What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #171

who knew you could make money selling to developers?🤷🏼‍♂️

I’m back from a few days in Europe, and the energy and excitement for enterprise startups was simply awesome. Being there partly reminded me of NYC enterprise just 5 years ago as now there a number of high profile companies like Dataiku, Datadog, and UIPath, plenty of local funding, and VCs from Silicon Valley moving earlier and earlier in funding stage. Like NYC, it’s still hard to find key, super experienced hires in roles like product marketing and management and over time, you’ll see more and more European companies building their GTM motion in the states.

In other news, lots of great advice for scaling startups along with a number of articles on developer tooling and infrastructure.

As always, please share and retweet.

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Scaling Startups

1. 👇🏼💯

   Paul Graham @paulg

   The #1 cause of startup death is making something no one wants. The #2 cause is spending too much. Those two account for so many deaths that I'm not even sure what #3 is. If you merely make something people want and don't spend too much, you're way ahead.

2. Sales math as startups scale - click on for full thread and comments…

   Ed Sim @edsim

   Most founders know enterprise sales rep math, # of reps*$ quota*% quota hit per rep w/ ramp time (6 mos); what’s often forgotten is that reps need leads, marketing, BDRs, and some of their own pipe; don’t scale without knowing the math on Glengarry leads, you’ll just burn 💰💰💰

3. Anna Miura-Ko nails it on her post about what true product market fit is, a minimum viable company.

   Ann Miura-Ko @annimaniac

   1/ Ever seen a company where customers loved the product but the company STILL failed? Over 10 years I’ve seen this way too many times. It’s caused me to question whether the importance product market fit is a myth. Check this out 👇 techcrunch.com/2020/01/31/you…

   

   techcrunch.comTrue product-market fit is a minimum viable company – TechCrunchBefore attempting to scale your minimum viable product, focus on cultivating your minimum viable company.

4. Mathilde Collin from Front (a boldstart portfolio co) shares her Series C deck for round led by enterprise CEOs from Qualtrics, Zoom, Atlassian with Sequoia

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Enterprise Tech

1. With so many open source projects and tech, it’s quite hard for a back end developer to keep track - take a look at this roadmap for the backend developer on everything they need to know which means they will always be learning and barely shipping 😃

   🔎Julia Evans🔍 @b0rk

   I liked this backend developer roadmap by @kamranahmedse roadmap.sh/backend -- it's impossible to build a list like this that everyone agrees on but it's a good starting point

   

2. My colleague @ShomikGhosh21 shares a must read on dev tooling market

   Shomik Ghosh @shomikghosh21

   This post by @itunpredictable is a must read. I've been looking for a concise overview of dev tooling for awhile now and Justin's post is the only one I've seen. Covers writing, shipping, and monitoring code! Best thing I've read this week!

   

   technically.devTechnically

3. Phil Venables (ex-CISO Goldman Sachs, current board member) shares his thoughts on how startups can cut through the noise with so many vendors banging on a CISO/CIO’s door - what I ❤️ most is this from him

   Ed Sim @edsim

   This is a biggie and one which has inverted pyramid for sales motion to enteprises, as I like to say, “win ❤️ and 🧠 of developers, win enterprise” - read more from @philvenables who is ex-CISO @GoldmanSachs and on the boardb

   

   Phil Venables @philvenables

   3. Grass Roots Demand. Demand from end users, engineers, security team - genuine buzz/zeal shown by organic take up that led to an enterprise deal. The graveyard of hopes & dreams of vendors and customers alike is full of imposed product use from a top-down executive sale. 6/24

4. On the application side, WSJ VC Pro highlights the VC search for the next Zoom or Slack - great to have portfolio cos Superhuman and Front covered! To be clear the barriers to entry are much lower for these next gen companies and having founders who understand the GTM motion becomes super important.

5. Tomasz Tunguz writes about Cloud Prem. This is what Replicated (a portfolio co) calls Modern On-Prem. It’s great that Tomasz lays this out as many in Silicon Valley believe the cloud is the only way to go but those who are close to the Fortune 500 customers knows that it will still take another 10 years or more for this full transition and for some industries it may never happen.

   Tomasz Tunguz @ttunguz

   Cloud Prem Architecture - The New Way of Serving the Enterprise with a Hub and Spoke Data Model bit.ly/2Ua0J5i

   

6. All about the JAMstack - Javascript, APIs, Markup - what many believe is the future of web development. Great post on how Cloudflare workers is enabling this - “workers has given JavaScript developers a platform to enable building high-performance applications with automatic scaling.” 🎩 @ShomikGhosh21

7. Snowflake is now worth over $12 billion with new investment from Dragoneer and Salesforce - as for why are they worth so much…

   He said Snowflake has probably taken 2,500 customers from Amazon Web Services’ Redshift data warehousing service. They include Adobe, Instacart, Deliveroo and Strava, he said.

   “We wouldn’t even exist as a company if we didn’t do that every day of the week,” Slootman said. AWS declined to comment.

8. Hashicorp in infrastructure automation space at $100mm run rate as end of last year

   This success has lead to a $100 million annual run rate as of last year, according to the company, and McJannet predicts HashiCorp will continue to scale up quickly to meet demand. "We're now at 900 plus employees and will hire another 500 at least this year, because the market is pulling us so quickly," he said.

9. No comment needed 🤖

   Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar

   Imagine what machines will be able to do in the next 5-10 years. Boston Dynamics' machine shows its agility with a flawless gymnastic routine.

   

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Markets

1. Wow - devs just getting started - $1 billion revenue mark for Twilio

   Ed Sim @edsim

   That's @Atlassian and @twilio with over $1 billion in revenue! Who said you can’t make money selling to developers? 🤷🏻‍♂ry

   

   Jeff Lawson @jeffiel

   That’s a wrap on Q4 2019 Earnings: $331M revenue, growing 62% Y/Y... and for FY 2019 - a huge milestone for the company crossing the billion mark at $1.1B! Thank you to Twilions, our customers, and our partners worldwide, yet, it’s still #DayOne. https://t.co/ltyRYkpwoP

   Furthermore…

   Jon Ma @jonbma

   Atlassian breaks down its view on market size: 🧠800 million knowledge workers 🤓100 million technical professionals 😮50 million registered Trello users 💻23 million software developers 👉Software devs make up only ~3% of all knowledge workrK4jU

   

2. Google Cloud revenue finally revealed (chart from the Information) - like Microsoft, it includes application revenue from GSuite while Microsoft has Office 365