boldstart ventures, partnering from Inception with bold founders reinventing the enterprise stack - Snyk, Kustomer, BigID, Blockdaemon...
Want to hear a story about how an enterprise infrastructure co survived the dot.com crash? original tweet from May 21, 2022 1/ So many tweets about why it's a great time to start a co + it is, but let me share 1 of survival + success from dot.com crash - how @Greenplum pivoted, sold to EMC + IPOed as Pivotal Hope is founders will come out more resilient, investors more patient + ecosystem healthier 2/ Metapa was started by Scott Yara, Anthony Batt Neville Spiteri as an Akamai-like infrastructure play to transcode any media format for any device + player over any content delivery network This was the era of free 💰 + endless $$$ for infra plays 3/They had a few large paying customers but market crashed + for an infra startup, the world stopped. The company skinnied down to a core team of engineers + bought time It was rough, brutal, but the founders survived by doing consulting work for data analytics projects 4/ 18 mos of consulting + along way the founders found Didera, a database clustering solution built on commodity clusters - we bought the company in 2003 w/ stock + invested in new round 5/ 6 mos, later prototype was launched along w/a few customers, rd led by Leo Spiegel + VP Sales brought on board to sell + scale 6/ 9 mos later it was relaunched w/a new round led by Sierra Ventures Tim Guleri + new CEO from Sun Micro Bill Cook joined, eventually Meritech Capital led round 7/ Greenplum sold in 2010 to EMC for super healthy undisclosed price + eventually spun back out, IPOed as Pivotal in 2018 https://lnkd.in/eiphN_mU 8/ BTW, I had no idea what I was doing as I had been a VC for 5 years w/no operating experience - was an incredible time of learning + pain but has definitely informed lots of how I think about building cos + being balanced aggressive when scaling - here's few lessons I learned... 9/ Missionary founders matter - founders volunteered to invest next to us + cut salaries back to survive when Didera was bought Honesty about your product matters - founders had paying customers twice + scrapped what they were doing - easy to keep going + not face hard truth 10/ Premature scaling of GTM + sales pre-PMF is number 1 cause of startup death You make product, you sell product as Tom Mendoza likes to say Problem is too many founders think they have PMF when they don't - a product that an exact persona wants that can be sold repeatedly 11/ Oh, this is not like 2000 - not sure what this is really like but if you have a GTM team + some sales, ask yourself if you really have PMF If you are pre-PMF, do what you need to build the product people want - should only have engineers 12/ This time sucks but good things can come out of this! I have so many more stories like this; GoToMeeting survived from a pivot, a number of our early crypto infra cos went through similar phase in 2018. Make the hard choices now and lots of good can come out of this We r all now lifelong friends as I was stranded for a week in LA during 9/11
Anthony Batt
4mo
Ed as you recall it was the start of creating LAMP stack using OpenSource, big data patterns and pre-cloud as service. So we had to build our own AWS consoles to manage our distributed infrastructure. Looking back at those days we had to build so much before market fit. Moreover customers we still just learning what web apps were and how to buy them. In todays world SaaS is normal so no sales friction on that front so the teams focus should be on customers pain point solution and making customers super happy. After that product teams can create muscle building features for customers, but not before getting one single killer feature nailed first.
Nima Badiey
4mo
That was the start of something amazing as the island of misfit toys including Greenplum, Pivotal Labs, Pivotal Tracker, Cloud Foundry, Spring, Redis and more became the amazing Paas powerhouse Pivotal (later acquired by Vmware)
Mark Hinkle
4mo
Good takeaway, "Problem is too many founders think they have PMF when they don't - a product that an exact persona wants that can be sold repeatedly."
Andrew Ettinger
4mo
Great story and even better people!!!!
Joe Otto
4mo
You learn a lot about investors too, when adversity hits! Thank you, Ed!
Matthew Nordby
4mo
It was a wild ride!
Pradeep Padala
4mo
Interesting history of Metapa + GreenPlum, didn't know. Great story and thanks for sharing the insights.
boldstart ventures, partnering from Inception with bold founders reinventing the enterprise stack - Snyk, Kustomer, BigID, Blockdaemon...
4momore here from my original blog, BeyondVC - https://www.beyondvc.com/2010/07/emc-buys-portfolio-company-greenplum-more-behind-the-story.html