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.
| Property/ Asset | Voting | Dividend | Yield | Minting | Utility | Value Driver |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equity | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | revenue /ebitda |
| Token | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | ? |
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.
| Metric | 2019 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue, $M | 68.4 | 102 |
| Revenue Growth | - | 49.7% |
| Gross Margin | 67.7% | 70.0% |
| Sales Efficiency | - | 0.54 |
| Net Income Margin | -49.0% | -24.0% |
| Cash Flow from Operations Margin | -23.4% | -10.1% |
| Net Dollar Retention | 116% | 119% |
| Average Customer Value, $k | 92.6 | 98.6 |
| Customer Count | 739 | 1039 |
| Large Customer Contribution | 71% | 72% |
Amplitude’s revenue growth rate is in the top quartile for modern software companies at 49%.
Should you price your SaaS per seat or per use? That was one of the salient questions Madhavan Ramanujam answered in last week’s Office Hours at Redpoint. Madhavan provided an excellent framework for answering this question, in addition to a multitude of other insights.
The first thing to state is that massive companies have been built using both pricing structures: Salesforce and Adobe bill per seat while Snowflake and Twilio charge per use. Deciding which to use involves considering factors such as customer preference and competition.
Visit any website today and you’ll likely be accosted from the front and mugged from the back.
The first thing you’ll see, aside from the website’s masthead, is ubiquitous and maddening cookie declaration asking you whether you object if the website sells your data. The overt mugging.
Meanwhile, third party data siphoned from your behavior on other sites catalog your preferences, your movements, and your purchases. This information is traded on exchanges around the world. The covert pilfering.
At Redpoint, we believe the 2020s will be the decade of data. Today, we’re announcing our partnership with Preset.io, a company providing the visualization layer for the modern data stack. In addition, Preset.io announces Preset Cloud, a fully hosted cloud service for Apache Superset, is generally available.
Preset provides a managed service of Apache Superset, an open source business intelligence software which Maxime Beauchemin started in at Airbnb. In a few short, Apache Superset has become the leading open source business intelligence layer. With more than 40,000 Github stars and users like Airbnb and Dropbox, Superset enables tens of thousands of teams to collaborate with data.
There’s a simple secret to hiring quickly and building a strong team. Invest in great managers early.
Let’s compare the organizational chart of two different startups. On the left, the startup is flat. There is a single leader, with a handful of individual contributors. On the right, the company structure is a classic hierarchy.
When startups start, they tend to look like the company on the left. There might be a few founders who lead, rather than the one depicted here. But most people are individual contributors. They write code, author blog posts, publish the website, attract customers, with the goal of achieving product-market fit.
Pricing is one of the questions that persist through the evolution of a company. A common topic today in software startup board rooms is: should the company price by seat or by usage?
To answer this question and many others, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Madhavan Ramanujam, Partner and Board Member at Simon-Kucher on Wednesday, August 25th at 11AM PT.
Madhavan has led more than 200 pricing projects across software companies. He has advised more than 20 unicorns including Uber, Asana, and Stripe. He is the co-author of Monetizing Innovation, which I wrote about in this blog post. It’s the canonical book on modern pricing.