Don’t you love comeback stories? Docker, left for dead in November 2019, as it sold its

enterprise business to focus on developer tooling is alive and well and now worth $2 Billion. Kudos to the team for fighting through the tough times.

Justin Cormack @justincormack

We @Docker welcome our new investors who share our excitement for the future techcrunch.com/2022/03/31/as-… Bain, Atlassian, Citi and more, looking forward to working with you.As Docker gains momentum, it hauls in $105M Series C on $2B valuation – TechCrunchIt wasn’t that long ago that Docker looked like it was on the ropes. In 2019, it sold its enterprise business and decided to focus strictly on a developer audience with a set of commercial and open source tools. It was a pretty big bet for a six-year-old company to sell off the part of [&hell…techcrunch.com

March 31st 2022

37 Retweets323 Likes

Here are some stats from its blog post:

• Monthly active: 16 million

• Registered developers: 10 million

• Registered Docker Hub applications: 14 million

• Downloads per month of Docker Engine: 35 million

• Paying customers: 56,000

• Customer profile: 70% of Fortune 100, 9 of top 10 tech cos, 8 of top banks…

• ARR growth: 4x YoY

It sounds like the future includes some of the GitLab playbook where developer first security is one of its most important modules.

In addition to such productivity improvements, we will increase our investments in helping developers build secure applications “auto-magically” by default using their existing tools, workflows, and trusted content.

Congrats again!

Shifting gears, here’s a reminder for all of us in the startup ecosystem to continue to keep an open mind no matter how much experience we gain.

Ed Sim @edsim

26 years as a VC 👴🏼 + I'm still learning from every meeting. Such a humbling profession - can't let past success or failure color your judgement on who next great founder or next big thing will be. Keep an open mind, try to balance what you've learned w/what's new.🔑 to growth

March 29th 2022

2 Retweets76 Likes

Finally stay tuned for Miami Tech Week April 19-23 - lots of folks coming to check out what’s so amazing here!

Ed Sim @edsim

Wow! So many folks coming in from SF and NYC for #miamitech🌴 week - roll call - who's coming? working on something...😄

March 31st 2022

4 Retweets142 Likes

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please subscribe if you have not done so already!

Scaling Startups

1. 💯 also wrote about it here a long time ago “Cutco Knives and startups”

   Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom

   Learn to Sell To be successful, you either need to learn how to build or you need to learn how to sell. Most of us aren't technically-gifted—so just learn to sell. The more you progress in any field, the more of your job becomes sales. If you can sell, you'll always make it.

   March 26th 2022

   154 Retweets2,078 Likes

2. YC stats for demo day this past week

   Ryan Hoover @rrhoover

   The floor (from what I’ve seen) for the latest YC batch: $20M post-money

   March 27th 2022

   32 Retweets747 Likes
   Sar Haribhakti @sarthakgh

   Latest YC batch has over 390 startups 32 from India and 18 from Nigeria. Both are countries with highest number of teams from their continents. Largest category in both is fintech. Almost 100 fintech startups in the batch

   March 28th 2022

   236 Retweets974 Likes

3. on talent

   Jack Altman @jaltma

   Aggressively promoting your most effective employees is the operator equivalent of VCs doubling down on their best investments. Load up once you have a known winner.

   March 31st 2022

   88 Retweets1,266 Likes

   plus my two cents which many folks don’t do

   Ed Sim @edsim

   @jaltma And be proactive on comp for your top performers who get stuff done, not necessarily your VPs

   March 31st 2022

   1 Retweet17 Likes

4. My only comment on Fast - more about employees and investors doing their diligence and homework on the people they are funding or working with 🧵

   Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz

   Plenty of news about Fast, the startup which allegedly generated $600K revenue in 2021, burning through most of their ~$100M funding. I got a reach out to interview in 2020 but immediately passed. It's because I did my research on the founder CEO. Real shady actions in the past:

   April 1st 2022

   417 Retweets2,135 Likes

Enterprise Tech

1. Reminder for all developer first and PLG founders - there’s no skipping steps!

   Ed Sim @edsim

   Developer first + PLG founders, my strong advice from day 1 is to focus on "quality"+ not "quantity" Less is more when onboarding 1st few users - get those right b4 expanding to dozens + hundreds, learn, interview - scaling something that doesn't work does not lead to 💰

   March 29th 2022

   24 Likes

2. And don’t forget this

   Aaron Levie @levie

   Remember: customers rarely care about how novel your technology is, only what problems it solves for them. Never lose sight of that as a startup.

   March 30th 2022

   575 Retweets4,072 Likes

3. Great profile and podcast with Daniel Dines (co-founder and CEO of UIPath) from Bessemer - love his instincts and even though the stock took a hit this past week, the company is on a path to $1B ARR which is simply amazing

   “In tennis, when you play someone who isn’t more skilled than you, but has more hype, it can shake you. You can lose your confidence and focus and end up losing the match. I’ve seen it happen many times,” he says.

   “When Blue Prism went public, I still knew our technology was better,” says Daniel. “Because there is no way some random engineers out of Romania could build a company that beat out some public companies without better technology.”

   Daniel insists that as a leader and as an athlete, you have to be in the moment and listen to your gut feelings. “Don’t overthink. When you overthink, it’s not going to work. But if you trust yourself, you’ll do the right things.”

   “It doesn’t matter if your competitor is 10 times bigger than you,” he continues. “We were up against Automation in Europe, a company that was 20 to 50 times bigger than us in terms of revenue and number of people in 2015. It doesn’t matter. If you are on the right trajectory at some point, and your growth rate is higher, at some point you meet them and then you jump ahead of them.”

   “To me, the lesson is, don’t be intimidated by big guys in this,” says Daniel, whose market capitalization today is roughly 15x Blue Prism’s.

4. Congrats Sergei and AtomicJar - awesome when one can graduate into the “Adopt” phase on the thoughtworks Tech Radar with SwiftUI

   Sergei Egorov @bsideup

   Okay, I just woke up to some great news, so I can call it a week earlier 😍 @testcontainers just moved from "Assess" to "Adopt" in @thoughtworks' Tech Radar 🤯🥳🎉 thoughtworks.com/radar/language… Thank you, ThoughtWorks! @martinfowler's ideas are all over the ideology of it 🤗

   

   March 29th 2022

   34 Retweets187 Likes

5. Lots of opportunity for crypto security with the $625M Axie Infinity Ronin Network hack - this below is mind boggling and excited to be working on a new crypto security opportunity which is coming soon

   web3 is going just great @web3isgreat

   One thing that must be emphasized: the Axie Infinity hack occurred on March 23. Sky Mavis became aware of it this morning, March 29, after a report from a user having trouble withdrawing funds. The equivalent of $625MM was missing for SIX DAYS before they realized it.

   March 29th 2022

   148 Retweets840 Likes

   along with the Discord hacks for Bored Aped, Doodles and more

6. 💯 and much better security needed

   zachdavidson.eth @zach__davidson

   a sad truth i’m starting to believe is that mainstream users of web3 won’t care about decentralization as much as builders currently do they’ll only care about the user experience: - intuitive user journeys/behaviors - instant feedback from product - fees abstracted away

   March 28th 2022

   112 Retweets1,409 Likes

7. All 25 YC Crypto companies here…

   Meet @meetbarvadiya

   in YC W22 batch 394 startups got selected. in that, around 25 startups are shipping in blockchain and Web3. 🍊 if you are a crypto VC you should keep eye on them, and bet on them early. A thread 🧵

   March 30th 2022

   9 Retweets48 Likes

8. 😂

   Budweiser @budweiserusa

   Cracking open a beer.eth Probably nothing… #NFTBeerfest

   

   March 26th 2022

   352 Retweets1,686 Likes

Markets

1. Have we hit a bottom in ☁️ multiples yet?

   Jamin Ball @jaminball

   This week on Clouded Judgement: Cloud software jumped 20% up the last 2 weeks. Do we have the all clear? - Median software multiple: 9x - High Growth software median: 13x - Mid Growth software median: 9x - Low Growth software median: 4x Clouded Judgement 4.1.22Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Was the March Rally Real? Cloud software stocks hit a local minimum in mid-march and then sharply bounced up 20% in the last 2 weeks of March. This came with the backdrop of a global wa…cloudedjudgement.substack.com

   April 1st 2022

   6 Retweets41 Likes

2. Ned Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments and a legend in the investment world, passed away this past week. Andrew Ross Sorkin covers how he pioneered the mutual fund and his key hire Peter Lynch helped bring the middle class into stocks…

   “It’s hard to overstate how important Mr. Lynch was in bringing the middle class to the stock market. It wasn’t just that his record was off the charts — the Magellan Fund recorded a 29 percent average annual return in the 13 years he ran it, between 1977 and 1990, with nary a down year. It was also that Mr. Lynch did it while making stock-picking seem like something anyone could do if they just used common sense. He demystified the market for millions.

   Mr. Lynch, now 78, famously invested in Hanes because he saw his wife buying the company’s L’eggs pantyhose at the supermarket. He called his big winners “ten-baggers.” He used to say, “I like to buy a business that any fool can run because eventually one will.”