June 2023

The Future is…Not Quite Here

Of course, when we sat down to write this quarter’s blog about AI’s impact on recruiting, we immediately went to ChatGPT and asked it to write the blog for us. Read More >

April 2023

The Promise of Zero Knowledge Proofs

Zero-knowledge proofs have gained significant attention in recent years, captivating researchers, technologists, and developers. Read More >

November 2022

AI in the era of Large Language Models

There’s an old joke among physicists about Nuclear Fusion that it is a technology that is 30 years away — and always will be. Till recently, the same could be said about Artificial Intelligence (AI)Read More >

August 2022

Talent Update: Chaos and Opportunity

The perfect storm of a pandemic, war, and a global economic slowdown is knocking on the door of tech companies everywhere. Read More >

March 2022

The NFT Ecosystem

I trust anyone who is reading this has a decent understanding of NFTs. Read More >

October 2021

Update on How Covid-19 is Impacting Talent

In our previous blog, Covid and Impacts on Hiring, we analyzed four key issues that companies would face during the pandemic: the hiring process, onboarding, compensation and benefits, and communication. Read More >

May 2021

Growth in the Product-Led era

SaaS companies today are going public at significantly higher revenue run rates than in previous years. The median Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for a B2B SaaS company going public today is ~$286M  — a 3x increase from just five or six years ago.Read More >

March 2021

Crypto Trends

There has never been a more exciting moment to work, invest, and follow what’s happening in crypto and we wanted to take time to discuss and highlight some super interesting and exciting developments in the industry.Read More >

September 2020

Covid-19 Impacts on Hiring

Remote work has taken a long time to take root, even in technology, aside from the occasional “work from home Friday.” Historically, many emerging tech companies were based in Silicon Valley with employees commuting into a centralized campus every day.Read More >

May 2020

Bottom-up SaaS: A Model for Capital-Efficient Growth

It may be many months before we can fully assess the devastating human and economic impact of Covid-19. Against this uncertainty, most startups have reacted predictably by cutting expenses, shelving expansion plans, and reducing headcount; doing everything in their powers to conserve cash and extend their runway. As businesses across the board recast their operating plans to reflect a somber, uncertain future one thing is clear: we’ve transitioned to a new phase where the metrics for success will include not just growth but also capital efficiency and profitability.Read More >

March 2020

Software as an Organization

Throughout economic history, money largely concerned itself with the development of a medium of exchange. Dating back thousands of years, the barter system enabled markets. It allowed people to trade one thing for another and laid out the foundation for a collective of individuals offering goods and services. Barter, however, had its flawsRead More >

August 2019

The Future of Productivity Software

The first version of Microsoft Office was released in 1989. Thirty years later, the Microsoft Office product suite is still going strong — a rare feat of endurance in an industry used to frequent change and paradigm shifts. The mobile, cloud app powered world today bears little resemblance to the desktop software PC era of the 1980s. Read More >

November 2018

Venture Capital Deal Nomenclature: Semantics or Something More?

As part of our investment approach, we routinely analyze broad VC deal data, identify key investment trends, and compare that to what we are seeing internally. How startup companies are “labeled” today (pre-Seed, post-Seed, early stage, pre-A, early B, etc.) has certainly complicated this process. Read More >

August 2018

The End of Moore’s Law. And The Coming Computing Renaissance.

The computing industry is at a crossroads. Moore’s law, the engine that powered the computing revolution, has finally run out of steam. Read More >

March 2018

The Promise of Cryptonetworks

Even though the Internet is a constant reminder of the great things that come when a passionate community of developers, researchers and visionaries collaborate to create an open platform on open standards, the history of computing tells a different tale.Read More >

August 2017

On Startup Hiring

The defining characteristic of every startup is growth. In a startup, it’s not where you are but where you’re headed that matters, progress measured not in absolute terms but as a rate of change towards greatness. In such a forward-looking environment, founders can easily fall into the trap of planning for tomorrow’s challenges without adequately preparing for today’s battles. Nowhere is this trap more pronounced than in hiring. The emphasis on growth can tempt founders into “future-proof” hiring, favoring candidates with experience at scaled businesses while losing sight of how well they fill the current needs of the company.Read More >

May 2017

A World of Driverless Cars (and Opportunity)

With a number of recent high-profile controversies, discussions about the future of Uber are rampant across the technology world. Considering this, I thought it would be a good time to weigh in on one area where we believe Uber is heading in the right direction: the future of autonomous transportation. From an investment standpoint, we think of autonomy in terms of land, sea, and air, but for the purposes of this essay, I want to focus specifically on self-driving cars. We believe this sector will have everything needed to make lucrative investments.Read More >

March 2017

A Contrarian View of Moonshots: Small Steps to a Giant Leap

Every startup begins with an idea and a plan. The idea (for a new product or service) describes the “what”; the plan describes the “how”. We associate genius with singular acts of idea creation, eureka moments that bring to the surface new discoveries and insights. But great startups are often distinguished more by the genius in the “how” than in the “what”. Google didn’t come up with the idea of a search engine, but its genius lay in how it made search more relevant than anything before. Read More >

August 2016

In Search of Self-Driving Enterprise Software

At the dawn of the twentieth century, pessimism pervaded the field of Physics. The existing theories had been so fully fleshed out and generalized that there appeared little room for future exploration. The widespread belief was that there was nothing of importance left to be discovered. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Michelson famously stated: “Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” It seemed that incremental refinements were all that awaited the world. Read More >

February 2016

The Amazon Cloud Juggernaut

One of the interesting aspects of platform shifts in computing is the way they end up redrawing platform boundaries, reorganizing what is inside the platform versus built on top of it. The seemingly simple act of changing platform boundaries resets incumbent advantages and fundamentally reshapes industry structure. When IBM dominated the mainframe market the platform was a vertically integrated hardware and software stack. In the PC era, the platform boundary shrank to the microprocessor on the hardware side and Microsoft Windows on the software side. Read More >

August 2015

The Rise of Native Open-Source

Open-source software is a hit with enterprises. It gives their IT organizations the ability to cost-effectively provide for their constituents without ever being locked-in to a particular vendor. Indeed it’s hard to find a company today that doesn’t use some open-source software. And certainly you have companies like Facebook that are completely running on an open-sourced infrastructure.Read More >

February 2015

Cloud and the Coming Upheaval

Few will dispute that cloud computing represents a massive transformation and technology shift. Everyone seems to agree it’s a big deal, but it’s hard to find consensus on the winners and losers from this shift. As a venture investor, I find myself drawn into debates: Will Oracle prevail over newer database architectures? Can VMware stay relevant in the new cloud infrastructure market? Can Cisco continue to dominate the networking market? Are SaaS pioneers going to be disrupted by SaaS v2.0?
Read More >