Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #85: For the week ended June 29, 2020

This week’s must-read is by Tracy Young, founder and CEO of Plangrid, on the realities of being a female founder. Plangrid is a leading SaaS company in construction software that graduated YC, raised $70M, employs 500 people, and was acquired by Autodesk for $875M in 2018. Tracy’s writing makes powerful reading — honest and full of details that bring the reality home — especially to male readers who — despite our best efforts — may not be able to fully imagine what our female colleagues and counterparts are experiencing.

A special event this week: The Future of Retail. This week, we are very excited to be hosting Francesca Danzi as our guest for Angular Insights. Francesca is a NY-based retail strategist who held senior roles at Tory Burch, Chanel, and Burberry — where she was part of that brand’s famous digital transformation effort. She will be talking about how global retailers are adjusting to the double tsunami of rapid digitization and Coronavirus. This week alone, Microsoft decided to shut its retail operation and Intu (one of the UK’s largest mall operators) filed for bankruptcy. Major brands and retailers are developing new strategies for adjusting to our rapidly changing world. Please join us for an interactive discussion with Francesca, this coming Wednesday. Click here to register and join us.

A helpful framework for thinking about Coronavirus. This is not a newsletter about Coronavirus, but I did want to share this interview with Professor Yehuda Carmeli, the head of Israel’s National Institute for Antibiotic Resistance and Infection Control, Heads of the Department of Epidemiology at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and professor at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. It’s the most helpful thing I’ve read on Coronavirus in while. That said, we should probably all stop doomscrolling.

As always, if you are building an enterprise or deep tech startup in Europe or Israel, please let me know… Now let’s get to the news.

Angular Insights: Talks for Enterprise Founders

Angular is hosting a series of online interactive talks with our community of early-stage enterprise tech founders from across Europe and Israel. These 45-minute talks are designed to deliver practical startup advice in an easy-to-consumer format — with plenty of opportunities to engage with our speakers. Typically, these take place on Wednesday at 3pm UK, 4pm CET, 5pm Israel. To register for any of the talks, just click on the links below.

• July 1: The Future of Retail with Francesca Danzi, Former Chief Client Officer at Tory Burch

• July 8: Building an AI-Driven Startup with Micha Breakstone, Co-Founder of Chorus.ai

• July 22: Pitching Media Right Now with Beck Bamberger, CEO of BAM Communications

Check out: www.angularventures.com/events for additional upcoming events, recordings of past events, and to subscribe to our event series.

From the blog

Defining Enterprise/Deep Tech. What do we actually mean by the phrase “enterprise or deep tech?”
Introducing the Angular Ventures Team. Getting to know Anne and Andrew.
Launching Angular Ventures I. What we do, why we exist, and how we got here.
US incorporation? Just do it. Why nearly all enterprise tech companies should incorporate in Delaware.
Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform.
A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity.
A System of Intelligence for Field Service: Why we invested in Aquant.io.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• US Immigration/AI Supremacy/Trump 2020. Setting up US operations is a core part of the journey to global domination for most European or Israeli startups. Trump has done a lot to make that harder and less pleasant. Israeli tech executives are debating the potential silver linings of the new policies, and there is a push-back starting led by the tech community in the US. Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute of AI, argues forcefully that the administration should establish a “special visa program for AI students and experts to help [the US] win [the AI] race for the sake of both economic vitality and national security.” The pendulum on this will swing sharply over the next few years. I’m cautiously optimistic that the US has had enough of Trump’s policies, just ask the Rajun Cajun.

• Germany/Payments. Payments provider Wirecard imploded in a cloud of accounting scandals and arrests, and the effects appear to be reverberating through the fintech ecosystem. “There have also been fears about possible disruption to Wirecard’s fintech clients — which include Revolut, Pockit, Soldo and Curve — who rely on the German tech-darling for card issuance, account top-ups and other e-money services.”

• Israel/IoT Security. Microsoft bought CyberX for $165M. “With CyberX, customers can see a digital map of thousands of devices across a factory floor or within a building and gather information about their asset profile and vulnerabilities.”

• UK/API Payments. Checkout raised $150M for its API-based platform enables merchants to build checkout experiences that accept multiple forms of payments.

• UK/Virtual Events. Hopin raised $40 million for its platform where organizers can create, host and manage live events.

• Israel/Data Insights. SQream raised $40M for its data analytics acceleration platform that enables enterprises to gain insights from their massive data stores.

• Germany/Open Source Audio. Rasa raised $26M from Andreessen Horowitz for its Open source conversational AI platform.

• France/Video Selfie Security. Ubble raised $10M for its identity verification platform that relies on live video streaming and AI to help companies verify the authenticity of a person trying to e.g. open a bank account, signing a temporary work contract etc. and thus prevent fraud.

• Israel/Cross Environment Security. Authorize raised $6M to help organization manage and secure complex and vastly different applications across cloud and on-premise applications.

• Israel/Code Instrumentation. Lightrun (formerly Athena) raised $4M to change the way developers can interact with and modify compiled code. (Congrats, Ilan!) Lightrun’s technology is used to improve companies’ development ecosystem and allows programmers to gather data on live applications and debug the code in real time, without having to redeploy a new version every time they want to add or change the code. Programmers can use Lightrun’s extension to add logs, performance metrics and traces to operating production and staging platforms, gather the data required to understand a problem, and send it to their logging system.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• What comes after Zoom? Zoom has become nearly synonymous with work (or birthday parties or meetings with friends) in the time of Coronavirus, but Benedict Evans asks some thought-provoking questions about what happens as the world moves beyond Zoom. “Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but hasn’t really asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is that the purpose of this moment? What is the ‘mute’ button for — background noise, or so I can talk to someone else, or is it so I can turn it off to raise my hand? What social purpose is ‘mute’ actually serving? What is screen-sharing for? What other questions could one ask? And so if Zoom is the Dropbox or Skype of video, we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse, and Yo.”

• Amazon moves into no-code. AWS launched Honeycode, a spreadsheet-like no-code platform. Techcrunch has good coverage of it. “For us, it was about extending the power of AWS to more and more users across our customers,” explained [AWS VP Larry] Augustin. “We consistently hear from customers that there are problems they want to solve, they would love to have their IT teams or other teams — even outsourced help — build applications to solve some of those problems. But there’s just more demand for some kind of custom application than there are available developers to solve it.”

How to Startup

• How to make decisions. I missed this when it first came out in April, but Villi Iltchev (partner at Two Sigma) offers four clear pieces of tangible advice for how leaders should make decisions. My favorite is #2: Don’t waste time debating two-way doors. “One-way doors are the types of decisions that require careful consideration and analysis. They are worthy of debate and deliberation. But, those decisions are very few. The majority of decisions an organization makes are two-way doors. They can easily be reversed with more experience or data. Good companies do not dwell on two-way doors. They thrive on making decisions quickly and efficiently, which allows them to learn faster and make adjustments.”

• SaaS Product Benchmarks. Openview put out a comprehensive set of benchmarks on SaaS products including trial conversion rates, retention rates, activation rates, PQLs, etc.

• What are growth funds looking for? My friend Yasmin Razavi, GP at Spark, provides a concise and useful set of answers. One snippet: “9. Go-to-market org: Number of quota-carrying reps, quotas, on-target earnings (OTE), time to ramp, historical quota attainment by rep. You want to see consistency across reps and obviously the higher the attainment the better.”

• Rules for healthcare startups. Bessemer published “10 Laws of Healthcare.” “Nearly 60% of healthcare purchases are made after seven months of sales conversations, making healthcare sales cycles notoriously slow. While frustrating for companies, the industry operates in a highly regulated and technologically complex industry governed by the Hippocratic Oath.”

• Selling founders’ equity? Everyone is doing it. Jason Lemkin “writes that this practice is commonplace for rounds at $80M+ valuations, and offers some advice to founders. “Some, not all, investors will get nervous if the absolute $$$ are too much. Selling some shares at $100m for a downpayment on a house? Doesn’t create anxiety. Cashing out $5m in a hot deal? Who >wouldn’t< worry?”

• Two SaaS for the pain of one. Pietro Bezza of Connect Ventures (congrats to him, Sitar, and Rory on the new fund!) writes that some of the most interesting companies combine two products in one. “I characterize it as a T-shaped proposition. A horizontal tool superpowered with a vertical something: a financial product, a transactional product, a productized professional service. Paraphrasing Chris Dixon, Come for the something, stay for the tool. Or vice-versa. The horizontal layer is the workflow UX wrapped around the vertical layer, which is the industry-specific technology (ex. Fintech, Travel Tech or HR Tech).”

• How to think about free trials. Jason Lemkin also weighed in this week with some helpful thoughts about how to approach free trials, including links to talked by Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint and Eric Yuan of Zoom.

How to Venture

• Marvin Liao finally blogs. The veteran 500 startups partner, frequent European conference speaker, and absolutely lovely person Marvin Liao has started a blog. He identities five signs of “Top of Bubble” and believes we hit them in 3Q19, well before Coronavirus slammed the brakes on tech (and everything else). “This is gonna suck and I don’t enjoy seeing this. But this rebuilding is when we will see a lot of amazing new world changing startups and teams come to the fore. We just need to survive the nuclear winter of 2020 (and probably 2021).”

Portfolio News

Valohai’s CEO, Eero Laaksonen, discussed the emerging creed of MLOps — the art of managing Machine Learning workflows, on the latest Inference podcast.

Vault Platform’s CEO, Neta Meidav, published an article in HR Magazine on Adidas employees’ push for their executives to revamp the company’s process for workplace misconduct reporting.

DUST Identity’s CEO, Ophir Gaathon, was recently interviewed by Bloomberg News on Trump’s power grid orders and complexities around authenticating overseas parts.

JFrog has extended the reach and scope of CI/CD platform.

Sisense is one of the nine Israeli-founded unicorns which now calls New York home.