Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #33: July 30, 2018

This week's must-read is from Sarah Guo at Greylock who put together a very detailed look at what it takes for a startup to succeed in the enterprise market. Her piece is chock full of great advice - and great quotes from enterprise buyers. Here's an especially good one - but the whole thing is worth reading:

“When you go out and see new technology and then come back home and talk to your team about adopting it, there’s this phenomenon that kicks in — a sort of immune defense system. Not because they don’t like you or the new technology, but because their own priorities and risk tolerance put them at odds with the new technology you have brought home… Encouraging adoption can be tricky, it’s sometimes tempting to just say it’s my call, I’m buying this and we’re using it… as you’d imagine this approach is rarely successful. What I’ve found to be helpful is bringing a cross-section of my team with me when I visit Silicon Valley (cutting across levels and functions) to stimulate interest and engagement. If they’ve seen and touched a new technology with their own eyes, met the founder, and believe it has potential, then they can pull it into the organization for me and I don’t have to push it.” — Rich Adduci, Advisor at Esito LLC, former CIO of National Grid

Another must-read piece this week is "Slow Money Crypto" by the amazing Mike Maples. For anyone struggling to make sense of where we really are in crypto, this is an important read. But it's really about the fundamentals of innovation and investing - and is about much more than crypto:

Given the uncertainties and volatility, smart crypto founders should seek input from a combination of fast money and slow money. Fast money investors can provide insights on shifting market developments, the mechanics of money velocity, token vesting, and other immediate opportunities and threats. Slow money investors can help with the various aspects of long-term value creation including recruiting, operational help, category design, go-to-market, and other issues of business building.

Finally, it's not every week that I bring you a link to a story that combines mysterious uber drivers, North Korea, the Director of National Intelligence, and Russian-American journalists... but this is that week. I give you The Spy Who Drove Me by Julia Ioffe in GQ.

Now let's get to the news...

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Please feel free to email me with comments (or startups) and if you like this - please forward to friends. Thanks!

From the blog

1Q18 & 2Q18 EU+IL VC Data.
$12.7B of VC investment summarized in 70 slides. 

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Israel/Messaging. Facebook acquired Redkix for a rumored $100M. Founded by brothers Oudi and Roy Antebi in 2014, Redkix built an email-integrated instant messaging app for the workplace. According to Recode, Facebook is likely to integrate the 60-person Redkix team into its Workplace product: "It’s unclear how Workplace plans to integrate Redkix’s technology, although it makes sense why Facebook would want it. Workplace, which is used internally by Facebook employees, is a lot like the regular, consumer version of Facebook. That means it has features like messaging and groups, but not more traditional office features like email and calendars."

• Israel/Payments. Dutch payments company PayU bought Israeli payments company Zooz for a rumored $80M. Founded in 2010, Zooz had raised $40M of venture capital. 

• Europe/Israel/CFIUS. Michael Eisenberg of Aleph on the growing set of complexities and challenges arising from the US government's re-emphasis on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

• Switzerland/IoT. Scandit raised $30M to help onboard devices into the internet of things. 

• Israel/Adtech. Eyeview raised $20M for its video adtech platform. 

• UK/ERP. Brightpearl raised $15M for its retail ERP SaaS platform. 

• Israel/Security. Siemplify raised $14M for its security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solution.

• Portugal/AI. DefinedCrowd raised $10.8M for its AI training system.

• Netherlands/HR. Impraise raised $10M for employee performance management SaaS.

• Finland/Productivity. Happeo raised $8M for an all-in-one digital workspace serving over 220,000 employees.

• Israel/SCM. Upserve bought Israeli restaurant inventory management platform SimpleOrder. Terms were not disclosed. 

• Germany/Twitter. As Germans move onto social media, Jochen Bittner raises some concerns: "What worries me is that the skeptical innocence that kept Germans off social media for so long has also prevented us from learning from others’ mistakes — and now we are rushing into it headlong, angry and naïve at the same time."

Worth reading

• As it turns out, IT does matter. The WSJ on how tech spending actually drives performance at the most successful firms: "There are different kinds of IT spending. For the first few decades of the PC revolution, most companies would buy off-the-shelf hardware and software. Then, with the advent of the cloud, they switched to services offered by the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Like the difference between a tailored suit and a bespoke one, these systems can be customized, but they aren’t custom. IT spending that goes into hiring developers and creating software owned and used exclusively by a firm is the key competitive advantage. It’s different from our standard understanding of R&D in that this software is used solely by the company, and isn’t part of products developed for its customers."

• Enterprise messaging. Slack struck a deal with Atlassian which helps consolidate Slack's considerable lead in enterprise collaboration and messaging. "As part of the deal, Slack is acquiring the intellectual property for Atlassian's Stride and HipChat Cloud, both of which compete with Slack, and shutting them down. Atlassian is making "a small, but symbolically important" equity investment in Slack, the company wrote in a blog post, and with that will exit the business communications space."

• Amazon's record quarter. Amazon knocked it out of the park. From the WSJ: "One of Amazon’s biggest profit drivers, Amazon Web Services, kept up its pace of growth, reporting revenue grew 49% to $6.1 billion. The division’s revenue growth has accelerated three straight quarters after shrinking, despite stronger competition from rivals including Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google in recent months. AWS offerings including machine learning, artificial intelligence and analytics have proven popular for customers, Mr. Olsavsky said."

• What is a proprietary dataset? My friend Jake Saper of Emergence on what this actually means and how a startup can build one. Jake's hierarchy of data generation strategies is: scraping, partnering, crowdsourcing, and workflow. 

• Ouch. Facebook suffered the largest ever loss of value in one day for a US-traded company.

• The end of the real you online. M.G. Siegler of GV on why he no longer thinks people should (or will) put their "real" life online. 

• Invest slowly. Fred Wilson on why and how he invests slowly. "This is not spray and pray, this is not following the herd, this is not momentum investing. This is thesis-driven, active early stage investing, which has always produced the best returns over time and I believe always will."

• Invest VERY carefully - especially now. Brad Feld with a clear warning for early-stage VCs. 

• A disturbance in the force. Semil Shah is looking for this when he makes an early stage investment.

• Industrial/IoT Security. Just how vulnerable is the US grid? 

• The business of venture. Elizabeth Yin with 11 things she's learned from running a micro VC and Hunter Walk yells wisdom at the clouds. Good stuff if you are thinking about raising a venture fund.

• Corporate culture. My friend Naama Zalzman Dror of Vertex wrote an interesting and detailed piece on the role of culture in startups. I agree with her conclusion that culture starts with the founders and needs to be in place on day one. For more on this theme, here's a look at how Shopify drives a culture of innovation. 

Portfolio News & Jobs

Siemplify raised $14M for its security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solution, on the back of 500% revenue growth. 

Eyal Keren of Rollout on feature flagging: "Regardless of the specifics of your crash resolution flow, there is a technique that can assist you in investigating and mitigating the impact of crashes: remote feature flag management. In this post, I'll show you how feature flags can make your life easier and greatly reduce the impact of potential crashes when you release new features."

Datos is hiring a BD lead in the US.

Moltin is hiring for multiple roles in the US and UK.

Resin is hiring globally.