Yesterday, both Google and Microsoft announced their earnings for their cloud businesses. I’ve been tracking the growth rates of these companies and product lines for the last 18 months to develop a broad gauge of enterprise buying patterns after the downturn.
In the chart, it’s immediately evident that Mongo has seen dramatic increase in growth rate last quarter. We await the earnings from everyone aside from Google and Microsoft in the next few weeks.
On November 8th, I’ll share my 10 Top Trends in Data & AI at the IMPACT Summit.
Last year, I covered 9 topics:
How many of those turned out to be true? I’ll be scoring them!
The patois of data teams has become a dialect of modern engineering teams because the commonalities in the stack.
| Core Eng | Data Eng |
|---|---|
| Products | Data Products |
| Microservices | Data Mesh |
| Service Level Agreements | Data Contracts |
| Access Control | Data Security |
| Observability | Data Observability |
This convergence signals how far data teams have evolved into core engineering teams. Machine learning’s demand for data has accelerated this movement because AI needs data to function.
Data teams receive tickets from their internal customers & develop data products that serve both internal & external users, much like a classic product management & engineering team.
On Thursday, November 2nd at 9:30 AM Pacific, Office Hours welcomes Raj Sarkar to talk about Unleashing Outbound Marketing Fury.
Raj started his career as a marketing manager at Cisco focused on the SMB market. He then jooined Google to become the lead product marketing manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Next, he headed marketing at Atlassian for Trello, Confluence, Jira for Business Teams & other products. Last a short stint at Palo Alto Networks before becoming CMO at 1Password.
Within the last few weeks, we’ve seen two significant exits in Startupland, the first new pricing information we received in many quarters.
Klaviyo was the first half for IPO in at least a year. Atlassian’s acquisition of Loom is also the first unicorn sale in about the same time frame.
| Company | Last Round Post, $b | Current Value, $b | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loom | 1.53 | 0.975 | -36% |
| Klaviyo | 9.5 | 7.6 | -20% |
Naturally, many of the first analyses compared the last round valuation in the private markets to the exit value. In both cases, the exit values amounted to less than the last private round - discounts of 36% & 20%.
Last week, Office Hours hosted Oliver Jay, former CRO at Asana to talk about Avoiding the PLG Trap. More than 900 people registered for the event.
The full recording is here or embedded below on the web.
Oliver shared some trenchant insights about his experience leading the GTM teams to success. These are three of the lessons that stood out to me espcially managing the transition from product to sales-led growth (PLG -> SLG).
Over the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with chaining together large language models.
I dictate emails & blog posts often. Recently, I started using Whisper for drafting emails and documents. (Initially there were some issues with memory management, but I’ve since found a compiled version that works well on my Mac called whisper.cpp)
After tying Google’s Duet I wondered if I could replicate something similar. I’ve been chaining the Whisper dictation model together with LLaMA 2 model from Facebook. When drafting an email, I can dictate a response to LLaMA 2, which will then generate a reply using the context from my original email.
Eliciting product feedback elegantly is a competitive advantage for LLM-software.
Over the weekend, I queried Google’s Bard, & noticed the elegant feedback loop the product team has incorporated into their product.
I asked Bard to compare the 3rd-row leg room of the leading 7-passenger SUVs.
At the bottom of the post is a little G button, which double-checks the response using Google searches.
Last week, Harvard Business School released its analysis of LLMs on 758 consultants’ performance when using AI. Three key insights emerged.
In the first experiment (inside AI’s capability frontier), consultants randomly assigned access to GPT-4 AI completed 12.2% more tasks on average & 25.1% faster. Quality improved by 40%.
Lower performing consultants benefit the most from AI augmentation, increasing performance by 43% compared to 17% for higher performers.
This rising-tide effect seems common across AI applications. The benefit to the lower quartiles is dramatic across sales, customer support, & consulting. This has broader implications, something I aim to write about later this week.
Artisanal chocolate, artisanal candles, artisanal silk scarves. What about an artisanal email?
LLM’s powerful content generation abilities will soon automate many emails we send. Sales teams have started using software that identifies leads, researches them, identifies commonalities (a shared university affiliation or a passion for a sports team), drafts the email, & sends it. Then it tracks the email for follow up.
New product launches will bring similar tools to everyone.