report and how one can use Slim (a portfolio co) to analyze and minimize container size
“It is typical to see hundreds of packages even in small, special purpose containers. And as we explore larger images in more generic categories, these numbers explode.
We looked at “attack surface” — not just vulnerabilities found in a container scan, but the combination of known vulnerabilities, their criticality, files in the container with special permissions, and total number of packages (i.e., potential Zero Day vulnerabilities) — and saw a wide spread among categories and containers within categories. To us, this implies a required (and presumably manual) step in the “getting dev containers ready for production” process that many teams may ignore.”
🤯 Once upon a time VCs 🙏🏼 to get out of the IPO as soon as possible but Jamin showing what kinds of returns for the great companies still exist afterwards. Also why Sequoia changing fund structure and moving to more permanent capital.
“Our experience with category-defining companies — Apple, Google, Cisco, Unity, Snowflake, Zoom — has taught us that they take more than a few years to build. In recent years, many of our most promising companies have chosen to stay private longer, building scale and expanding their strategic footprint before debuting as public market leaders. They then compound their advantage for decades, with much of their value accruing long after an IPO. Square, for instance, which we partnered with early in 2011 and where I remain on the board of directors, had a market capitalization of $2.9B at the IPO in 2015. Five years later Square grew to $86B, and today is worth over $117B. “As a founder, the understanding and trust we’ve built with Sequoia and Roelof over many years are irreplaceable,” says Jack Dorsey of Square. “That history and relationship has been crucial to me at defining moments.”
Patience and long-term partnerships generate exceptional results. For Sequoia, the 10-year fund cycle has become obsolete.”
Jamin Ball @jaminball
Trend in cloud software: Growth Durability 📈📈 Historically, many people have overestimated how quickly software companies would decelerate growth. below chart shows rough Datadog quarterly growth expectations at IPO (orange) and actual (blue)
October 26th 2021
42 Retweets335 Likes