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This week is all about the ☁️ 💯 list of the Top Private Companies from Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Forbes and you can read more about it here👇🏼
Salesforce Ventures took another slice at the data and some of these stats are 🤯 😲:
Private cloud company valuations have been on a similar trajectory: every company on the 2021 Cloud 100 list carries a valuation of at least $1 billion, with an average valuation of $5.2 billion. This represents 420% growth from 2016. The total value of the 2021 list is a staggering $518 billion — nearly double last year’s level.
Similar to last year, I spent 10 minutes and used my best guess to understand the primary business model and sales motion of The Top 20 Cloud 100 companies and as you can see below, dev first models (including OSS) account for 30% of the list (down from 40% last year)!
Winning the ❤️ and 🧠 of developers to win the enterprise continues to pay off for those who stick with it. In addition if you include Product Led Growth Companies + Dev First which are primarily bottoms up models, 70% of the Cloud 100 (vs. 60% last year) use a frictionless GTM which is also insane! The lone enterprise models in Samsara and Celonis account for 10% vs. 25% last year and are the bottom 2 of the Top 20.
Congrats again to portfolio cos Snyk and BigID for 2nd year in a row on Cloud 100.
🙏🏼 as always for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Scaling Startups
Treat all founders the same on the way down and the way up - life is long!
Anatomy of the best startups as told by Nora Jones, co-founder and CEO of Jeli (a portfolio co) 🧵 - passion, mission oriented founders and team, ❤️ what you do!
💯
How to hire and structure a growth team for product led growth (OpenView/TechCrunch) - yes, PLG should sell itself but over time you can’t scale without a team and agree that growth teams should have an owner who wakes up every day only thinking about this vs. a collection of leaders from cross functional teams - trust me, I’ve seen it many different ways
The pluses and minuses of remote work…
Pretty good article on the future of work from Cloudflare, which details many benefits of remote work (better productivity, more participation, more diversity etc.), but also the problems (osmosis!). bit.ly/2UbUUHa Also the plan to tear down SF/London offices entirely.On quotas and your first sales reps…
Enterprise Tech
What is the API lifecycle?
GraphQL for the win 🧵
Great 🧵 on the decentralized web - still thinking through what, if any, enterprise ramifications there are…
How do data mesh principles apply to the modern data stack 🧵 - lots of dbt and Snowflake?
What I ❤️ most about GitHub Codespaces is the philosophy and focus on developer experience:
These two changes, along with a handful of app and service level optimizations, took GitHub.com codespace creation time from 45 minutes to five minutes. But five minutes is still quite a distance from “instant-on.” Well-known studies have shown people can sustain roughly ten seconds of wait time before falling out of flow. So while we’d made tremendous strides, we still had a way to go.
Thanks to the hard work of the Codespaces team, GitHub engineers can now bootstrap their dev environments in the cloud in <10 seconds (35gb image 😱). Today we're making Codespaces available to more teams to move their own development to the cloud.I helped lead the https://t.co/RuDrvKnpnP migration from local macOS dev to Codespaces and went from skeptic to believer along the way; cloud-based development is the future. https://t.co/k02dANiAAqCory Wilkerson @corywilkersonGo LaunchDarkly and Edith Harbaugh and team - another dev first company hitting the $3B valuation - by the way it took 7 years to get here! (Forbes)
Feature flags are like on-and-off toggles used for deploying new or risky sections of code. In other words, it’s a way to dark launch. It gives DevOps teams control over the software development process by allowing developers to decide which users, as well as how many, can see or use a new feature. For instance, instead of introducing a new feature to everyone, it can be teased to a small percentage of users or users in one specific region, testing the waters while the main operation continues to run.
While feature flagging is a common practice in software development, feature management, which allows collaboration across different silos of a company, is a new tool. The next step for Harbaugh was to fill in the gaps by joining forces with her former classmate Kodumal and starting their own company.
Markets
Axios asks if startups especially at the mid-to-late stages are the new stock market?
While Softbank's first Vision Fund was all about "picking winners" in a sector and arming them with a lot of capital to fend off their rivals, the Japanese giant's second Vision Fund has a different strategy: backing as many worthy startups as possible, as early as possible.
Why it matters: Diversified portfolios have been a fixture of seed investing for a while, but with the entrance of investors like Tiger Global into the startup scene, it’s a strategy no longer confined to the earliest stages of venture.
By the numbers: Last quarter SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 invested in 47 startups ($14.2 billion including follow-on capital from VF 1), and has already backed another 27 since July 1.
"You'll see more diversification — [SoftBank's Vision Fund 2] is coming in at earlier stages. ... The idea is to be earlier in the cap table and be able to participate in the next round," one person familiar with the Vision Fund's thinking told Axios.
July🔥🦄 - 53 startups hit $1 billion valuations in July as 'hot unicorn summer' rages. Here are all of them.
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Ed Sim's (@boldstartvc) weekly readings and notes on enterprise VC, software, and scaling startups