Shifting left, shifting right.
Gil Dibner

Shifting left to developers. One of the biggest technology themes of the past several years has been the “shift left” of several key areas of responsibility to developers from other functional areas. The term comes from the idea that the typical technology value chain diagram starts on the left side with developers who write code which is then pushed towards production and actual business utility which is typically depicted on the right side of the diagram. Development (dev) is on the left, infrastructure (ops) is in the middle, and business is on the right. We’ve seen this trend with security (Snyk), testing (Testim, which was just acquired by Tricentis, among others), and observability (Datadog and many others). Software continues to inexorably “eat the world” and, along with it, the organizations that run the world. As the center of business gravity shifts towards developers, as software becomes increasingly complex, and as the pace of continuous deployment cycles increases, it’s only logical to expect developers to shoulder more of the burden for an increasing set of functions.

Lately, however, I’ve been increasingly wondering about the possibility of “shift right” — a complementary but opposite idea. The idea behind “shift right” is that the no-code design paradigm may allow developers to extend “engineering-like” capabilities into other parts of the organization. No-code (and low-code) have already started to revolutionize how some software applications are being built and adopted by customers. We have been investing on this theme for some time, and my partner David has written about this very thoughtfully based on his extensive experience at Airtable — perhaps one of the best examples of this approach. Airtable, Miro, Wix, Notion, and many others are great examples of SaaS tools that are pursuing this “customer-built growth” (CBG) model. Our portfolio has a number of examples: Datos for customer-built remote patient care pathways, Levity for customer-built ML-based workflows, LoudNClear for customer-built marketing automations, and Forwrd.ai for customer-built predictive analytics.

Shifting right to internal customers. But what happens when the customers are internal? What functions are internal engineering teams serving that could — more efficiently and more agilely — be performed by other non-engineering teams within the organization? Can tools be built to enable that sort of intra-company democratization? What would such tools look like and how would they be packaged up, productized, sold, and deployed?

Webflow is a great example of this idea. The company’s positioning and brilliant advertising emphasized how Webflow’s front-end builder enables business teams to modify and deploy critical customer-facing front-ends without hitting obstacles caused by the need to work closely with engineering (or design) teams. Uniform is doing something similar with the DXP (digital experience platform). Statsig appears to be attempting the same for A/B testing. Our portfolio company, Candu, is enabling customer success teams to build pages directly into SaaS applications to drive faster adoption, better engagement, and happier customers — and all without any engineering involvement. Each of these is an example of “shift right.”

We are — we think — still in the early innings of figuring out how the shift-right trend will play out and how far it will go. I suspect there may be more areas where shift-right tools can help a business run far more smoothly, freeing up developers for more critical tasks. We also struggle with the complexity of these sales cycles: in most cases, both the engineering team and the business team must be engaged and supportive for the solution to succeed.

A call to action. If you are working on a company that is pushing a shift-right strategy — please let us know. I’m eager to hear about new opportunities for this approach — and to learn about the sales and adoption challenges you may be facing and how you are solving them. The shift-right world — if it comes about — should be a dynamic and efficient one — and we will continue to look for companies that are cracking the code on how to design and scale business in that domain.

Thanks,
Gil

EVENTS

Feb 23 / Compliance Tech: Building Pain-Killers
Eynat Guez, CEO of Papaya Global & Neta Meidav, CEO of Vault Platform

Mar 23 / The Importance of Culture and Values As You Scale a Business
Oren Kaniel, Co-Founder & CEO, AppsFlyer

Apr 11 / How to Employ Category Design as a VC
David Peterson, Partner at Angular & Al Ramadan, CEO of PlayBigger

FROM THE BLOG

The Problem with Engineering-led Growth for Early Stage Startups
What kind of growth team you need to hire depends on the stage of your company.

What Childhood Can Teach Us About Entrepreneurship
Childhood as a solution to the early stage entrepreneurship explore–exploit dilemma.

How to Overcome “Customer-Built” Software’s Learning Curve
“Customer-built” companies and the challenge of user activation.

The Long Road to Creating a Category
Category creation strategy, with a little inspiration from Apple.

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

UK/Health Data. Informa has divested Pharma Intelligence in a $2.5B deal to Warburg Pincus for its industry-leading data and intelligence platform on clinical trials, drug treatments and medical devices.
Switzerland/Logistics Data. Scandit raised $150M for its app-based software for self-checkout and inventory management.
Israel/Software Security. Salt Security closed $140M for its API Security platform.
UK/SME Finance. Thincats raised $135M for its online platform for business loans.
Israel/Software Security. Legit Security closed $30M for its software supply chain protection solution.
Germany/Construction Marketplace. Cosuno raised $30M for its marketplace for construction companies to find subcontractors.
Israel/Security. Vicarius raised $24M for its autonomous vulnerability remediation platform.
Israel/Entertainment. Deepdub raised $20M for its AI-powered dubbing that uses actors’ original voices.
UK/Pricing. M3ter raised $17.5M for its usage-based pricing metering and pricing engine for SaaS companies.
Netherlands/SME Insurance. Insify raised $17M to simplify the insurance process for European entrepreneurs and SMEs.
Israel/ML Tooling. Qwak raised $15M for its MLOps platform.
UK/Tech-Enabled Insurance. Floodflash raised $14.8M for its sensor-based insurance service.
Germany/Fintech. Finmid raised $12.5M for its lending financial services infrastructure platform.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Nuclear fusion. European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion — the energy process that powers the stars. The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen. Deep tech investor, David Friedberg, wrote up a tweetstorm about the breakthrough and its implications. “Summarily, we are going to realize truly abundant practically free energy with zero environmental/natural resource consequences”.

Forbes Blockchain 50 2022. Forbes has released the Blockchain 50 2022, their annual list of enterprise companies that lead in employing distributed ledger technology. “Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether grab all the headlines, especially after booming last year and then losing more than $1 trillion in value since November. But in many ways, speculative cryptocurrencies are the least intriguing blockchain application. The most lasting impact will come as more and more multinationals integrate blockchains into their daily operations, unleashing untold efficiencies.”

HOW TO STARTUP

How to run 1:1s as an engineering manager. Mitra Raman, Senior Engineering Manager at Glossier, shared a great thread on how to make the most of 1:1s.

The seed handbook. Alex Miller, the CEO of Hiro Systems, uploaded and open-sourced a bunch of helpful sample policies for early-stage companies. The policies include everything from travel and expenses, to code of conduct, vacation, flexible work, etc.

HOW TO VENTURE

Sequoia’s invisible hand. Sequoia’s Roelof Botha is unquestionably one of the most powerful and important VCs of our generation. He’s generated over $10B in total gains with investments in companies including YouTube, Instagram, 23andMe, MongoDB, Bird, Unity and Square. How did he become one of the top VCs? What are his plans for the future of Sequoia? Protocol covered this and more in a detailed profile of Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s invisible hand. “A rugby-playing salesman from South Africa is now a leader at one of the top-tier venture capital firms, but it took some help (and some pesto) to get there. And along the way, he learned a crucial lesson: Cash can dry up, but counsel is evergreen.”

Network Effects and Returns. About 70% of the value created by tech comes from companies with network effects. “These network effects are what underpin the growth of aggregators. But aggregators do something else: they don’t give away the direct relationship to the customer. They stay as intermediaries. This gives them a massive amount of power, because to access demand, the suppliers need to adapt to the aggregators’ asks.”

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Candu, the no-code UI component builder for SaaS products, has relaunched on ProductHunt and was the #4 product of the day.

CruxOCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, was selected as one of the top founders to follow for marketing on Twitter.

Aspecto was chosen as one of the top seven most intriguing enterprise startups for 2022.

Snyk has hired former Twilio legal chief Karyn Smith as its new top lawyer.

JFrog will host their virtual Investor Day from NASDAQ on Tuesday, February 15th.