Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #91: For the week ended September 1, 2020

Author

Angular Ventures
September 01, 2020

Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #91: For the week ended September 1, 2020

A big week for enterprise tech IPOs. The past week saw a rush of major tech companies filing to go public in the US, including a number of companies with European or Israeli connections.

A big week for Angular’s Insights series. We are back from a brief summer break. This week, we are hosting David Peterson, who leads business development for Airtable, in an interactive discussion on the intersection of two of the biggest themes in software: product-led growth and no-code software. Join us this Wednesday at 10am Eastern, 3pm UK, 4pm CET, or 5pm Israel. Click here to register and check out David’s recent blog post on why “no code operations” will be the next big job in tech.

A big week for me, professionally. One of the companies above, JFrog, is one where I was fortunate enough to have driven the seed round eight years ago as part of my role as a Principal at Gemini Israel Funds. I suspected that this filing was coming for many months, but seeing it in black and white on my laptop screen was kind of a landmark moment for me — the first time a company I backed at the seed stage files to go public. It’s too early for a celebration or a victory lap (and knowing the JFrog team, they will never take a victory lap, they will just keep building…) But it’s not too early to say thank you. Thank you to Shlomi Ben Haim, Yoav Landman, and Fred Simon for your friendship and for allowing me to be a tiny part of your incredible story. Special thanks to Fred for being part of Angular’s story as well — we are thrilled to have you on our team!

Here’s paragraph one from the S-1: “JFrog’s vision is to power a world of continuously updated, version-less software — we call this Liquid Software. We provide an end-to-end, hybrid, universal DevOps Platform to achieve Continuous Software Release Management, or CSRM. Our leading CSRM platform enables organizations to continuously deliver software updates across any system. Our platform is the critical bridge between software development and deployment of that software, paving the way for the modern DevOps paradigm. We enable organizations to build and release software faster and more securely while empowering developers to be more efficient. As of June 30, 2020, approximately 5,800 organizations, including all of the top 10 technology organizations, 8 of the top 10 financial services organizations, 9 of the top 10 retail organizations, 8 of the top 10 healthcare organizations, and 7 of the top 9 telecommunications organizations in the Fortune 500 have adopted JFrog, embarking on their journey towards Liquid Software.”

Yoav, Fred, and Shlomi of JFrog at their Netanya HQ.

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 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 sessions, just click on the links below.

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

From the blog

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

  • Europe/Israel/US VCs. We took a look at the most active US VCs in European and Israeli enterprise tech.

  • UK/Energy Data. UK-based Aveva acquired OSIsoft for $5B. “For the past 40 years, OSIsoft has built a commanding position as the utility industry’s provider of choice for “data historian” software. The San Leandro, Calif.-based company’s PI software platform creates massive time-ordered records of everything from the actions of pumps, motors and turbines in power plants to split-second information flowing from solar systems and smart inverters on the power grid.”

  • Spain/e-Commerce Finance. Pagantis (Barcelona) was acquired by Afterpay, an Australian consumer fintech player for $82M.

  • Croatia/Messaging. A profile of Infobip, an under-the-radar company that recently raised $200M at a $1B+ valuation. “The company started as a provider of SMS messaging services for businesses but has expanded to technologies like WhatsApp, video and chatbots. Kutic is determined to build everything in house…Some of the funds will go to shoring up the 2000-strong engineering team, which operates out of development centres in Croatia, Bosnia, Poland, Slovakia, St Petersburg and Pune, India. This could involve acquisitions to fill in particular technical gaps, says Kutic.”

  • France/Enterprise ML Ops. Dataiku raised $100M for its enterprise artificial intelligence and machine-learning platform.

  • Israel/Open Source Database. Redis Labs raised $100 million for its NoSQL real-time database and enterprise-grade caching layer for your business-critical apps.

  • Finland/Marketing Data Warehouse. Supermetrics raised $54M for a platform that picks up all the marketing data and brings it to the companies favorite reporting, analytics, or storage platform.

  • Iceland/Web Browser Spreadsheets. Grid raised $12M for that allows users to turn spreadsheets into visual “narratives” to share.

  • Israel/Healthtech. Calcalist maps Israel’s booming healthtech eco-system.

  • Italy/Startup Scene. How startups in southern Italy are recovering from the pandemic.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

  • Who needs open-source in a cloud world? An awesomely interesting analysis of the role and future of open-source in the modern cloud-native world by Matt Asay in conversation with Guarav Gupta of Lightspeed. “Is it impossible to achieve this community love with a proprietary product? No, but “It’s a lot easier to build if you’re open source.” [Gupta] went on, “When you’re a black box cloud service and you have an API, that’s great. People like Twilio, but do they love it?” With open source projects like Grafana and Elasticsearch, by contrast, developers really love the project, he said, because it’s more than a project, more than a technology: “As a developer, you want to be part of that movement. One key aspect of such developer movements isn’t a matter of open source code, though that helps. No, it’s really about trust.”

  • Tom Preston-Warner’s dev-centered worldview. An interview with the Github founder on his role as board member at Netlify, Jamstack, and his newest project — RedwoodJS. “That made me think that here finally is the ability to combine everything that’s awesome about the JAMstack and static files, security and this workflow with the ability to do business logic,” Preston-Werner explained. “I kept waiting for somebody to come out and glue this all together with Rails, but for the JAMstack/JavaScript world. Nobody was doing it, so I started working on it myself and that has become RedwoodJS.”

  • Saleforce’s blowout quarter. The CRM platform giant announced record results with revenue up 29% YoY.

  • An overview of Quantum. Bessemer offers an overview of quantum computing. “By the 2030s, a small number of leading vendors should hopefully be far enough to develop scalable, error-free QCs with high coherence, enabling QC software vendors to tackle all the problems currently addressed by classical supercomputers for pharmaceuticals, finance, chemical engineering, AI, agriculture and logistics.”

  • Rough sledding for Europe’s neobanks. Forbes takes a look at the struggles of Europe’s fintech darlings. “Accenture’s neobank expert Tom Merry says there’s still a “trust factor” at play here. Six years in and neobanks are really still more a banking bolt-on for millennial pocket money, with deposit amounts in the low hundreds, not thousands of dollars. Whilst the neobanks may hold the key to the customer’s heart through “experience,” Merry says, many customers still see incumbent banks as safer and more secure. Accenture’s Digital Banking Tracker found that the average deposit balance at Neobanks operating in the U.K. dropped by 25%, from $460 (£350) to $340 (£260) per customer across the second half of 2019. Again, the direction of travel here is clear. With normality slowly returning, the coronavirus pandemic deepened our relationship with the businesses and technology which we came to rely on most. But lockdown shows the consumer relationship with neobanks is simply not deepening. Standing balance losses aside, if all neobanks disappeared tomorrow, would anyone really miss them?”

  • Carta in the spotlight. Carta is under scrutiny for workplace harassment and inequality. It’s not a good look.

How to Startup

  • Raising capital from Americans? We took a look at the most active US VCs in European and Israeli enterprise tech.

  • Product-led growth, a compendium. Brett Bivens collects a series of resources and observations about product-led-growth. Well-worth a look even if this is the not new ground for you. For more on PLG, Openview had an interesting take on how security companies can and should leverage PLG in their strategies.

  • Month zero cash-on-cash payback. Tom Tunguz of Redpoint looks at this new metric introduced by his former colleague Adil Syed, now at Rippling. It’s super important — and can be the key to explosive growth. “ZCP answers the question: if we invest $1 in sales costs (e.g., salaries & sales commissions), how long does it take to recoup that dollar and see it in our bank account?”

  • The importance of onboarding. Sarah Guo from Greylock unpacks the importance of “prescriptive onboarding.” “If customers cannot successfully self-activate, your iteration speed will be slow. Successful community will increase your iteration speed, advocate for you, and help new (stuck) users advocate.”

  • Openview’s SaaS product benchmarking survey. A treasure trove of insights based on a survey of 150 SaaS founders. Two examples: (1) On freemium: “Offering a freemium product opens up a business’s top-of-funnel much more than any trial or sales demo could, with typical freemium tools generating 33% more free accounts for every website visitor. If a product generates more value with more people using it — such as in viral products like Calendly or Zoom — freemium is the best way to go.” (2) On credit cards: “Product leaders regularly debate whether to gate their free offerings with requests for contact information or credit card details. We learned that requiring a credit card is out of date: freemium and free trial businesses only do so 4% and 12% of the time, respectively. Software companies are finding that this extra step creates too much friction for would-be users. But more than 70% of companies do require information such as email and company name before getting started. We recommend gathering this important data to re-engage users outside of the product and assess whether the user is in a high-value segment.”

How to Venture

  • Solo. The information digs into the “solo capitalist” boom.

  • To IPO or not to IPO? A16Z rises to the defense of the IPO. Bill Gurley tears it down.

  • Long journey into venture. Tunde Adekeye shares his long journey into a VC role at Icebreaker. “Venture roles have become extremely ‘glamorous’ and, given that there are no concrete prerequisites for junior positions, receive huge numbers of applications when they are made open to the public. Anecdotally, I have heard from several funds of situations where they have had well over 500 applicants for a single role. This combined with no real way to filter CVs for anything other than ‘pedigree’ (there is no qualification for taste in startups) makes it difficult for funds to narrow down who makes it into the first round. If you are narrowing from 700 CVs to 40 first round interviews, how does one meaningfully differentiate between the 30 McKinsey consultants, the 20 investment bankers, the 15 start-up founders / operators and 20 FANG PMs?”

Portfolio News

Firebolt will be hosting a live product showdown on September 23 — register here to learn how Firebolt’s cloud data warehouse delivers super-fast big data analytics, efficiently and affordably. (If you thought Snowflake was a big deal…)

Trellis is helping to minimize food wastage and manage food supply.

Datos Health is redefining remote care, enabling patients to receive the best possible medical care and attention from the comfort of their own home.

Crux OCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, will be speaking at the Intelligent Automation in Oil & Gas online event on September 9.

JFrog files for IPO.

SiSense was recognized as an overall leader in business intelligence in the 2020 Dresner Industry Excellence Awards.

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