Where, oh where, has all the technology reporting gone?
David Peterson

It’s been a tough week. A long list of companies announced layoffs, with more sure to come. Expectations of further rate hikes plus softer than expected revenue projections led to a wholesale public market selloff of high growth software companies. The median EV/NTM multiple across software companies is now 4.5x.

In other words, the market has made it clear that product-market fit isn’t worth much anymore if it isn’t paired with profitability. The punch bowl has been taken away and the party is most certainly over. Whether you’re a founder or an investor, I’ll say it again, it’s been a tough week.

During times like these, it’s easy to get pessimistic. But I’ve been fighting the urge to doom scroll by digging ever deeper into stories of technology, progress and human invention. And that made me realize something…where, oh where, has all the technology reporting gone?

Take a look at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech section today:

Notice anything missing?

How about the Financial Times:

It’s all Elon, Twitter, iPhone delays, Twitter, layoffs, layoffs, layoffs.

Where are the stories about, you know, actual technology?

That’s not to say these aren’t stories worth covering. They absolutely are. But these are business stories. They should be in the Business section. Once upon a time, the Technology section was about technology, not the business of technology companies.

I don’t know when exactly this shift happened. But these days if I want to understand some sort of technology, the last place I go is any of the major media outlets. I’m heading to a newsletter, or following a particular person on Twitter, or watching an in-depth video on YouTube, or reading a book.

Now, I could wax poetic about the negative impact of our obsession with the business of technology…and how our collective understanding of, appreciation of and trepidation for humanity’s technical achievements is ossifying before our eyes…but instead, I wanted to share a few of my favorite sources for understanding technology better. Perhaps I can help you stop doom scrolling as well.

• To learn about the technology itself: set Google Scholar alerts for the keywords of your choice, search for “best ____ tools github” on Google (e.g. bioinformatics)

• To get an overview of the technology: seminars uploaded to university’s YouTube channels (e.g. Professor Hima Lakkaraju’s recent seminar on machine learning explainability), STAT News’ In The Lab

• To read an analysis of the impact of the technology: Benn Stancil’s newsletter on data science/engineering, Elliot Hershberg’s Century of Bio newsletter on biotech, Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, Eli Dourado on Twitter, Catherine Clifford at CNBC (a major news outlet!)

Those are just a few of my favorites. But in times like these, I could always use more. Anything I should add to my regular rotation?

David

EVENTS

Feb 8 / Lessons Learned From Investing Early in Over a Dozen SaaS Unicorns Including Salesforce, SuccessFactors, Box, Gusto, SalesLoft, ServiceMax, Veeva, Bill.com, Doximity, Yammer and Zoom Among Others
Jason Green, Founder & General Partner, Emergence Capital

Feb 15 / The Evolution of Collibra’s Product Positioning & How They Created a Category
Stan Christiaens, Co-Founder & Chief Data Citizen, Collibra

FROM THE BLOG

It’s Never too Early to Build your Growth Model
What are the specific mechanisms by which one user turns into many, and an initial investment turns into revenue?

How to Think About Revenue Quality as an Early Stage Founder
What does “quality revenue” mean when you don’t have much revenue at all?

It’s Not All About Bottoms-up
Two recent trends indicate that we may finally be past the mistaken belief that bottoms-up is the only “fundable” business model in town.

Don’t be Fooled by the PLG Mullet
How to know if you should be building a PLG Now, PLG Later or PLG Never company.

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

UK/Financial Services. Cover Genius raised $70M for its embedded insurance platform that prices and handles claims for virtually any line of insurance or warranty.
Israel/ML Tooling. Dataloop closed $33M for its AI annotation and management platform.
Spain/Travel. Lodgify raised $29.7M for its cloud-based end-to-end software for vacation rental management.
France/Payments. Fintecture raised $26M for its open banking API for merchant payments.
Germany/SW Development. Gitpod raised $25M for its integrated cloud development environment.
Portugal/Industrial. Smartex closed $24.7M for its AI-based textile inspection solution.
Germany/Industrial. Software Defined Automation closed $10M to help factories automate with an Industrial-Control-as-a-Service in the cloud offering.
Germany/Space. ConstellR raised $10M to develop satellites, which take measurements beyond the infrared wavelengths to calculate surface temperature and thus measure water distribution for earth observation services.
UK/SW Development. Budibase (an Angular portfolio company) raised $7M for its open-source full stack app development platform.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

AlphaFold’s new rival? Meta AI has predicted the shape of 600 million proteins, covering microbial molecules from soil, seawater and human bodies.

Burkhard Rost, a computational biologist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, is impressed by the combined speed and accuracy of Meta’s model. But he questions whether ESMFold really offers an advantage over AlphaFold’s precision when it comes to predicting proteins from metagenomic databases. Language-model-based prediction methods — including one developed by his team — are better suited to quickly determining how mutations alter a protein’s structure, which is not possible with AlphaFold. “We will see structure prediction become leaner, simpler, cheaper, and that will open the door for new things,” he says.

State of the OpenCloud 2022. Battery Ventures released its annual report on the state of the cloud. Slide 8, titled ‘There is pain ahead for private companies’, is especially poignant, “Highly-valued software unicorns have a high bar to meet to transition to successful public companies, often requiring a 10x+ revenue ramp and being mindful about margins early on.” Related is Anoushka Vaswani’s tweet, “There are only 22 public software companies with a 10B+ market cap right now but 213 software private unicorns.”

AI trends. Mario Gabriele, the founder of The Generalist, interviewed ten investors for trends and companies to watch out for, which covers “copilot for everyone” to generative AI in life sciences.

HOW TO STARTUP

Cash in the bank vs today’s dilution. David Sacks, founder of Yammer and Craft Ventures, gives a useful exercise for founders about 30 mins in to the latest All-In podcast.

“The most important thing founders can do is forget about the historical terms of the deal or how much you were burning. You just think about (the following):

1. How much money do you have in the bank today?

2. Impute a valuation

3. Internalise how much dilution (the money in the bank) that represents in today’s market

4. Create a new plan to preserve that cash as long as possible.”

The art and science of great customer interviews. Hema Padhu who with early stage startups on brand, positioning and GTM wrote a great post on how to run the best customer interview process. “There is an art and science to doing great customer interviews, and I’m calling it Rigorous Observational Interviewing. I’m going to use the acronym RgOI (not to be confused with ROI — return on investment). RgOI goes beyond what the user says or even does to find those nuggets of insights lurking behind their words and behaviors.”

HOW TO VENTURE

Cash in vs cash out. A reminder to us in the venture community about the big picture. Altimeter Capital released a chart of how much of TVPI (Total Value to Paid In) turned into DPI Distributions to Paid in Capital) over recent time, which Ibrahim Ajami from Mubadala tweeted out.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Forter was selected in the Cloud 100 companies, an annual list of the world’s top private cloud companies. Forter Co-founder & CEO Michael Reitblat discusses the company’s origin and his more than 25 years of combating fraud.

Snyk was selected in the Cloud 100 companies, an annual list of the world’s top private cloud companies. Snyk CEO Peter McKay explains how their unique offering enables developers to work securely throughout the software development lifecycle.

Reco’s Tal Shapira wrote an article on ‘Why Business Context Justification Enables Safer Collaboration’.

Aquant collaborates with Oracle to optimize how field service organizations operate and deliver service.