What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC

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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #247

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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #247

How to scale from 100 to 700 people in 2 years? Here's Dipti's (VP People) playbook from Snyk

Ed Sim
Jul 24, 2021
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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #247

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The war for talent could not be more brutal these days and I love solutions like the Future Founder Promise from GraphCDN and TurboRepo - it’s what makes the startup world go round and round!

Twitter avatar for @GraphCDN
GraphCDN ⚡️ @GraphCDN
We've started a list of startups offering the Future Founder Promise! 😍 Do you want to build your own startup eventually but aren't quite ready? Consider working at one of the companies! github.com/graphcdn/futur… 👈 You're a company with the promise? Add yourself to the list!
github.comGitHub - graphcdn/future-founder-promise: A list of startups that offer the Future Founder Promise to their employeesA list of startups that offer the Future Founder Promise to their employees - GitHub - graphcdn/future-founder-promise: A list of startups that offer the Future Founder Promise to their employees
9:13 AM ∙ Jul 21, 2021
75Likes13Retweets

Speaking of talent, Dipti Salopek, VP People at Snyk ( a portfolio co), shared her playbook for scaling your talent engine and published her Hypergrowth Playbook. I’ve seen Dipti firsthand help Snyk go from 100 to 700 people in two years with hires from all over the world and highly recommend learning from her experience. Here are 7 💎 to start as you go from startup to scaleup:

1. Don’t  just recruit, build a recruiting engine
2. Keep raising the talent bar
3. Lean in to your culture
4. Create a learning organization
5. Adapt how you communicate
6. Strengthen your Core HR processes
7. Operate with Data

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

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Scaling Startups

  1. Rahul at Superhuman (a portfolio co) is one of best storytellers I know and here he shares how to tell a billion dollar story along with parallels to the Hero’s Journey (I recommend reading the classic book, the Hero with a Thousand Faces)

    With the right story, you can close investors, captivate customers, and inspire your team toward your next big milestone.

    The most powerful stories have 3 key ingredients — and the way you tell them will make or break your startup. Let's dive in…

    Call to Adventures, Victory Over Crisis, Transformation…

  2. Let’s not forget this 👇🏼

    Twitter avatar for @marcelo_lebre
    Marcelo Lebre @marcelo_lebre
    Remote work is not the future of work, it is a way to get there. The future of work is working to achieve your dreams and not sacrificing your dreams to work.
    2:54 PM ∙ Jul 19, 2021
    478Likes71Retweets
  3. So many ways to hire and scale - here is one at Gumroad

    Twitter avatar for @shl
    Sahil @shl
    Our hiring process at Gumroad is now 100% asynchronous except for a 15-minute phone call. Meaning there’s now a bunch of people I work with everyday and I have no idea what they look like.
    1:47 PM ∙ Jul 22, 2021
    2,965Likes144Retweets
  4. this could be you - Zoom acquired John’s company for $14.7B

    Twitter avatar for @JohnSungKim
    john sung kim @JohnSungKim
    I started @Five9 in my apartment in SF many years ago with the idea of liberating call center agents (like me) from centralized boiler rooms. As a longtime fan and user of @Zoom, I’m proud to say that this is the final chapter for my first startup. google.com/amp/s/texasnew…
    Image
    2:28 AM ∙ Jul 19, 2021
    1,350Likes80Retweets
  5. Love this

    Twitter avatar for @nrmehta
    Nick Mehta @nrmehta
    If you intend to run your company for a long time, one key role as CEO becomes being the "historian." Many people that work for you won't have the context of how your team got to where they are at - and of why things worked and didn't work. It's your job to remember the stories.
    1:54 PM ∙ Jul 20, 2021
    1,035Likes93Retweets
  6. 👇🏼 great advice from Mathilde (Front - a portfolio co) - a great skill to learn for founders as they continue to scale their business

    Twitter avatar for @collinmathilde
    Mathilde Collin @collinmathilde
    Giving AND receiving feedback is hard, so I wrote my best, most practical tips to make it easier for everyone. It's helped me both in my professional and personal life!
    collinmathilde.medium.com7 do’s and don’ts to get better at giving and receiving feedbackWhen I tell future hires that we practice radical candor here at Front, everyone’s bought in to the idea. What’s not to like about it? Everybody wants to learn fast, tackle problems when they’re…
    8:27 PM ∙ Jul 13, 2021
    36Likes1Retweet

Enterprise Tech

  1. Great read from Jean Yang at Akita Software Why Aren’t There More Programming Languages Startups along with🧵 on HackerNews: don’t let title mislead you as it’s beyond programming languages and also about dev tools and developer needs in general

    Twitter avatar for @jeanqasaur
    ⚡️ Jean Yang ⚡️ @jeanqasaur
    Why aren't there more startups based on programming languages and software analysis? There's definitely a need for SOMETHING, as developers have so much pain. I was recently on a panel where someone asked this question. I didn't have time to answer then, so here's a thread. 1/
    7:12 PM ∙ Jul 14, 2021
    266Likes39Retweets

    And 👇🏼 this is huge and many times forgotten and the difference between a true developer first tool and one that is not

    Twitter avatar for @jeanqasaur
    ⚡️ Jean Yang ⚡️ @jeanqasaur
    I also often see programming tools people ignore design. Design isn't about increasing prettiness, it's about reducing friction to solving valuable problems. Today, there's a design gap in between many cool programming technologies and the tools they could become. 5/
    7:29 PM ∙ Jul 14, 2021
    105Likes15Retweets
  2. State of DevOps report from Puppet is out

    Twitter avatar for @ytechdata
    Yvonne Wassenaar @ytechdata
    One decade ago @puppetize released our first #StateOfDevOps Report. Today I'm proud to share our 10th report with you. This report is focusing on cultural blockers are keeping mid-evolution firms stuck in the middle. Download it now:
    bit.lyState of DevOps Report 2021 | PuppetRead the 2021 State of DevOps Report to learn why firms are stuck in the middle of DevOps evolution, how automation and cloud relate, and more.
    2:45 PM ∙ Jul 20, 2021
    12Likes5Retweets
  3. Capital One is one of most forward thinking Fortune 500s - still so much room for innovation for everyone else which means more spending on 🌥️ and developers 💰 - Capital One Adding 3,000 Tech Staff to Build on Cloud Banking Leadership

    More than 75% of this year’s expected 3,000 new hires will be engineers, he said, with expertise in areas such as cloud, data, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and security. Designing for mobile will also be a key area, he added, since online and mobile are increasingly popular ways that Capital One customers interact with the bank.

    The bank decided 8 or 10 years ago that to compete it had to develop its own software.

    “Before that, Capital One leveraged third parties to build apps, but the bank recognized the winners would be great tech companies with the risk management skills of a leading bank. In 2012 we started to redefine who we were as a company, with the goal to being a bank that a tech company would build,” added Nims.

    “We have reinvented our operating model, moving to 100% agile for delivery of software, leveraging micro services and building on open source software. By moving to AWS and re-architecting our entire data set we have dramatically advanced our ability to manage data at a larger scale, which created the foundation to leverage machine learning.

  4. 💯 - best open source and developer first cos I know subscribe to this and over time it becomes an incredible moat

    Twitter avatar for @gregisenberg
    GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg
    Don't build a customer base. Build a fan base I'd rather a fan over a customer any day of the week
    2:27 PM ∙ Jul 20, 2021
    708Likes81Retweets
  5. Many times forgotten since focus is on code when it comes to APIs and dev tools - but documentation and ease of use matters as you only have seconds before a dev goes somewhere else

    Twitter avatar for @mjasay
    Matt Asay @mjasay
    The best doc writers don't get paid what the best developers do. Should they? Arguably they have as great an impact on the adoption of that code.... Would love your thoughts tek.io/2UQzj73 by @mjasay for @TechRepublic
    tek.ioShould documentation writers get paid more than developers?Commentary: Given the importance of documentation to making software usable, should documentarians earn a bigger paycheck than developers?
    4:17 PM ∙ Jul 19, 2021
    50Likes15Retweets

    Without great documentation, great code...isn't. Great documentation, after all, makes code more approachable, more useful. Bad code? Well, as The Taproom CEO Kelly Vaughn tweeted, "Please, please, PLEASE–I am begging you–invest time and resources into your documentation. I've been running in circles for 3 days now trying to solve the same problem because the documentation is terribly lacking."

  6. If you want a quick summary of the NSO Group’s spyware story, read this 🧵

    Twitter avatar for @billmarczak
    Bill Marczak @billmarczak
    THREAD with a couple of interesting bits from @AmnestyTech's new report on what they learned from looking for NSO Group's spyware on phones
    amnesty.orgForensic Methodology Report: How to catch NSO Group’s PegasusNSO Group claims that its Pegasus spyware is only used to “investigate terrorism and crime” and “leaves no traces whatsoever”. This Forensic Methodology Report shows that neither of these statements are true. This report accompanies the release of the Pegasus Project, a collaborative investigation t…
    4:46 PM ∙ Jul 18, 2021
    1,737Likes1,075Retweets

Markets

  1. What’s ahead for the economy?

    Twitter avatar for @alexisohanian
    AlexisOhanian.eth 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ @alexisohanian
    😷 Bubonic plague ➡️ Renaissance 😷 Spanish Flu ➡️ Roaring 20s 😷 COVID-19 ➡️ ???
    2:21 PM ∙ Jul 19, 2021
    808Likes88Retweets
  2. 🦄🦄🦄

    Twitter avatar for @eringriffith
    erin griffith @eringriffith
    There are now 900 unicorns worth $1 trillion 🤯 news.crunchbase.com/news/unicorn-s…
    news.crunchbase.comThe World’s Unicorns Are Now Valued At $3T — Up By A Trillion In The Past Year. Who Invested?The Crunchbase Unicorn Board, a comprehensive list of startups valued at $1 billion or more in private financing deals, now hosts more than 900 companies with a collective value of $3 trillion — up by a trillion dollars from our June 2020 report.
    12:43 AM ∙ Jul 20, 2021
    125Likes40Retweets
  3. More on Zoom acquisition of Five9 - never quit…

    Twitter avatar for @TheRealCarlChi1
    someguyCarl @TheRealCarlChi1
    I love the Five9 story. IPO'ed in '14. Growth deceled - ended 2014 @ 17% Q4 growth and low 20s full year (ouch!) Stock was left for dead but the team put its head down and executed. Averaged 27%+ annually from 2015 - 2020 and accelerated massively in 20/21. 40x stock from bottom.
    1:40 AM ∙ Jul 19, 2021
    151Likes5Retweets

  4. 🤯

    Twitter avatar for @levynews
    Ari Levy @levynews
    This is crazy Zoom went public a little over 2 years ago with a market cap of $9.2 bln. Now it’s buying a company for $14.7 bln.
    2:57 AM ∙ Jul 19, 2021
    445Likes45Retweets
  5. A rising cloud lifts all boats - IBM

    Total cloud revenue grew 13% compared with a year earlier to $7 billion with Red Hat sales surging 20% during the quarter. IBM reaffirmed its prior outlook of delivering revenue growth for the full year. “We are pleased with the early signs of progress,” Krishna said on a conference call of the company’s shift to cloud and AI. “However, it will take time before we realize the full benefit of these changes.”

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What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #247

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