VCChat

I will pay money to see that

Scott Raney

to make it fair, Pete can use both hands

have you seen Aaron? He weighs like 95 pounds and 6'1

5 Votes Vote

hey @dfjjosh Josh do you guys have fresh "powder" - what's the update at DFJ?

Oh please - I'm pushing at least 170. And 6'2"....rounding up:) . I'm up for a live match. We'll stream it on @AppMeerkat

@aaronej Is Meerkat fading? Periscope is crushing them - Meerkat is a college weekend hack..

Josh Stein

@furrier we raised ~$800m last year for a pair of new funds (Venture XI and Growth 2014). Send the good deals our way. :)

what size rounds are you doing will you do small deals in the $5m Series A range?

define "good deals"

My question as well @dvellante

Josh Stein

@furrier that's right in our sweet spot.

Josh Stein

@raddimanche @dvellante good = great teams, large TAMs, big out of box ideas. that, and of course anything backed by NEA.

Great i'll circle around with you to get the lastest - we'll send deals your way; need to know which sectors are your fav esp in Enterprise

Greg Stewart28

@psonsini - from the experience of you and your peers - what, in your opinion, is the biggest roadblock in terms of advancing from seed funding to successful enterprise platform? Looking for an answer besides growing customer base etc.

6 Votes Vote

biggest challenge is to find innovative ways to get product in customers hands without top down approach. Developer-focused models that gain momentum usually do well

7 Votes Vote

@psonsini the land and expand is the SaaS way imo no more big license deals

Bert Latamore

@furrier Tableau is doing that an being pretty successful.

Going from Seed to Series A in the enterprise requires strong evidence of Product / Market fit. Deals that go sideways typically lack F500 or thought-leading customers paying for product.

Or if money tap hasn't been turned on, customers should at least show high engagement / usage and provide killer reviews when talking to VCs during customer diligence

@aaronej Totally agree with you; cost of sales is another wildcard; can't just win with the big "splash in the pool" - Customer acquisition is key; low sales costs win

John Furrier24

Ok real time question: Please comment on the @informatica deal - they are going private in $5.3 Billion Leveraged Buyout #LBO #privateequity

another whale/tuna goes private - BMC, Dell, Informatica...life is good on the non-public side?

another sign of an old legacy company that can't respond fast enough to new web, cloud world. trend will continue

5 Votes Vote

A lot of market cap just opened up for @NEAVC portfolio company @Mulesoft

another thought on informatica - co's like Dell and Informatica w/viable strategies that need patient capital should run like the wind fm public markets. We've seen this work before (e.g. seagate)

big distinction between legacy companies that can't respond to new web cloud world and need to go private to take cover vs new web cloud companies that are riding these waves and should go public

Paul Gillin

@psonsini Are you saying that going private is evidence of failure?

Nick Howell21

How much effect do the big companies (NetApp, EMC, HP, IBM, etc) have on getting a BigData startup off the ground? Is there active vetting to insure a new MVP is not something that is already being done elsewhere? Curious on how gaps are presented...

we safely assume that the big dogs just can't respond fast enough these days. So long as the trend is very contemporary we don't worry much about them. They are just too stuck in the mud to respond.

In most exciting storage markets today, big vendors are held back by cash cow legacy products. They may have a competing product for a new use case, but have a limited ability to put sales, marketing, and engineering $ behind it.

. @datacenterdude don't mess with the federation... they have lots of muscle in the market and lots of synergies to do M&A fast and well

That's a common perception. It's also on us to market our solutions better. There are certainly times when we have existing solutions that are comparable/similar, but no one is excited about them yet.

@aaronej Nailed it. The productization of something can take longer than spinning up a comparable new MVP.

@psonsini How about vmware finally waking up in storage - how does that affect for example a Tintri who started when vmware storage was totally broken? - is there still plenty of white space

@dvellante Execs wholesale bailing out at Tintri says something. I'm not sure what, but they either figured out how to do something better, or lost faith in the product(s).

@dvellante Can you define "VMware waking up in storage?" Is this a VSAN reference or are you specifically referring to architecture changes like policies and VVols?

0 Votes Vote

execs who have been with companies for a long time often need a change for personal reasons; happens all the time, just look around

5 Votes Vote

John Furrier21

Research from @Wikibon just hitting the market says the mkt for #bigdata is huge. Where do the investors see the value being created? http://www.via-cc.at...

Also interested in VC perspective on business value around #BigData

From the storage side of the world, it's easy for us to wrap business value around enablement, and leveraging the giant pools of unstructured data within our storage systems. But how do enterprises best turn data into information for analysis?

lower levels have been very well funded, as have BI layer however we expect new projects to come around and replace some projects before they are able to really get off the ground

Value is being created up and down the stack, from Applications to Data Management to the Storage. Tough to pinpoint one specific area.

Great example though is our company @MapR. At the app layer it enables new revenue opportunities like real-time offers and product recommendations. At the same time it drastically brings down the cost of storage for deploying a data warehouse.

@aaronej @furrier but where are all the #bigdata apps - we're predicting an explosion but the real action comes late this decade and beyond

@aaronej We love Mapr they are the most under hyped big data winners - just booking business: I will check in with John Schoeder and team

. @dvellante @aaronej I think the apps will be huge but questions is that an investable sector? lots of little deals hard to find a break out winner ?? thoughts Aaron?

that's right @maprtech building company the right way with customers and sw margins

Big data analytics applied to functional areas like Sales & Marketing and @lattice_engines. Customer Success, HR, FP&A present other ops.

Vertical big data applications will be big too if packaged correctly. @Opower is first of many success to come.

@aaronej agree there is huge $$$ in what we call the Engagement Cloud -aka marketing cloud; it will be a very lucrative mkt; OPower is awesome how fast that took off

Christopher Kusek20

Given how consistent the enterprise space is with, "me too" solutions which are essentially carbon copy of everyone else, what kinds of offerings do you see proposed based on customer problems and not competitively similar proposals.

To that point. Is there interest and funding to solve customer problems vs making ANOTHER flash or NAS vendor. ;)

can you elaborate on this more...not sure I see the enterprise as me too at this point; investing might be a bit too "dockerish" right now but software SaaS is a greenfield.

Well take your docker scenario. Once Docker started to gain adoption you get things like Rocket and CoreOS, and who knows how many others will be propping up to say, "I have an idea which is already rehashed and out there! BUT MINE IS BETTER"

I mean. It's not as though containerized applications haven't been in the market place for what... 20 years now?

And Software SaaS is as much a green field discussion today as it was in 1999 when we had his very same discussion laying the initial groundwork for the first dotcom boom. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying its not new.

Leaders will emerge naturally. Yay Capitalism! I say more the merrier!

I think that good software that aligns with cloud model can win the "better mousetrap" game then differentiate further with scale

@datacenterdude true story Nick and I concur. But so long as a leader wins with the customer coming out on top, rather than a least worst model. :)

. @cxi Scale is the new "lock in" spec - doing something unique isn't the value anymore it's scaling it - that is the new differentiation imo; winners keep moving the chains and the goal posts

@furrier whether better mousetrap, or least worst mouse trap. I mean look at Backup today and Enterprise Mgmt suites. It's not who is best. It's who is least worst.