Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #79: For the week ended May 12, 2020

Insight Series: Starting this week, we are launching a series of short, focused, and easy-to-consume interactive webinars for early-stage enterprise tech founders anywhere. Each webinar will be a condensed 30-minute interactive session on a topic, with a quick presentation by a subject-matter expert, followed by audience Q&A — allowing you to hear some perspectives and get back to your day — hopefully a bit wiser and refreshed. Our first session is with Uri Baruchin, an award-winning creative strategist and branding expert (and a part of Angular’s extended team). Uri will be sharing his learnings from working across B2C and B2B with both household names and early-stage startups. Key branding topics will be covered in this webinar, including: how and when early-stage startups should invest in their branding, naming, pivots, and more.

Click here to register for Uri’s session on Branding tomorrow and stay tuned for upcoming sessions include with Jerry Dischler, Martin Henk, Yaron Galai, Christina Fonseca, Geatan Gachet and others.

Coronavirus Impact Survey. Last week, we released our Coronavirus Impact Survey — a detailed survey of 128 founders across 28 countries. The results paint a stark portrait of the widespread impact of the Coronavirus recession on founders across industries, stages, and countries. If you haven’t done so already, check it out.

Below is a graph (from the survey) that illustrates that we may just be at the end of an era. The annual (YoY) growth rate in VC dollars invested was lower in 1Q than its been in more than three years. The annual growth rate for April was negative. The data shows two distinct booms in VC acceleration: one that peaked in 3Q17 and one that peaked in 2Q19. Even before Coronavirus, we are clearly at an inflection point. I suspect that 1Q20 still contains a lot of dealmaking that was decided upon before Coronavirus set in. We’re hearing anecdotally about term sheets being pulled left and right. We’ll see where 2Q20 comes out, but I’m not counting on an increase in volumes anytime soon.

Musical diversions: I’m not sure, but I think I found the perfect theme song for 2020. Let me know if you’ve got a better one.

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 events with our community of early-stage enterprise tech founders from across Europe and Israel. These 30-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.

• May 13: Startup Branding with Uri Baruchin, globally renowned branding strategies (and Angular Advisory Partner)

• May 27: Product Management with Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management for AdWords at Google (and Angular Advisory Partner)

• June 10: Enterprise Product Strategy with Vivek Saraswat, investor at Mayfield Partners and former product leader at Docker, VMware, and AWS

• June 24: Mistakes Slowing Your Growth with Guy Poreh, former Head of Digital BBDO, the Chief Innovation Officer at Silver + Partners, and Founder of Playground (and Angular Ventures Advisory Partner)

Stay tuned for upcoming sessions with: Martin Henk of Pipeline, Fred Simon of Jfrog, Omri Tamir of Datorama, Yaron Galai of Outbrain, Geatan Gachet of Algolia, and more.

From the blog

Coronavirus Impact Survey. We surveyed over 120 founders from around the world on how they are responding to Coronavirus.
Surviving Coronavirus. A guide for founders and some resources on remote work. Also, some straight talk on VC fundraising in 2020.
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

• Israel/Tech Jobs. How the HR landscape has shifted for Israeli tech companies. “If in the past it would take three months and we would only receive medium-level applications, today we get to choose between four outstanding candidates. We are getting more applications in general, and specifically from experienced candidates.”

• Germany/Tax Automation. Zeitgold raised $29M for its automated bookkeeping software for SMBs.

• Israel/Cloud Security. Orca Security raised $20M for its for ‘agentless’ cloud security technology that provides thorough protection of multi-cloud systems, monitoring the entire infrastructure in minutes.

• Cyprus/AI Customer Support. Omilia raised $20 million for its conversational AI technology, built for the customer care needs of global enterprises.

• Israel/Cloud Access. Ermetic raised $10M to protect enterprise from cloud data breaches by detecting all human and machine identities in the cloud and analysing their access privileges.

• UK/Data Ecosystem. Harbr raised $6M to help enterprises build online data marketplaces

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Towards a new set of CFO tools. A16Z looks at the modern CFO’s hierarchy of needs, and the tools to support them. “Increasingly, companies in this space also have the ability to monetize with fintech, through transaction revenues, lending, or even insurance. This shift has been driven by a few trends. First, companies are eager to transact online — it’s viewed as more efficient and trustworthy than cutting paper checks to pay invoices or payroll. Second, we’ve witnessed the creation of a fintech infrastructure that enables companies to take payments and connect with banking partners.”

• The new normal for office life. The Economist looks at how work in offices may be permanently changed by Coronavirus. The Guardian zooms in on videoconferencing and wonders if its right for all types of meetings. Apparently, Google, Facebook, and other tech giants are expecting their offices to be shuttered until the end of the year.

• The disaggregation of Zapier. We are seeing the trend to verticalization everywhere, and application integration is no exception. “As I was looking at some of these workflows, I couldn’t help but think how there will be this eventual shift like with Craiglist where companies will spring up that just focus on certain more complex popular workflows.”

• Coronavirus accelerates the move away from legacy call centers. It’s apparently been a boon to companies like LivePerson. “”The COVID crisis was a wake-up call that the legacy call center model is a relic and incapable of supporting a remote home-based workforce,” said LivePerson CEO and founder, Rob LoCascio. “Whereas the corporate world turned to video conferencing applications to support office workers, LiveEngage is filling the void for the contact center. We are seeing Conversational Commerce adoption trends accelerate with many of our customers, and a new normal is emerging where brands are leading with AI-powered messaging built and managed by work from home agents.””

• Notion on Notion. Yes, it’s content marketing, but it’s brilliantly done. “We’re in a unique position to show you how to use this tool because we made the thing. We know its nooks and crannies and generally try to stretch its limits. Our goal here is to pop the hood on our internal Notion setup so you can see what we’ve built, how it helps us get more done, and how you can create something similar yourself.”

• AIOps. The New Stack takes a looks at the emerging world of AIOps. It’s clear that with the rapid adoption of AI there remain challenges that service assurance organizations must address.

• Google + Zoom. The Information on how Google considered buying Zoom.

• Cockroach labs. The cloud-native transactional DB company raised $86M.

How to Startup

• Real growth is personal. Fred Wilson highlights two problematic leadership traits: “I got this” and “deer in the headlights.” “I’ve got this” is more problematic. The leader acts like they know what they are doing, but they don’t. And everyone around them knows it except them. I like to provide a leader with “I’ve got this” syndrome with a lot of tough love but that is usually not enough. The answer to “I’ve got this” is usually failure of some sort, often a very significant one. The key is to be there for the failing leader in that moment and help them get through the failure and come out of it with self awareness and a desire to address the issues that have gotten in the way.

• Category creation. An (audio) conversation with Viviana Faga on category creation, one of the most important things to get right from the earliest stages.

• Adapting to Recession. George Roberts of Openview shares his insights. Step one: Tighten your focus. Going into a crisis, companies are often running a lot of optional initiatives for experimentation’s sake or another reason. There’s nothing wrong with these activities during the usual course of business, but a crisis demands that we take a bare-bones approach.

• Solo founders? New research suggests that solo founders may not necessarily underperform teams.

• Guide to remote work. Zapier publishes a detailed guide to remote work. Aside from recommending their own product (for which we will forgive them), it’s very good.

How to Venture

• Interview with Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital. A video interview with Josh Wolfe, the man behind one of the most aggressive deep tech VC funds out there.

Portfolio News

Candu’s CEO, Jonathan Anderson, spoke about his journey to start Candu and pivot from an in-app LMS to a UI builder in the latest CELab: the Customer Education Lab podcast.

Crux OCM recently presented at Plug and Play Energy’s event Cutting Costs in Today’s Oil Patch.

Datos Health’s FDA-cleared remote care system is designed to support hospitals by helping keep suspected Coronavirus patients, and those infected but not requiring hospitalization, at home while still providing them with optimal care.

Planable was featured as one of the 15 social media management tools for 2020.