cloud infrastructure

Is the modern data stack just old wine in a new bottle? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in cloud infrastructure, Column, data observability, data stack, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Column, EC Enterprise Applications, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

Ashish Kakran Contributor Ashish Kakran, principal at Thomvest Ventures, is a product manager/engineer turned investor who enjoys supporting founders with a balance of technical know-how, customer insights, empathy with challenges and market knowledge. More posts by this contributor Here’s where MLOps is accelerating enterprise AI adoption Remember the cable, phone and internet combo offers that used to land in our mailboxes? These offers were highly optimized for conversion, and the type of offer and the monthly price could vary significantly between two neighboring houses or even between condos in the same building. I know this because I used to be a data engineer and built extract-transform-load (ETL) data pipelines for this type of offer optimization. Part of my job involved unpacking encrypted data feeds, removing rows or columns that had missing data, and mapping the fields to our internal data models. Our statistics team then used the clean, updated data to model the best offer for each household. That was almost a decade ago. If you take that process and run it on steroids for 100x larger datasets today, you’ll get to the scale that midsized and large organizations are dealing with today. Each step of the data analysis process is ripe for disruption. For example, a single video conferencing call can generate logs that require hundreds of storage tables. Cloud has fundamentally changed the way business is done because of the unlimited storage and scalable compute resources you can get at an affordable price. To put it simply, this is the difference between old and modern stacks: Image Credits: Ashish Kakran, Thomvest Ventures Why do data leaders today care about the modern data stack? Self-service analytics Citizen-developers want access to critical business dashboards in real time. They want automatically updating dashboards built on top of their operational and customer data. For example, the product team can use real-time product usage and customer renewal data for decision-making. Cloud makes data truly accessible to everyone, but there is a need for self-service analytics compared to legacy, static, on-demand reports and dashboards.

Where cloud management is going next • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in cloud cost optimization, cloud infrastructure, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise, finops, product-led growth, Startups, usage-based pricing, VentureNo Comments

“There’s a big wave of innovation in managing cloud costs,” Team8 co-founder and managing partner Liran Grinberg told ZebethMedia as part of our latest cloud investor survey. Having noticed tailwinds for the wave of B2B startups that offer cloud cost-optimization solutions, and cloud management more broadly, we were curious to know where VCs thought the space was headed — and the answers we heard show promise. Indeed, the tailwinds we are referring to aren’t limited to the current macroeconomic climate. The need to better manage cloud spend is undoubtedly fueled by the downturn, which makes everyone more cost-conscious. But, as we will explore, innovation in this field is also a corollary to broader trends, such as the rise of product-led growth among B2B SaaS companies, which have become both practitioners and consumers of usage-based pricing. There are also reasons to think that we haven’t seen all of it yet. “We continue to see tremendous opportunity in the cloud management space given how early we are in the cloud adoption journey,” Battery Ventures venture investor Danel Dayan said. So what might be next? Let’s dive in. Beyond cost optimization The first wave of cloud optimization solutions did the obvious: help companies track and lower their cloud spend. Per Team8’s Grinberg: “The first generation of cloud cost management (represented by Cloudability, CloudHealth) helped provide visibility and clarity on the spend on AWS, Azure and GCP. Meanwhile, cloud cost-optimization tools (represented by Spot, Granulate) allowed for tactical changes to lower costs.” Consolidation followed, ZebethMedia’s Kyle Wiggers noted, “as incumbents in adjacent sectors saw the opportunities presented by cloud cost optimization. Microsoft in 2017 acquired Cloudyn [ … ]. Then, in 2019, Apptio snatched up [ … ] Cloudability, while VMware and NetApp bought CloudHealth and Spot (formerly Spotinst), respectively, within the span of a few years.” And this April, Intel bought Granulate for $650 million. As time and mergers went by, it became clear that there was more than startups in this space could do for their customers. First and foremost, cloud teams required more than cost optimization — they needed cloud management.

Why startups are better off prioritizing growth instead of optimizing cloud costs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in cloud cost optimization, cloud infrastructure, Enterprise, investor survey, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Everybody’s talking so much about cost optimization and extending runways that startups across the board are looking at every little expense as they seek ways to navigate the downturn. But some costs are better left untouched simply because the work involved may not be worth the payoff. According to several investors we surveyed recently, cloud costs are one such area that startups can afford to ignore, at least in the early days. As Zetta Ventures managing director Jocelyn Goldfein put it, the math needs to make sense if you’re prioritizing cost cuts over growth. “It’s not really worth optimizing your cloud spend until you can squeeze out at least half a month, better yet a full month, of runway. Usually, that’s not the case at the early stage.” It’s also increasingly important to not lose focus on product development if you’re a growth-stage startup. “I’ll always believe that getting things working end-to-end in a timely fashion and iterating on user feedback is the priority. Over-optimizing early is an anti-pattern,” said Menlo Ventures partner Tim Tully. “As they say in product teams, K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid). You can always go back and optimize later.” We’re widening our lens, looking for more investors to include in ZebethMedia surveys where we poll top professionals about challenges in their industry. If you’re an investor who’d like to participate in future surveys, fill out this form. Keeping it simple, though, isn’t always an option for startups these days with the plethora of cloud and component providers crowding the market. Multicloud is now a more viable option than ever in such an environment. “While choosing a single public cloud offers more simplicity and speed,” Team8 managing partner Liran Grinberg says, “a multicloud setup will allow you to leverage the best-of-breed offering from a functionality standpoint as well as optimize for cost down the line.” However, Grinberg added that startups should be mindful of the implications of using multiple cloud vendors down the road. “Firstly, egress costs can be expensive enough to make this not worth the while. Second, you need to manage more than one provider, so your monitoring, cost management, infrastructure as code, and security solutions need to support all the vendors you are using.” Besides the usual suspects, there are now more vendors and models available to startups than there were a few years ago. This includes virtual private clouds, which can be useful for companies dealing with privacy and regulatory concerns. For a company to run its own servers, all the investors agreed that founders should first carefully weigh the pros and cons of doing so, and only proceed if it’s going to be worth it. Tully said, “Going on-prem from a data center perspective, as opposed to cloud on-prem, i.e., virtual private cloud (VPC), would require a very compelling business reason to justify.” “For starting on-prem, you should have a really, really good excuse, as the overhead cost for running this kind of operation is almost never worthwhile for startups (and even for very mature companies, for that matter),” Grinberg added. Read the full survey to find out what investors look for in cloud startups, the best ways to approach and pitch them, why cloud marketplaces are a hit, and more advice on what to prioritize when it comes to cloud-related decisions.

Could machine learning refresh the cloud debate? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 22, 2022Posted in cloud infrastructure, expensify, Robotics & AI, Startups, TechCrunch Exchange newsletter, The ExchangeNo Comments

Welcome to The ZebethMedia Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily ZebethMedia+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Should early-stage founders ignore the never-ending debate on server infrastructure? Up to a point, yes: Investors we talked to are giving entrepreneurs their blessing not to give too much thought to cloud spend in their early days. But the rise of machine learning makes us suspect that answers might soon change. — Anna Bare metal, rehashed If you had a sense of déjà vu this week when David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) announced that Basecamp’s and Hey’s parent company 37signals was leaving the cloud, you are not alone: The debate on the pros and cons of cloud infrastructure sometimes seems stuck on an infinite loop. It is certainly not the first time that I heard 37signals’ core argument: That “renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth.” In fact, both DHH’s rationale and its detractors strongly reminded me of the years-old discussion that expense management company Expensify ignited when it defended its choice to go bare metal — that is, to run its own servers. However, it would be wrong to think that the parameters of the cloud versus on-premise debate have remained unchanged. As Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh noted in our cloud investor survey, there’s more to on-prem these days than running your own servers. Debate aside, I think most of us can agree that bare metal is not for everyone, which is why it’s interesting to see a middle ground emerge. “In terms of terminology,” Ghosh said, “I think on-prem should also be called ‘modern on-prem,’ which Replicated coined, as it addresses not just bare metal self-managed servers but also virtual private clouds, etc.”

5 cloud investors illustrate the various paths ahead for startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in cloud cost optimization, cloud infrastructure, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC investor survey, Enterprise, enterprise startups, investor survey, StartupsNo Comments

Cloud cost optimization startups have become ubiquitous, and they’ve found a friendly ear among enterprise clients looking to cut costs amid the downturn. But should younger startups similarly scrutinize their cloud spend? According to several cloud investors, startups should prioritize building over optimization — unless it’s going to save them a big chunk of money. Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh summed it up succinctly: “In early product or go-to-market stages, optimizing cloud spend should be the last thing on a founder’s mind besides utilizing as much cloud resource credits as possible.” We’re widening our lens, looking for more investors to participate in ZebethMedia surveys, where we poll top professionals about challenges in their industry. If you’re an investor and would like to participate in future surveys, fill out this form. While founders shouldn’t lose sleep over cloud costs at the early stages, they should still carefully ponder other expansionary decisions, like cloud marketplaces, before foraying out. Himself an entrepreneur, angel investor Anshu Sharma noted that using cloud marketplaces as a distribution channel has pros and cons, and shouldn’t perhaps be done from Day 1 because “it can commoditize your offering.” Quiet Capital founding partner Astasia Myers concurred, saying startups should focus on finding product-market fit first. “We encourage startups to consider cloud marketplaces once they have found product–market fit, not before,” she said. “To successfully leverage cloud marketplaces, a solution’s product marketing, value proposition, and return on investment need to be clear while exhibiting a fast time to value, which happens post-PMF.” However, because of how fast things are moving, startups can explore marketplaces earlier than they could: “Historically we saw startups join cloud marketplaces at Series D+. Now we are starting to see companies consider it post Series B.” Founders should also remember that startups are destined to become bigger, and should therefore plan ahead. “It’s always important to select a technology stack that is available in all major cloud providers and that is as elastic as possible to support those migrations should they be needed (using Kubernetes is a great example of allowing for that),” Liran Grinberg, co-founder and managing partner at Team8 said. To find out what cloud-related advice investors are giving startups these days, we spoke with: Shomik Ghosh, partner, Boldstart Ventures Liran Grinberg, co-founder and managing partner, Team8 Tim Tully, partner, Menlo Ventures Astasia Myers, founding partner, Quiet Capital Anshu Sharma, angel investor and co-founder & CEO, Skyflow Shomik Ghosh, partner, Boldstart Ventures Founders are looking to cut costs amid the downturn. How important is it for startups to optimize their cloud spend in the early days? It depends on what is meant by “early days”. In early product or go-to-market (GTM) stages, optimizing cloud spend should be the last thing on a founder’s mind besides utilizing as much cloud resource credits as possible. Finding product-market fit, engaged users, and understanding the end-user workflow and how the product is essential to these users is the most important area founders need to focus on. As the company starts to have a few million in ARR, then it starts to make sense to manage cloud spend more closely to improve gross margins and therefore the bottom line (net cash burn or free cash flow). Major cloud providers often lure startups with free credit, but they also charge data egress fees later on. As cost optimization becomes a bigger consideration than ever, how consequential are early stage decisions on choosing a cloud provider? I think picking a cloud provider at the early stage based on cost is missing the forest for the trees. I know some founders who, in the early days, switch cloud providers to keep utilizing free credits. This may be possible when there are only a few people on the team, but as the team gets bigger, everyone needs to learn and relearn documentation, APIs, and UIs, which has a bigger hidden “cost” than any money being saved. Cost optimization is not just the size of the bill at the end of the month. It’s also the velocity of the team’s product development, downtime avoided, developer experience to allow teams to move faster, etc. All of these points should be top of mind when choosing a cloud provider at the early stages. What are the pros and cons of using a multi-cloud setup instead of building on top of a single public cloud? As a company scales, teams become a bit more focused on functional areas. In the early days, everyone does everything, but as the team scales, you have not just a backend infra team but inside of that, a database team, a security team, an ML team, a QA team, etc. Multi-cloud can help get the benefits of best-of-breed tooling from each cloud provider. In the early stages of a startup’s life, it is most important to go from 0 to 1. Astasia Myers, founding partner, Quiet Capital For example, Google BigQuery may be better for some use cases than Redshift or Azure Synapse, while AWS may have the best infra management tooling. The trade-off, of course, is having to make all those tools across platforms interoperable, and the major cloud providers are not exactly incentivized to do this. This is where startups come in, and by focusing on making one product the best, they can work across platforms and integrate easily (i.e. Snowflake can be used across any major cloud provider). When should a startup consider going on-prem, if at all? Would you advise AI/ML startups any differently? In terms of terminology, I think on-prem should also be called “modern on-prem,” which Replicated coined, as it addresses not just bare metal self-managed servers, but also virtual private clouds. The most common reason startups should consider modern on-prem is for dealing with sensitive data, which especially occurs in regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, or pharma). The scope of what is considered sensitive is growing over time with regulations though, so it’s something more startups need to be aware of. A lot of

PLG and enterprise sales, SaaS pricing strategy, OPT options • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in cloud infrastructure, EC roundup, immigration law, Product-led growth strategy, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

After staging our first ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco in three years, Slack is much quieter than usual this morning. My colleagues are flying home to cities as far flung as Taipei, Paris and London; I just took a streetcar home, which should keep my expense report simple. Moscone Center did not look like we’re experiencing a downturn in tech: the Expo Hall and demo booths were buzzing, and attendees were networking with enthusiasm in the hallways (are business cards making a comeback?). Full ZebethMedia+ articles are only available to membersUse discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription Next week, I’ll share a recap of the panel I moderated, “Taking the BS out of your TAM.” In a conversation with Kara Nortman (Upfront Ventures), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures) and Deena Shakir (Lux Capital), we explored the many mistakes first-time founders make when calculating the size of their market, and pinned down the information investors are actually looking for. Everyone had actionable insights to share, and more than one attendee stopped me in the hallways afterwards to let me know how much they appreciated our frank discussion. If you don’t want to wait for my recap, you can watch a video of the panel right now. Thanks again to everyone who participated! Walter ThompsonEditorial Manager, ZebethMedia+@yourprotagonist 2023 VC predictions: Finding an exit from the ‘messy middle’ Eric Tarczynski, managing partner and founder of Contrary Capital, says we are entering a “messy middle” era for venture capital: “Companies can no longer raise $5 million to $10 million seed rounds with nothing but a deck and the assumption that revenue multiples will skyrocket beyond historical norms,” he writes in a TC+ guest post. Looking ahead to 2023, Tarczynski foresees an environment where “the VC landscape has started to bifurcate,” as “slow M&A activity and no IPOs” and “good companies in ‘safe’ industries” temper investor expectations. Read this before you reprice your SaaS product because of the downturn Image Credits: Richard Drury (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Many startups are lowering their prices in an attempt to retain customers and reduce churn during the downturn. “But is that actually helpful advice for SaaS founders?” asks Torben Friehe, CEO and co-founder of Wingback. “As far as I can see, it isn’t for most.” Instead of being reactive, Friehe says SaaS startups should instead revisit their ideal customer profile and revise their messaging. “This adverse economic climate may actually be a time when you have more leverage and can demand higher prices for your product.” Dear Sophie: How can I launch a startup while on OPT? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/ZebethMedia Dear Sophie, I’m an international student in the U.S. in F-1 status. I will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in computer science this May and plan to apply for OPT. I want to launch a startup. Can I do that with OPT? What options would I have after OPT to continue growing my company? — Forward-Looking Founder The Great Migration and the next 10-year cycle in cloud Image Credits: Tim Robberts (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Now that the public cloud market has undergone a correction after years of growth, will seasoned workers look for greener pastures at smaller companies? According to Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, we’re entering a decade-long cycle that will spark a Great Migration of talent. “The answer is clear once you think about it,” he says. “Companies are extending cash runways, and cloud leaders are feeling that pain as they lay off parts of their teams and face even more work and pressure.” How to combine PLG and enterprise sales to improve the funnel and drive bottom-line growth Image Credits: Richard Drury (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Products and services that sell themselves sound great, but product-led growth (PLG) startups still launch marketing campaigns and hire sales teams. Combining PLG with traditional sales-led growth efforts can raise retention and acquisition to the next level, says Kate Ahlering, chief revenue officer at Calendly. In this TC+ guest post, Ahlering lays out multiple strategies that will help teams implement a “hybrid GTM strategy,” which includes suggestions for leveraging PLG data and optimizing success metrics.