Enterprise

Microsoft says GitHub now has a $1B ARR, 90M active users • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Enterprise, GitHub, MicrosoftNo Comments

As part of its earnings call, Microsoft today announced a number of new data points for GitHub, the massively popular code repository service it acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018. According to Microsoft, GitHub now has an annual recurring revenue of $1 billion, up from a reported $200 to $300 million at the time of the acquisition. The company also announced that the service now has over 90 million active users on the platform, up from 28 million when the acquisition closed and 73 million last November, when Thomas Dohmke replaced Nat Friedman as the service’s CEO. This marks the first time Microsoft has shared any financial data about the service the acquisition closed. “Since our acquisition, GitHub is now at $1 billion annual recurring revenue and GitHub’s developer-first ethos has never been stronger,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in today’s earnings call. “More than 90 million people now use the service to build software for any cloud, on any platform — up three times.” For the most part, Microsoft let GitHub be GitHub since the acquisition closed. Early on, a lot of developers — and especially open-source advocates — worried that Microsoft would change the way the service operated and reduce its free offerings in order to squeeze more money out of it. But instead, GitHub expanded its free service and has continued to embrace open source and open-source developers. Meanwhile, projects like GitHub Copilot probably wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Microsoft. And while some users defected to GitLab and other services, the new users numbers speak for themselves.

Five questions to consider ahead of Big Tech’s Q3 earnings • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Amazon earnings, apple earnings, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Enterprise Applications, EC Newsletter, Enterprise, Startups, tech earnings, The ExchangeNo Comments

Today after the bell, Alphabet and Microsoft will report their calendar third-quarter financial results. Given the breadth of industries that each of these companies touch, their performance will provide us with rich data concerning different areas of the technology landscape. The fun will continue tomorrow when Meta reports its own results. And later this week, we’ll hear from Apple and Amazon, completing the “Big Five” technology earnings reporting cycle in just a handful of days. Get ready for a blizzard of numbers. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Most folks don’t love reading earnings reports, dry documents that are an odd combination of canned CEO-speak and raw numbers. The proffered executive commentary is too pre-chewed to mean much, and numbers are just that: figures on a page. To help you cut a useful line through the upcoming numerical flurry, I’ve detailed below five questions that ZebethMedia+ wants to answer in the coming days. Our queries are centered around issues that impact startups, so we’ll relate each question and its supporting data points back to upstart tech companies.

RapidSOS, a big data platform for emergency first responders, raises $75M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Enterprise, SecurityNo Comments

Emergency response services have had a big boost of data thanks to advances in connected technology, with watches that can detect when their wearers are falling down and are experiencing trauma, cars that can pinpoint where their drivers are located, and home systems that can transmit important data about fires when you cannot just a few of the innovations we’ve seen in recent years. Today, a startup called RapidSOS, which helps connect those data points with those who can turn them into action, is announcing some funding as it continues to grow. The startup has raised $75 million from a group of investors led by security and safety specialist VC NightDragon, with participation also from BAM Elevate, Insight Partners, Honeywell, Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12, Axon, Citi via the Citi Impact Fund, Highland Capital Partners, Playground Global, Forte Ventures, C5 Capital, and Avanta Venture. RapidSOS founder and CEO Michael Martin said that it is not disclosing valuation but it has now raised more than $250 million, and will be using this latest capital injection both expand its technology and its business overall. The two go hand-in-hand: RapidSOS works with major device and software makers, from whom it takes the data points that their services create; applies data science to them to make better sense of the information; and translates that into information that emergency response centers — using a wide variety of their own software — can then use to do their work in triaging and calling out response teams. Considering that emergencies are precisely the kinds of critical situations that need to work quickly and efficiently, the landscape of players involved is in reality huge and fragmented. RapidSOS currently counts 90 tech companies (covering more than 500,000 connected devices and buildings), over 50 public safety vendors, and 15,000+ first responder agencies as customers and users of its platform. So far this year, this has worked out to handling 130 million emergencies. All those numbers represent big growth for the company over last year, when RapidSOS announced $85 million in funding. But considering there are more than 14.4 billion connected devices globally (that includes IoT), and that data and information in the name of quick response can extend into even more areas like smart traffic routing, there is a lot of room to grow. The company’s business today is primarily in the U.S., with operations also in the U.K./Europe and South America, and services soon to be turned on in Japan (helped by a strategic partnership with one of its investors, NTT DoComo) and South Africa. The heart of RapidSOS’s business is a platform that provides APIs to technology, insurance and healthcare companies (the list of tech companies includes the likes of Apple, Google, Uber, SiriusXM and more), which can in turn be used both to channel data and direct voice connections between those companies’ users and emergency response centers. These work on the basis of continuous monitoring that might or might not have the proactive input of the users themselves, depending on the situation. So global events like the pandemic or a natural disaster might be front of mind as typical use cases (I first heard of the company when it went viral during a string of natural disasters years ago), but others include health monitoring for vulnerable individuals, vehicle crash detection, home security, fire, enterprise security, gunshot detection, personal safety, and critical event management. In addition to the tech that it has built to make those connections and parse the data that comes out of them, it’s proven to be a middle man in translating some of the newer innovations at the tech end into actions at the lower-tech responders’ end. “Before, 911 wouldn’t even know your name,” said Martin. “Now they have a live feed of the situation. It’s half a billion devices now working in harmony to save you.” That work has included RapidSOS giving some 20,000 hours of training each year for emergency response centers to “understand emergency workflows and identify technology solutions to solve hard challenges such as verification,” in the words of the company. Some of the triangulation that it’s devised in aid of that verification is showing up in the company’s IP: it has filed a patent on the use of social media as a channel for emergency management (RapidSOS has dozens of patent and patent applications overall). Martin said that the plan was not to raise so soon again after last year, but given the tricky funding climate, the decision was made to double down now, with NightDragon’s focus being a special draw. The firm has made many investments in cybersecurity, but also others working in the adjacent spaces of security and safety such as HawkEye 360, Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, Capalla Space, Premise Data and Interos. “When we look at building greater security and safety for people around the world, this requires greater and more accurate response services for emergencies,” said Dave DeWalt, NightDragon’s founder (and the former CEO of FireEye, McAfee and Documentum). “By leveraging technology, we can save lives and help people feel more secure. NightDragon feels RapidSOS is best positioned to deliver on this mission, and we look forward to working closely with the team to accelerate it.” NightDragon’s wider activity, and RapidSOS’s growth, both speak to a pretty salient point in the current market. Those building something that might be considered critical are faring the storm better than some others. “We have invested in now 13 companies out of our NightDragon Growth I fund, which we announced last July,” said DeWalt. “We have always been diligent around valuation and ensuring that we are investing at multiples that reflect the value that our team and platform bring to the table. For that reason, our investment strategy in our current market hasn’t changed much as we are still following those core principles.”

Launch House splits with law firm conducting its harassment investigation • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in Brett Goldstein, Enterprise, investigation, Launch House, startup lawNo Comments

It’s been a little over a month since Launch House, a buzzy venture-backed founder’s club backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Day One Ventures, publicly faced numerous allegations of harassment and assault. In response to the allegations first surfaced by the news publication Vox, the startup claimed that it would undergo an independent, third-party investigation. But as some former members of Launch House have noted, the company is using the same law firm for both its defamation warnings and its independent investigation. While it’s not a violation to have the same law firm handle two somewhat connected legal matters – one on behalf of Launch House for defamation and one to look into the allegations raised by victims – it is an optical challenge. After all, Launch House advertised that the firm was expected to conduct a neutral investigation, but it’s not really “third-party” if the same firm is going after employees, members and journalists speaking about the allegations. Indeed, the appearance of conflict of interest – or the idea that the law firm, Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff, LLP – could provide a more favorable outcome to Launch House due to its other work with the startup, was enough to rock the boat. After a ZebethMedia inquiry about Launch House’s heavy reliance on the outfit, co-founder and CEO Brett Goldstein said that the startup has asked the law firm to end its investigation into the company and is turning to another law firm for its fresh perspective. Goldstein said in a statement sent via spokesperson to ZebethMedia: “Launch House has asked Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff, LLP to end its investigation and will be engaging a new law firm, one who has never worked with Launch House before, to conduct a thorough and independent investigation.” Goldstein added that a completely separate team within Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff has been working on the investigation, and that Launch House “trusted their ability to remain impartial with those standard separation practices.” However, he said in his statement, “we do not want there to be even the appearance of any conflict, so a new law firm will be engaged as soon as possible to conduct this crucial work . . .We must learn exactly what happened, so we can best ensure it never happens again.” ZebethMedia reached out to an attorney at the law firm but did not immediately hear back. The company’s most recent town hall, conducted at the end of September, laid out a forward-looking plan to its community. Beyond the investigation, the firm claims it is working with a diversity, equity and inclusion firm to audit and update its processes. It also said it is expanding its zero tolerance policy to cover a broader range of misconduct. The full deck, titled “What’s next for Launch House”, is available publicly.

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.

Docker launches a first preview of its WebAssembly tooling • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in developers, Docker, Enterprise, infrastructure, kubecon detroit 2022, WebAssemblyNo Comments

Docker is still around and likely doing better – at last in financial terms — than during its early hype cycle that kicked off the container revolution (only to then be eclipsed by Kubernetes and its ecosystem). Today, the company announced the first technical preview of its WebAssembly (Wasm) support. Browser vendors pioneered Wasm to run web apps at native speeds, with code compiled from C, C++, Rust and other languages and run in a secure sandbox. Currently, you can compile about 40 languages to Wasm. But similar to how node.js brought JavaScript to the server, Wasm is now also migrating to the backend. Cloudflare supports it in its edge computing service, for example. We’re also starting to see some funding rounds in this space as VCs start waking up to the potential, with Cosmonic today announcing a $9 million funding round for its Wasm PaaS, for example. Fermyon announced a $20 million Series A round earlier this month. Docker clearly wants to be an early player in this space, too. The company notes that this is still very much a technical preview and that things will likely break. In this case, the Docker Engine uses the same containerd container runtime as the rest of the Docker ecosystem, but instead of using runc to run the container processes, it uses the wasmedge runtime. While Docker doesn’t go into details here, the promise of wasmedge is that it offers significantly faster startup times compared to Linux containers and that WasmEdge apps are significantly smaller (and run faster). Image Credits: Docker “We see Wasm as a complementary technology to Linux containers where developers can choose which technology they use (or both!) depending on the use case,” Docker’s Michael Irwin writes in today’s announcement. “And as the community explores what’s possible with Wasm, we want to help make Wasm applications easier to develop, build, and run using the experience and tools you know and love.” In addition to the product news, Docker also today announced that it will be joining the Bytecode Alliance, the non-profit behind WebAssembly and the WebAssembly System Interface that makes these new projects possible, as a voting member.

WeTravel books $27M to build fintech and more for bespoke group travel • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Fintech, Startups, travel, WeTravelNo Comments

Travel is back on the radar for investment, with consumers and business users both on the move again after a long pandemic period of staying in one place. Today, a startup called WeTravel — which builds tech for the specific needs of group travel — has raised $27 million, money that it will be using to expand its business on the heels of strong growth in the last year. The company provides payments and other tools to some 3,000 companies, working out to 500,000 customers using its platform. Transaction volumes have grown 30% and revenues currently sitting at 3X the level it was pre-Covid. And CEO and co-founder Johannes Koeppel said he believes those figures will double again in 2023 “as a conservative estimate.” The Series B is being led by Left Lane Capital, with previous backers Swift Ventures and Base10 also participating alongside angel investors that include Victor Jacobsson, one of the co-founders of Klarna. WeTravel had previously raised only $7 million in the 8 years since it was founded. We understand from sources that this Series B was made at a valuation of a little over $100 million. The startup, fittingly, has done a little traveling of its own. Originally, Keoppel and his two co-founders Garib Mehdiyev (CTO), and Zaky Prabowo (CMO) had moved out from The Netherlands to the Bay Area to start the business, only to find it impossible to navigate the visa waters to bring engineers and other technical talent over, too. So in 2019, WeTravel’s three founders relocated back across the pond to The Netherlands. Covid put paid to the idea that a startup needs to have its team in one place, and today, the majority of the company’s business team and customers are in the U.S., and it’s incorporated there, while the three founders, as well as WeTravel’s product and engineering teams, are all in Amsterdam. The gap in the market WeTravel is going after is one that seems to have been created, ironically, with the growth of online travel services. In the old, pre-internet days, travel agents ruled the roost when it came to booking tickets and overall vacations for many consumers and businesses, both as individuals and groups. Online tools have changed the game for individuals, but interestingly the same doesn’t apply to groups that want to, say, book a multi-day trip or retreat that might involve several hotels, activities, and food, which can involve multiple people, multiple locations, potentially hundreds of suppliers (not just hotels and airlines, but restaurants, excursion operators, insurance providers and much more), and the need for flexible paying options — different people paying different amounts, payments in installments, and lump sum payments that in turn need to be itemized across different suppliers. “The important piece is not so much about paying but what happens afterwards,” Keoppel said, “what the travel company has to do with these funds. A typical trip might cost $10 to the user, with the vast majority of that going to suppliers. It becomes about fund management. And more involved the trip, the larger the amount of suppliers from restaurants and transport companies to airlines and hotels and more.” On top of that there are wire fees and different payment methods business to business, country to country. WeTravel’s platform covers two main parts of that process: helping those putting the group travel together to organize suppliers and plan everything; and then handling the different aspects of the payment process, whether that involves setting up payments in installments, or working with various currencies and payment methods, and paying out to different suppliers under their individual terms. Keoppel describes the fintech side of the business as “the PayPal for travel” and says that it’s complex enough that companies like PayPal, Stripe and other big names in online payments haven’t really been able to address the particular segment of the market that WeTravel is serving, especially when used in tandem with the first part of its product set to coordinate itineraries and suppliers. Keoppel believes this is a template we might be seeing more in the B2B fintech world. “My belief is that there will be in the next couple of years more specific SaaS platforms that integrate payments as component for specific industries,” he said. (Indeed, today you already have some addressing this for, say, beauty and wellness, with companies like Fresha, Boulevard and Style Seat building tools specifically for the needs of that vertical.) This is also something that WeTravel’s customers also have sometimes tried but failed to build themselves. As travel agents have become “travel advisors” and focus on these bespoke travel experiences, some have turned, he said, to “custom-made systems they build themselves, but what I’ve realized is that what is lacking is the end customer experience. They don’t have the time to build the beautiful invoicing system plus payment methods, and all of the rest.” One thing that WeTravel does not currently do is offer discovery to its users — that is, travel advisors might still turn to their little black books, or these days maybe TripAdvisor, Yelp, or other recommendation and discovery platforms, to find interesting restaurants and more. This is something that WeTravel could potentially move into as it grows. `One significant elephant in the room is what happens when other big travel platforms consider how they might do more in this area: they already have all the big supplier relationships and it might be a matter of building or buying tools to meet this use case. Vinny Pujji, who led the investment for Left Lane, recalled that his parents once ran a travel agency, “so this was a cool one for me to see,” he said. “You bump into sneaky big markets and this is absolutely one of them.” He noted that the Covid winter that descended on travel does appear to be thawing, even in the current economic climate. “The data tells us that travel is mostly back now,” he said. He points out thought that

Fermyon raises $20M to build tools for cloud app dev • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in Amplify Partners, Apps, cloud, Dev, Enterprise, Fermyon, funding, Insight Partners, startup, Startups, WebAssemblyNo Comments

Matt Butcher and Radu Matei worked on container technologies for years, “containers” in this context referring to software packages containing all the necessary elements to run in any environment, from desktop PCs to servers. As engineers at Deis, and then DeisLabs once Microsoft acquired it in 2017, their team explored the container landscape and built the package manager Helm as well as Brigade and other tooling. Along the journey, they faced myriad problems with containers — namely speed and cost. The setbacks spurred them and a handful of other DeisLabs veterans to found Fermyon, which today closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors. Fermyon offers a managed cloud service, Fermyon Cloud, that allows developers to quickly build microservices, or pieces of apps that work independently, but together (e.g., if one microservice fails, it won’t bring down the others). “Fermyon is building the next wave of cloud services atop WebAssembly,” Butcher said, referring to the open standard that allows web browsers to run binary code. “Originally written for the browser, WebAssembly has all of the earmarks of an excellent cloud compute platform … [Its] combination of features got us excited. Fermyon set out to build a suite of tools that enables developers to build, deploy, and then operate WebAssembly binaries in a cloud context.” Butcher argues WebAssembly is superior to containers in a number of respects, such as start-up time and compatibility across operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac plus hardware platforms like Intel and Arm. It’s also more secure, he asserts, because it can safely execute even untrusted code. To explore WebAssembly’s container-replacing potential, Fermyon developed Spin, an open source dev tool for creating WebAssembly cloud apps. Fermyon Cloud is the evolution of this work, providing a platform where customers can host those apps. “Fermyon Cloud empowers developers to deploy … applications written in a variety of languages (such as Rust, .NET, Go, JavaScript) and experience brilliantly fast performance,” Butcher said. “[A]nyone with a GitHub account can create cloud native WebAssembly applications … The developer self-service paradigm reduces the friction of building applications by making it not only possible but easy for developers to write and test their code in a production-grade environment — and then deploy the finished version to that same hosted environment. Fermyon Cloud lets devs create up to five web apps or microservices and run them in a hosted environment for free. In addition to hosting applications, the service delivers release management, log access and app configuration from a web console. With employees now in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, Fermyon’s focus is continuing to build out both its open source and commercial projects, Butcher said. Fermyon Cloud will expand into an “enterprise-ready” commercial offering in the coming months, he added, as Fermyon looks to double its 20-person headcount by mid-2023 — emphasizing product, marketing, developer relations and community roles. “We are well-positioned to weather macro-economic storms due to the financing we’re announcing today,” said Butcher while declining to reveal revenue figures. “[We] have funds to last us several years.” To date, Colorado-based Fermyon has raised $26 million.

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

A brief history of activist investors in tech and the role they play • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in activist investors, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise, investing, Salesforce, Starboard ValueNo Comments

On Tuesday, activist investor Starboard Value revealed a significant stake in Salesforce, sending the company’s stock climbing more than 7%. A hedge fund founded in 2002 by Jeffrey Smith and Mark Mitchell, Starboard has a history of affecting change at major companies, spurring the spinning off of media startup Patch from AOL in 2014 and the replacement of the entire board of directors at Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse. Activist investors — typically specialized hedge funds that buy significant minority stakes in publicly traded companies with the goal of changing how they’re run — have become more active within the tech sector in recent years. According to an analysis by Bloomberg Law, investor activists launched more campaigns in tech during Q2 2022 than in any other sector. But how many of these activists have been successful in achieving their aims? It depends on how you define success. A Harvard, Columbia and Duke University study published in 2013 looked at 2,000 interventions by hedge fund activists from 1994 to 2007. It found that, in the short run, stocks tend to rise around 6% when activist investors get involved. And the upswings aren’t temporary. In the five years after activist investors show up on the scene, the stock prices of companies targeted by them tended to hold onto the initial gains — even when the activists employed hostile tactics. Consider the split-up of Motorola’s business in 2008, a move advocated by activist investor Carl Icahn. In 2011, owners of Motorola held stock worth over 20% more than it was before the split — much of it as a result of Google’s deal to buy Motorola’s mobile-focused spinout Motorola Mobility. As Icahn predicted, divvying up the company made the individual pieces more enticing. That’s not always the case, however — as the past decade or so shows.