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Stripe is the most valuable private company in the US. The company started out life as /dev/payments helmed by two brothers from Ireland. Today, Stripe is synonymous with payments and tallies more than 15 products. From fraud to reporting, company incorporation to carbon removal, Stripe has redefined itself again and again. This level of success requires masterful leadership.

To continue our “Month of Scale,” Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Stripe’s Chief Corporate Advisor and former COO, Claire Hughes Johnson on Wednesday, October 27th at 10:00 AM PT.

If you’re part of a management team, repeating yourself is a key to success.

When I worked in online advertising, we measured the performance of marketing campaigns in a particular way called aided and unaided recall.

Imagine I send you a survey with two questions:

1. List the names of all the venture firms you’re aware of.
2. Review this list of venture firm logos. Which ones do you know?

The first question is an example of unaided recall and the second is aided recall. A quantitative brand marketer for Redpoint might send this survey before and after a campaign to measure the impact of the campaign. Great brands score very highly on unaided recall.

Unlike equity-only startups, crypto startups maintain two capitalization tables. The first is the equity cap table, just the same as non-crypto startup. The second is the token cap table: who owns how many tokens.

In the early days of crypto, the convention for the genesis token distribution[1] was 80/20 community/insiders. Employees, investors, and the foundations responsible for running the projects (insiders) retained 20% of the tokens. At IPO for a classic startup, equity allocation is the reverse. Insiders own 80%.

Today, Height.app launched out of private beta, and we’re thrilled to announce Redpoint has partnered with the Height team, especially Michael & Kat, who hail from Stripe and Facebook.

We were captivated by Height when we met the team several years ago. In particular, the company aspired to a vision of enabling cross-functional teams to work better together, particularly as organizations grow. The past two years have accelerated collaboration tools adoption and the moment is right for a new product to push the project management sector forward.

The Modern Data Stack is taking shape. MDS is a movement led by many companies to re-architect data flows in an organization. The MDS is a reaction to the realization that data has become essential in every organization, but the tools, infrastructure, and culture to support that role aren’t yet in place.

One of the key parts of that ecosystem is data observability: the system in the MDS that ensures data is correct and flowing properly.

GitLab is the first fully remote software company to go public. More than 2000 employees work all over the world and have collaborated to build a massive software business.

GitLab provides a suite of DevOps tools that enable engineering teams to build and deploy software, and then secure it. The breadth of the solution is hard to convey, unless you visit the features page; when printed it’s more than 100 pages long. If that’s not a suite…

Developer relations tops the list of priorities for many infrastructure companies. After all developer interest is a key step in the go-to-market motion. Many products enter an organization bottoms-up, and months or years later, become so important to the company, they buy a contract.

How does a team scale and measure a devrel team? To answer that question, Redpoint Office Hours welcomes Shawn Wang, on Wednesday, September 22nd at 9:00 AM PT. Head of developer relations at Temporal, Shawn has worked on React and serverless JavaScript at Two Sigma, Netlify and AWS. He has started and run communities for hundreds of thousands of developers, like Svelte Society, /r/reactjs, and the React TypeScript Cheatsheet. His nontechnical writing was also recently published in the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developers.

What is the product a customer or a prospect buys immediately before they buy yours?

We’ve all heard the words digital transformation. Now that I’ve given you time to unroll your eyes and let the sarcastic comments dissipate, please give me a chance to make something useful of this idea.

As a customer progresses along their journey, they evolve from a previous inferior state to a new superior one. The journey might be a migration from an on-premises data stack to a modern cloud data pipeline. Perhaps, they are in the midst of modernizing their sales infrastructure from simply Salesforce to a broader suite of call recording, marketing attribution, and sales content enablement. A business could be migrating to a Kubernetes stack to power a microservices architecture with distributed tracing.

Imagine you have a dollar to invest and you can choose between two options: a public cloud service or a layer 1 blockchain. How do you decide which is more attractive? How does a token differ from equity?

The answer is that tokens can act remarkably like equity if they are structured in the right way. In addition, tokens offer one benefit beyond equity: utility.

Here’s a table that summmarizes the similarities and differences of equity and tokens. They are in fact, very similar.

Amplitude, a leading provider of web analytics, filed their S-1 earlier this week. The company leverages novel storage techniques to scalably collect data on how users engage with mobile apps and web sites. Amplitude counts Cisco, Adidas, PayPal and CapitalOne amongst its customers.

Amplitude offers three key products: analytics for measuring user behavior, experiment for testing new user flows, and recommendation which optimizes content for different user segments.

Amplitude’s revenue growth rate is in the top quartile for modern software companies at 49%.