Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #53: For the two weeks ended April 15, 2019

Last week, we published our investment thesis for our recent investment in Vault Platform: 

Vault is building a misconduct reporting platform for the next generation of employers and employees. This is about far more than sexual harassment — it works equally well for all manner of misconduct. The idea is to create a secure and immutable logging and reporting system in which witnesses of misconduct (employees, partners, customers) can store their complaints, testimony, and evidence in a way that enables their own ownership of data, inaccessible by their employer or any third parties, and ensures the integrity of the record if and when submitted.. Vault allows the complainants to determine when and under what conditions these reports are released into the hands of the HR department or the compliance department. Vault also is pioneering a novel “go-together” feature that matches reports from different complainants and allows them to condition the release of reports on the existence of multiple related claims — so that employees can feel comfortable that they will not be the only complainant coming forward.

Importantly, Vault Platform’s approach is not based on anonymity. On the contrary — Vault is focused on secure, immutable, non-anonymous reporting. Our view is that this is the right way to actually address the problem over the long term: make it possible for witnesses of misconduct to securely and safely report the specifics, attach their name to it, store reports in a vault until they are ready to file them, and ensure that no one — no matter how powerful — can tamper with the data. Accountability rests not just with the perpetrators, but with the complainants and the enterprises as well.

You can read the full blog post on this investment here.

If you are building an enterprise tech startup in Europe or Israel,
please let me know...  Now let's get to the news.

From the blog

Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform

Stop counting unicorns. How fund economics are inflating the private tech market and wrecking companies.

2015-2018 Europe & Israel Venture Data: $25.1B of 2018 VC investment summarized in 83 slides.

A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity
Angular's first investment: Why we invested in Aquant.io

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Israel/Security. Firewall management company Tufin went public on the NYSE last week with a market cap of over $600M.

• Israel/IT management. SAManage was acquired by SolarWinds for $350M. "Samanage offers cloud computing services to corporate IT departments. Founded in 2007, Samanage employees 200 people in both the U.S. and Israel, and has raised $74 million to date, according to Pitchbook data. The company reports some 2,000 corporate customers including Salesforce, Ikea, and 3M."

• Sweden/Payment. Klarna raised $93M for its payment solutions, bringing its total raised to over $300M.

• Israel/Container Security. Aqua raised $62M for container security.

• UK/Background Checks. Onfido raised $50M for identity verification.

• Spain/Brand Protection. Red Points raised $38M for detection of online fakes of physical goods. 

• Netherlands/3D Printing. 3D Hubs raised $18M to build a network of 3D printing houses.

• Germany/Chatbots. Rasa raised $13M for a dev-friendly open-source approach to chatbots.

• Israel/AI. Run.ai raised $13M for a distributed machine learning platform. "Run.AI offers...a new virtualization layer for distributed machine learning tasks that can across a large number of machines."

• Norway/Standard Legals. Startup Lab publishes a new type of standard legal template for early rounds in Norwegian companies, the "SLIP." 

• Israel/Intel Capital. The Times of Israel looks at Intel Capital's past activities and renewed focus on Israeli investments.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• PagerDuty pops. The APM company held an IPO in New York last week on Thursday and the stock closed up 59% on its first day of trading.

• Amazon and Google's Cloud AI plays. How Google is trying to differentiate from other cloud AI platforms - and how Amazon is responding. 

• Innovation in Pharma. A16Z published this interview with Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan. "I think now we’re reaching the point where we have no choice but to really now engage technology. I mean, there are estimates now from various sources that believe you could take out 20% of clinical trials costs if you were to actually to really deploy technology at scale."

• A profile of Atlassian. The Information had a detailed look at Atlassian's growth and challenges.

• Regulating crypto. Katherine Wu with a detailed analysis of the SEC's official statement on crypto regulation. "Getting this sort of guidance fro the SEC, even if unofficial and not legally binding— is helpful. I think there were some aspects to the guidance that were helpful in the sense that it really pulled together a lot of the reasoning and opinions that the SEC has said publicly in their enforcement actions (especially around promotional and marketing efforts), and it also shows that the SEC is at least open to a network being totally ‘decentralized’ to the point where it would be unlikely to be classified as a security."

• Stack Overflow Survey. A survey of 90,000 developers. "Python, the fastest-growing major programming language, has risen in the ranks of programming languages in our survey yet again, edging out Java this year and standing as the second most loved language (behind Rust)...Over half of respondents had written their first line of code by the time they were sixteen, although this experience varies by country and by gender...DevOps specialists and site reliability engineers are among the highest paid, most experienced developers most satisfied with their jobs, and are looking for new jobs at the lowest levels."

• SAP Hana and Leonardo. An interview with SAP CTO Juergen Mueller focuses on SAP Hana and SAP Leonardo as two lynchpins of the software giant's strategy going forward.

• IoT Security. A look at IoT security by Dotan Bar Noy. "IoT is growing so fast that there is an obvious need for proper solutions to address security concerns. It is only through the use of such solutions that the IoT revolution can be completed and the vision of a connected world manifested. However, without a mainstream industry standard for IoT security (such as the one NIST is working on) it will remain a somewhat fuzzy and complicated sector, and vendors will attempt to stamp their authority and grab as much of the market as possible."

• The Goldman Sachs API. Goldman Sachs, the storied and somewhat secretive Wall Street titan is releasing APIs. "“We want to be to quantitative finance what Amazon is to computing power,” said Andy Phillips, a Goldman engineer."

How to Startup

• Enterprise Go-to-Market. Matt Turck (Firstmark) and Martin Casado (A16Z) in conversation about go-to-market strategies for enterprise tech startups.

• ABP. Founder Collective on why it's healthy to always be pitching. 

• Five ways to $100M. Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital revisits his legendary blog post on how startups can carve out a path to $100M in revenue. Most notably, Christoph seems to be showing a new focus on higher ARR (more whales, fewer bees). A great and related post is this one by Nakul Mandan, In it, he argues that there are "two ways to scale a B2B company in an explosive growth manner are: (a) Go self-serve; or (b) Have a large enterprise selling motion on day one."

• Hustle as Strategy. Tomasz Tunguz: "In a world where there are no secrets, where innovations are quickly imitated or become obsolete, the theory of competitive advantage may have had its day. Realistically, ask yourself, If all your competitors gave their strategic plans to each other, would it really make a difference?"

• Where you sit matters. Alex Cornell, who just finished YC, provides a super detailed (too detailed?) analysis of how where people sit in a room affects the dynamics of VC-startup fundraising meetings.

• Fundraising lessons from Iceland. Grid.is founder Hjalmar Gislason shares some wisdom from his 10th fundraising round: "As an entrepreneur, you should seek out funds that have an investment thesis that matches what you’re doing. I felt this strongly in this latest raise. Talking to investors who already had theories around modern productivity tools and/or the spreadsheet market was so much more productive and so much more valuable to us than talking to ones where we had to explain our background, research and theories from the ground up."

• Send your deck, not a link. Mark Suster on why founders should send their deck as a PDF, not a link. 

How to Venture

• Stay hungry, stay humble. Fortune Term Sheet provided a set of quotes from VCs highlighting their most painful misses. Here's an example from Alex Ferrara of Bessemer: "I, unfortunately, missed investing in an early round at Zoom. I’d originally met [CEO] Eric Yuan while researching next-gen video conferencing solutions and it quickly became clear to me that they had the best team, tech and product in the market but they were still a very small company. He was kind enough to offer me a chance to invest in an early round (Series B or C?). It was a tough call but I was overly concerned about how crowded the market was at the time. There must have been a dozen competing startups as well as several well-entrenched incumbent vendors. It’s, unfortunately, one destined for our anti-portfolio!"

• Time to boycott dirty money. Jason Calacanis, the prolific angel investor, makes a brave call to boycott sources of funding that are morally compromised. He singles out Saudi Arabia and the Softbank Vision fund. "Are we that desperate for a quick markup that we’re willing to sell out the system that generated the value to begin with?"

• Micro VC allocation models. A detailed analysis of micro fund VC allocations. by Shaun Abrahamson of Urban VC. He argues that micro funds can get by with less reserving than is commonly assumed, and that venture market dynamics have changed in two ways: a "taller funnel" (i.e. more rounds before the A) and more helpful corporate VC investors.   

Portfolio News & Jobs

Forbes on Front's decision to take their SaaS app to the mainstream. Sequoia investor Bryan Schreier compares what Front is trying to pull off now with a broadening feature set to what Apple did with the iPhone. “You were into music, and they gave you one device, the iPod. Then they added phone functionality,” he says. With Front, the equivalent would be starting with shared inboxes, then adding on ways to collaborate on top of email drafts and documents and talk to colleagues within an email tab, Schreier argues, replacing the common workflow of having an email inbox and collaboration tools each open separately and at once. “I think Front has established a new category of software to bring out the best of what people are trying to use their Web browser for in one place.”

- - - Portfolio Jobs - - -

Aquant is hiring. R&D in Israel and Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success in NY.