The fastest growing software category in the public markets is security. Data follows.
Security companies as a group average 29% expected revenue growth in 2024, compared to 23% for Data (or DaaS which stands for data-as-a-service). Fintech & SaaS (horizontal) average ten percentage points fewer expected growth.
ServiceNow, a $150b market cap company, made this statement yesterday in their earnings call :
“In Q4, our gen AI products drove the largest net new ACV contribution for our first full quarter of any of our new product family releases ever, including our original Pro SKU.”
That’s pretty sensational for a company with 3 massive business lines & enough acronyms to fill a dictionary :
“With technology, customer and creator, we now have 3 workflow businesses over $1 billion in ACV. We have 11 individual product lines with north of $250 million in ACV. ITSM, ITOM and ITAM, each had double-digit deals over $1 million in Q4. Security and risk combined for 12 of the top 20 with 9 deals over $1 million. "
Last Friday’s post about delegation called The Class Missing from Business School, spurred a deluge of great advice from readers.
There was a recurring theme when delegating:
Paul sent this graphic about Hostinger’s Task Relevant Maturity.
When I sat down to write this post, I wrote :
Write an introductory paragraph telling a story about when I was in grade school, my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. L, insisted on the class outlining their paper.
Write a paragraph about how we all wish we would outline, & there are frameworks like Situation, Complication, Question, & Answer that achieve this goal. But it’s been easier to simply dive in as much for grade school as in corporate life.
This is the machine generated example of metawriting that I mentioned in this post.
In my grade school days, a memorable lesson from 5th grade still stands out. My teacher, Mrs. L, was particularly passionate about the importance of structuring our thoughts on paper.
She insisted that our class outline every essay before diving into the writing process. I remember how she would enthusiastically explain the benefits of an outline, emphasizing its role in organizing our ideas and ensuring a clear, logical flow.
I remember my graduate classes well : marketing, operations research, statistics, macroeconomics, strategy, & negotiation.
But having worked for about twenty years, there’s a class missing from business school for a skill used as frequently as public speaking & negotiation : Delegation.
After starting in the working world, at some point we start managing others. Perhaps just for a project. Perhaps a small team. Or an entire business unit. Or working with an executive assistant.
Open source models have become a critical part of the AI landscape.
I was curious about the trends in the open source ecosystem, so I analyzed HuggingFace data on the top 300 open source models, both by overall usage & also the top of the trending list.
Open source models are governed by open source licenses. Similar to regular open source software, Apache & MIT dominate the licenses by model count. 76% of the top models choose one of these licenses. Apache is nearly twice as popular as MIT.
The 10x programmer - engineers whose prodigious productivity and perspicacity change the arc of a business.
But what about a 10x AE? A salesperson who books 10x more business than their next closest peer.
10x engineers use their knowledge of technology to achieve astounding feats. Why wouldn’t the same idea apply to sales?
With AI, we will start to see sales outliers who meaningfully outperform & break quota expectations.
AI compresses prospect research time. AI writes emails. AI captures transcripts from sales conversations. All of this work is 50-80% automated.
Measuring engineering productivity is a Gordian knot.
How does a manager measure the performance of an engineer? Lines of code, like lines of a blog post aren’t a good metric. Most of the time, short, direct prose is better than verbose or lengthy sentences that carry on forever because they haven’t been edited & really ought to be, but someone was rushing or forgetful, & they lose the reader along the way.
Companies aren’t bought. They’re sold.
Hang around startups & venture capital long enough, & you’ll hear this aphorism. It means it’s much easier to sell a company when there’s plenty of demand.
In any given year, there’s an 82% chance the value of startup liquidity will change by more than 77% - both up & down.
Aside from certain crypto tokens, it’s hard to find a less reliable market than the VC exit market.