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An estimated 45,000 security professionals descended on San Francisco this past week for RSA. If you are a security investor or founder, this is a must attend event. While I stay far away from the halls and focus more on the networking events and dinners, one of the sub-events I most look forward to is the RSA Innovation Sandbox which crowns the most innovative startup every year. In 2018, BigID (one of our portfolio cos) won the event, and this year the privacy theme continues with Securiti.ai as the winner. With the amount of venture money pouring into security companies, John Masserini CISO at Millicom Communications summed up RSA best:
He further goes on to say at one of the booths, a core part of the marketing message was how much VC was raised! Time for all of us to rethink how many security companies need to be funded and what the core differentiation and value provided for customers truly are as there are now a dozen companies in each sub category.
As always, please share and retweet.
Scaling Startups
Please click through the below tweet for my full thread on how to manage all of those inbounds from VCs who want to “preempt” your round. Lots of nuances but important to control the dialogue and if your coffees are meant to get to know a few firms while you’re not raising then great. If you think you are doing those for a preemptive round, then think twice.
👇🏼 💯 I found many founders don’t know the difference between the below and the ones that can figure it out quicker can scale faster.
Rahul Vohra (Superhuman, also a portfolio co) shares his views on how to build a 10x product at Brianne Kimmel’s startup school
👇🏼 💯 10 years ago, enterprise founders used to look down on the need for a designer and now, they are usually amongst the early hires on a team
Enterprise Tech
The Enterprise Tech 30 is out from Wing VC - Super excited to have portfolio companies @fortressiq @FrontApp on this list with so many great companies! Some trends, 8 of 30 data platforms, pipeline monitoring and management, 5 related to business processes, 6 API-related, 4 Low-code/no-code
current state of enterprise software…
RSA Innovation Sandbox is a contest that has launched many successful startups such as our own portfolio company BigID which won in 2018. This year’s winner is Securiti.ai which “aims to bring a new approach to data privacy rights and protection capabilities. The company's AI-powered "PrivacyOps" platform is designed to operationalize and simplify compliance using robotic automation and a natural language interface. Securiti.ai's goal is to automate all major functions needed for privacy compliance in one place.” Read on for the other 9 finalists.
YC Series A stats for B2B companies
Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners shares his annual Cybersecurity Perspectives 2020 coinciding with RSA. The one that stands out the most is “For the first time in our survey, CEOs are seen as the executives ultimately responsible for security.”
🤔 sounds pretty basic to me as “Google Cloud plots course to overtake cloud rivals”
Under Mr. Kurian, said a former Google Cloud engineer, “we have to build stuff we can sell. People weren’t used to having that.”
Mr. Kurian also upset some sales people when he shifted their compensation plans by lowering their base pay but offering more in bonuses for the deals they secured, former employees said.
And yes, the size of seed rounds is definitely increasing - broken out between 2015-2017 and 2018-2020 - more from Crunchbase news
Of the seed rounds raised in the 2015-2017 period, 7.8 percent raised over $3 million, and 17 percent of the seed rounds raised between 2018 and early 2020 were greater than $3 million.
With Moore’s Law pretty much dead, what’s next (MIT Technology Review)?
Markets
Wow! “Zoom has added more videoconferencing users this year than in all of 2019 thanks to coronavirus - The company added 2.22 million monthly active users so far in 2020, while in 2019 it added 1.99 million, according to Bernstein’s estimates.”
Chetan from Benchmark points out how important retention is!
Salesforce 2010: $1.3B subscription revenue run-rate 82% revenue retention, excluding upsell 2019: $13.5B subscription revenue run-rate 91% revenue retention, excluding upsell +9% rise in retention saved $1B+ of 2019 revenue Small improvements in churn can have massive impact.contrary to popular belief, startups aren't usually overnight successes! Let’s 👏🏼 for the ones with their heads down quietly cranking away…
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Ed Sim's (@boldstartvc) weekly readings and notes on enterprise VC, software, and scaling startups