Merry Christmas to those who celebrate 🎅🏼 and for everyone else, Happy Holidays! In years past, I remember my kids getting up before the crack of dawn filled with anticipation for what would be under the 🎄. Sadly, those days are long past as my kids are now sleeping in quite late, but with that time I did have an opportunity to curate some news from this past week.

As we enter the holiday season, I find it’s a great opportunity to focus on what matters most, time with friends and family, to recharge our batteries and fill it with goodness, to reflect on the year that was, and to prepare and think about goals for 2022.

As I started thinking about 2021, the one thought that kept popping up was the confluence of factors that created the biggest war for talent I have ever seen - Covid, the acceptance of remote work, and the amount of 💰 that poured into enterprise startups. While this created a tremendous opportunity to hire talent anywhere, it also created an opportunity for your talent to be poached by anyone, anywhere. I do think this is a problem which will only grow in 2022 and an area for founders to think about over the holidays in terms of reassessing their win rate for top talent and what can be done to continue building a mission and culture that will make your company the best place to be.

Ed Sim @edsim

With all of this 💰 flowing into startups, the big ❓ is not who is your competition since there will be dozens, but why will the best talent seek you out, work for your startup, bring their friends + stay? We ❤️ technical moats but need the best people to build the best company

December 19th 2021

6 Retweets85 Likes

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

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Scaling Startups

1. 💯 👇🏼 - signal from noise, taking best advice from each and creating your own narrative and way to build a company

   James Cham @jamescham

   I think founder coachability is overvalued by VCs. But the ability to extract good information from many sources and turn it into something valuable is a magical skill that I look for in founders.

   Ethan Mollick @emollick

   One way VCs evaluate new founders is whether they seem "coachable" and willing to listen to advice. But coachability (measured objectively & subjectively) barely matters in startup performance. The problem is that teams that resist coaching may just know more than the coaches! https://t.co/PpbtfCa0Vn

   December 23rd 2021

   33 Retweets279 Likes

2. Speaking of founders…1000% true

   Mike Speiser @laserlikemike

   If you don’t have the right founders at the start, you’re dead. If you do and you doubt them when things get hard, you’re dead. Work with founders in which you have absolute faith and then back them no matter what — win or die, together.

   December 23rd 2021

   58 Retweets630 Likes

3. Amazing 🧵

   Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom

   21 lessons learned in 2021:

   December 18th 2021

   5,456 Retweets20,055 Likes

4. How a company starts from an open source community, in this case, TestContainers.org and Atomic Jar (a portfolio co)

   Ed Sim @edsim

   How an #OSS co starts. ⁦@AtomicJarInc⁩ ⁦@bsideup⁩ ⁦@whichrich⁩ - all about community starting w/an active user who suggested they start a company + for first 10 hires - LFG! ⁦⁦⁦@_JamesWard⁩ (90s clip) #50 Testcontainers (Like Uber but for Integration Tests) with Sergei EgorovHow Atomic Jar got started and built its team - yes, it tapped its OSS community starting with an active user who suggested they start a company and for the first 10 hires - huge validation - Ed Simairr.io

   December 19th 2021

   6 Retweets12 Likes

Enterprise Tech

1. 🤣 which side of the religious debate are you on for web3 - just marketing vs. it’s the next big thing - great 🧵 here. As you can imagine, I take a balanced approach having made our first fund investment in 2014 in Changetip which was building a payment infrastructure for crypto and making it easy to send bitcoin/tips over social. But…we were a little too early 🤣.

   Our next attempt was launching a growth lab in partnership with IBM and Hyperledger and Comcast. We learned a ton and were fortunate to lead the first round in blockdaemon and get a small seed check in Fireblocks through our lab, MState. My view is that there will be a ton of opportunity but also a lot of money lost.

   Aaron Levie @levie

   How about the future of the web is just: * more interoperability * more open standards & new protocols * richer, more immersive apps * multiplayer everything * more APIs to leverage * more open source contribution * more monetization options * more voice, video, and media

   December 22nd 2021

   365 Retweets2,741 Likes

2. More on that in my predictions shared with Nikhil Trivedi in “The next big thing in 2022 is…” - grateful to be included in Nikhil’s post with 50 of tech’s top thinkers…Here’s mine:

   
   The next big thing in 2022 is blockchain is the new "dev tool" as many long time enterprise founders rush to explore and build newcos in crypto infra and enterprise investors fund any company with "enterprise + crypto." Despite the number of companies that don't make it, there will be a handful of foundational companies started in 2022 that will create returns that far exceed the money lost. -Ed Sim, Founder & Managing Partner at boldstart ventures

3. So much more infra to build in crypto…more on blockdaemon (a portfolio co) and it’s node monitoring

   Ed Sim @edsim

   What would the @datadoghq of blockchain node monitoring look like + the importance of tuning different criteria for each protocol. Check out @BlockdaemonHQ post as it's one largest node operators. Still a lot more infra and tools to be built in crypto... 3 Secrets of Effective Blockchain Node MonitoringIf you run a blockchain node it’s important to monitor its performance. Blockdaemon can help.blockdaemon.com

   December 24th 2021

   1 Retweet8 Likes

4. And for those who want to spend the holidays going down the crypto 🐇 hole, Lightspeed has a great overview with lots of links to lots of smart folks

   Mercedes Bent @mercebent

   You've heard a ton about web3/crypto + wonder where to get started. Or like us, you've spent days, weekends, nights diving down the rabbithole Here's what we've been reading + how we're immersing ourselves in this incredibly vibrant ecosystem The Web3/Crypto/Metaverse Ecosystem Guide — From the Minds of LightspeedYou’ve been hearing a lot about crypto and are wondering where to get started. Or maybe if you’re like us, you’ve spent your days, evenings, weekends and holidays getting up to speed. The crypto…medium.com

   December 21st 2021

   65 Retweets419 Likes

5. Congrats to FortressIQ (a portfolio co) on its acquisition by Automation Anywhere. Was super cool to be there since day one as Pankaj and team created a new category for process discovery. Here’s more from Techcrunch as well:

   “FortressIQ gives Automation Anywhere this missing process discovery component, which enables AI-fueled software to map internal processes in an automated way, replacing high-priced consultants. Together, Automation Anywhere and FortressIQ will reshape the future of automation, changing the way our customers automate, adapt, and accelerate as they pursue digital transformation initiatives,” Automation Anywhere CEO and co-founder Mihir Shukla said in a statement.”

   Ed Sim @edsim

   💪🏼 Huge congrats @pchowdhry @fortressiq! 🙏🏼 for @Boldstartvc to have partnered since day 1 on your journey to create the category for process discovery Super excited for next phase w/@AutomationAnywh 🚀 Been a great ride w/@EniacVC @lightspeedvp @M12vc @ComcastVentures

   Pankaj Chowdhry @pchowdhry

   Excited to announce we're, joining @AutomationAnywh to redefine the nature of work. Immense gratitude to all the great people here at @fortressiq who put their trust in me and joined me in the first phase of this incredible journey. Can't wait for what's next! https://t.co/KJNrFJFkpi

   December 23rd 2021

   4 Retweets20 Likes

6. The long arc of quantum..but money pouring in as $1.7B funded in 2021 (McKinsey)

7. Finally getting around to this thought provoking post from Erik Bernhardsson “Storm in the stratosphere: how the cloud will be reshuffled” - lots of interesting arguments on why he believes the cloud vendors will be all about lowest layers of the stack

   and why, perhaps, we could see a future where in 2030:

   “We're roughly 10 years into the shift to the cloud, and even though it feels like it's transformed how we build software, I think we're still just getting started. I really wouldn't be surprised to wake up in a world where most developers don't interact with cloud vendors.”

8. Crypto on 🔥 - high water mark was $8B in 2018, now at over $29.4B 😲

9. What % of R&D should be spent on new features vs. platform?

   Jean-Michel Lemieux @jmwind

   Another common question I’m answering working with scaling tech companies is… Q. How much of your r&d spend should be focused on platform work? A. 50%, and most teams are way off what it should be. Let me explain…🧵 (1/21)

   December 14th 2021

   124 Retweets479 Likes

Markets

1. If you’re thinking about exogenous factors that could affect markets next year, this is one of the big ones…great 🧵 from one of co-founders of Crowdstrike

   Dmitri Alperovitch @DAlperovitch

   In the last few weeks, I have become increasingly convinced that Kremlin has unfortunately made a decision to invade Ukraine later this winter. While it is still possible for Putin to deescalate, I believe the likelihood is now quite low. Allow me to explain why 🧵

   December 21st 2021

   4,755 Retweets11,364 Likes