"I have personally found that the healthiest relationship between a board director and the CEO is one that is peer-like"
"To some extent, yes, but it’s actually the board’s job to encourage and allow the company to think long-term."
"Peter will almost always leave the ultimate decisions to the CEO he’s working with, but he has a way of using compelling examples from the many successful companies he has been involved with as anecdotes to help steer the CEOs to the right decisions."
"One of the beauties of rich networks is that they often provide access to the person that is best suited to give the best advice to the entrepreneur."
"The master of the universe of networks is Reid Hoffman."
"Particularly with VC-rich boards, I have found that all-too-often we enjoy hearing ourselves talk perhaps a bit too much."
"I suspect we see the same sort of dynamic with information on social media in particular; there is very little motivation to create misinformation about topics that very few people are talking about, while there is a lot of motivation — money, mischief, partisan advantage, panic — to create misinformation about very popular topics."
"I've fired myself five times at Zapier: from my original role as a frontend engineer, from my role running our early platform, as a design manager, as a product manager, and most recently as Chief Product Officer."
"The crash always involves the same three elements. First is scary bad news that 3 increases uncertainty, and so volatility of asset returns. This leads to tighter margins as lenders get more nervous. This in turn leads to falling prices and huge losses by the most optimistic, leveraged buyers. All three elements feed back on each other; the redistribution of wealth from optimists to pessimists further erodes prices, causing more losses for optimists, and steeper price declines, which rational lenders anticipate, leading then to demand more collateral, and so on"
Claims that they were first company with "three pillars of observability"
"The ended last quarter (30-Jun-2019) with 8,846 customers across 100+ countries."
DataDog is self-serve
Core offering is the infrastructure monitoring tool
42 paying over $1M ARR
"In the first 6 months of 2019, ~60% of Datadog’s increase in revenue was attributable to growth from existing customers."
"In 2019 Datadog signed an agreement with AWS where they are required to purchase at least $225M of cloud services from AWS through April of 2022."
GTM
"1) enterprise sales team focused on large business 2) high-velocity inside-sales team focused on new customers 3) a customer success team focused on customer onboarding and expansions in the current base and 4) a partner team that works with resellers, distributors and managed service providers."
up and coming APM tools: Instana, Lightstep
"Datadog got their start in infrastructure monitoring, has moved “up” the stack towards APM and “down” the stack towards logging, and is continuing to bolt on products that customers are paying for, as evidenced by their high dollar-based net retention rates and multi-product sales growth."
Lol → Have you ever tried to install/setup Superset? The chances of you completing this task fall somewhere between "Next to impossible" and "Not going to happen".
"Moreover, Mulesoft’s exploitation of open source is now complete, giving ownership to a group that takes from open source without giving back commensurately."
Consumer Internet companies are built with the technologies of enterprise IT companies. Enterprise IT companies can now be built with the principles and strategies of consumer companies.
Which businesses have been built off package registries or managers?
"Certainly, the greatest diffusion of open source projects appears to be in settings where the end users are sophisticated, such as the Apache server installed by systems administrators. In these cases, users are apparently more willing to tolerate the lack of detailed documentation or easy-to-understand user interfaces in exchange for the cost savings and the possibility of modifying the source code themselves."
“I have pointed out that any superior record which we might accomplish should not be expected to be evidenced by a relatively constant advantage in performance compared to the Average. Rather it is likely that if such an advantage is achieved, it will be through better-than-average performance in stable or declining markets and average, or perhaps even poorer-than-average performance in rising markets.” ー Warren Buffett, 1960
March 8th, 2020
What are some debates / questions to pay attention to in software and IT infrastructure?
continues to emerge in enterprise security. Have an exciting bet in this space.
Is there going to be a data replication and backup company built for event streaming architectures? Rubrik emerged because traditional vendors in the space couldn't scale across clusters.
"Yes. One of the theses behind my research is that at the moment we rely too much on servers and centralization. If you think about how the Internet was originally designed back in the day when it evolved from ARPANET, it was intended as a very resilient network where packets could be sent via several different routes, and they would still get to the destination. And if a nuclear bomb hit a particular American city, the rest of the network would still work because it would just route around the failed parts of the system. This was a Cold War design. And then we decided to put everything in the cloud, and now basically everything has to go via one of AWS’s datacenters, such as us-east-1 somewhere in Virginia. We’ve taken away this ideal of being able to decentrally use various different parts of the network, and we’ve put in these servers that everything relies on, and now it’s extremely centralized. So I’m interested in decentralization, in the sense of moving some of the power and control over data away from those servers and back to the end users."