Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. When partnering with big folks like Drata does with AWS, you have to bring business to them. Drata was one of three companies mentioned on stage by AWS’ Head of Partnerships because they did the most transactions on the marketplace than any other company. Otherwise, it falls apart.

AWS 238

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 238

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2024

But SOMA and much of the financial district are still awful. All VCs will invest anywhere now. Better to find a remote job and live in a cheaper, and calmer geo. • It will take years for parts of SF to be nice again. Some parts are great though. Palo Alto and the Peninsula are as pretty, sunny, and expensive as ever. •

AWS 297

AWS B2B AI Startup 297

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW, is a cloud spend optimization solution that guarantees to cut down your AWS bills by 5-15%. With CloudKeeper, we have helped 200+ of our customers optimize their AWS spend with a guaranteed reduction in their AWS bills. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr!

Cloud spend optimization 231

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 231

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

Another 5%-7% go to core infrastructure costs (AWS, Azure, Snowflake, etc). It’s your top marketing and customer retention investment. Typically support consumes about perhaps 5%-7% of your revenue at scale (excluding customer success) in most SaaS models. It could be more or less, but that’s a rough way to think about it.

Azure 250

Azure AWS SaaS Customer Success 250

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

PE wants to invest in leaders, if not necessarily always #1 in a category. The startup I invested in that were acquired by PE in the 2020-2021 Boom were acquired for 8x in one case, 12x in another, and 15x in a third. Products that are as close to an annuity as possible, that are amenable to efficiency gains. is interesting to see.

AWS 277

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 277

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Alison brings the perspective of all sides of a startup, from investing to SaaS to Cloud. For Google Workspace, they invested in expanding and building Google Meet and the rest of the workspace during 2020. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS.

Cloud 270

Cloud Scale AWS AI 270

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

Investing at a breathtaking pace. In many ways, your Quality of Life will simply be awful. Your quality of life will simply be awful if your co-founders aren’t as committed as you, and if they aren’t at least close to as good as you. This friend is one of the hardest working people in the industry. Do not pass go.

Part-Time VPE 299

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 299

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

300 Employees Working on AI Not a surprise, but interesting to see the scale of investment here. #5. Growing Almost 50% as Approaches $2B in ARR The exact growth rate is based on an The Information report from a few weeks ago, and it seems about right looking at their published metrics. That’s awfully impressive.

AWS 288

AWS B2C Scaling AI 288

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2024

Overall Cloud spending has bounced back off lows for sure: AWS at a $105B run rate growing 19% Quarterly YoY growth trends below. VCs are minting AI unicorns at a strong clip, and investing in AI at as fast a clip as they can. OneStream had an epic SaaS IPO at $500m ARR, growing 34%. That is clearly true in some aspect.

AWS 211

AWS Scale Social Media AI 211

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2022

Pop any venture firm’s website into the wayback machine , peruse the bios from the late 90s, and you’ll see statements like “I invest in Internet companies.” For example, a gaming company might build an app on a classic cloud stack on AWS and offer a decentralized peer-to-peer NFT exchange. ” Or Web2.0

AWS 236

AWS Government Innovation Cloud 236

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Investing in things that enable us to move faster and leaner for the long term. Our engineers also write a lot of Ruby code, which knits together a lot of AWS, infrastructure, platform and SaaS technologies that form the core of Intercom’s backend infrastructure. Best in class public companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple).

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

Clouded Judgement

MAY 3, 2024

We now have results from the three hypersclaers (AWS / Azure / GCP). The most notable change in tone was Andy Jassy talking about AWS. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cost optimization & reporting 190

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Software Azure 190

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 But also it’s allowed us to get much closer to our provider, I mean, we host and run 100% on AWS, but pull data from everywhere. It was pretty easy to drive that from our side.

Scale 224

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 224

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud. Azure (excluding Azure AI) continued to decelerate, and while AWS did come in ahead of expectations, it wasn’t a blow out. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cost optimization & reporting 167

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 167

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

The Treasure Data platform instantly analyzed large amounts of data, which meant that companies didn’t need to hire lots of computer scientists or put up a considerable upfront investment for data projects. . Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud. million and $1.2 million deals led by the founders.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 298

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

To invest in you when there’s no logical reason to. But they are often just awful managers. You have to convince people to join you. To drag the troops up the hill. To do the impossible. You probably haven’t done it before. Turns out, first-time CEOs are often the most successful.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AWS Churn 279

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. To “soften the beach,” you need to expend as little energy and investment as possible while learning as much as possible. Invest in and put that into the market to start softening the beach.

Scale 221

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 221

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 25, 2023

Cloud LLM Infrastructure Microsoft OpenAI Snowflake Nvidia Databricks Mosaic Google Anthropic Oracle Cohere Amazon HuggingFace Microsoft has invested over $10b, plus significant development efforts to work with OpenAI. Google has invested hundreds of millions into Anthropic , complementing its efforts with Google Brain.

Artificial Intelligence 202

Artificial Intelligence AI AWS Cloud 202

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

Historically, Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure help with the sporadic needs of renting a GPU for a few hours for training vs. long-term use, which would cost thousands of dollars. If someone doesn’t want to switch from AWS because AWS has partnerships with OpenAI, they have tradeoffs. What about ROI?

AI Search 244

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 244

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

If you want to scale, you need to make the investment of time and money and make sure your infrastructure suits your size of business. A lot of our workload was getting moved to AWS, and wouldn’t you know it: they want you to move compute to them so they have migration services to match. Are you growing and want to scale?

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

I thought it might be helpful to assemble a checklist of 22 reasons I almost immediately pass on investing in start-ups that are still interesting. This one you can’t really control, but I only want to invest in founders that can build a management team. This is sort of awful. Others bet on traction. They never catch up.

Sales Recruiting 342

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 342

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2022

Secureframe allows companies to get compliant within weeks, rather than months and monitors 100+ services, including AWS, GCP, and Azure. Verdane is a specialist growth equity investment firm that partners with tech-enabled and sustainable businesses based out of Europe to help them reach the next stage of international growth.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 215

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS Enterprise readiness 215

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Back then, folks all over Twitter were making fun of Sequoia for investing $20m+ in an iOS app that never launched and failed. Now, to a small fund, or a new VC, I’d think a $14m loss would just be awful. So the original post below I wrote a full 10 (!) years ago in the first few months of SaaStr.com, in November 2012.

Venture Capital 241

Venture Capital AWS Enterprise Investment 241

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

Or of my investments, ones like Algolia and Salesloft, that yes, in theory, were playing in larger markets, but in practice, their entry points were quite narrow. Worth investing 7+ years of your life in. But others started off in what seemed like … material but smaller markets. Like Shopify and Okta, to pick two.

Scale 237

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 237

Frontegg

JUNE 30, 2021

Another great benefit of investing in multi-tenant architectures is the possibility of maintaining the application’s agility and good performance. This way, the more customers you have, the more investment you can make in marketing, promotion, and improving customer relations. How to Build a Multi-tenant SaaS Application on AWS?

AWS 88

AWS SaaS Payments Payment Methods Enterprise 88

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 6, 2023

In the cloud, AWS, Azure, & GCP have created about as much market cap as all the top 100 B2B & B2C publics built on cloud (Netflix, ServiceNow, AirBnb, etc). It’s likely startups start at plug-ins & then move down with scale that affords more usage & more capital to invest.

Generative AI 206

Generative AI AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 206

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

It could be a 6-month, 12-month, or multi-year venture, so you want the cash to invest in an upmarket strategy properly. Once you do, invest and go hard after this market and grow the sales team to serve that upmarket customer. #3: Make sure you can make that investment from a product perspective. Look at your team.

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 278

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS. Hire a Junior Team You can recruit your junior team from investment banking or other Strategic Finance teams. Invest in next-gen finance tooling. Encourage bias towards action.

Scale 187

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 187

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

I started at Amazon before they had Amazon Web Services (AWS) so I was lucky enough to see AWS born out of the guts of all of the great operations work done for the amazon.com retail website. You can think of them beginning from very base infrastructural technologies, and in our case we’re betting exclusively on AWS as a cloud vendor.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Don’t wait to invest in customer success and account management. Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? So is SaaS cursed? I know this seems counter-intuitive.

Scale 299

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 299

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q3 ‘23 Not a great signal for software this week from the Cloud Giants (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)…After Q2 (3 months ago), the tone from the Cloud Giants around optimizations was largely: optimizations have started to ease, and net new workloads have picked up. That is not new.”

Cost optimization & reporting 157

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 157

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 9, 2021

Ten years ago, we built the initial Intercom infrastructure in AWS’ us-east-1 data center in North Virginia, USA. As a first step, we’re delighted to announce that we now offer European data hosting – allowing your most important data to remain entirely in Europe, stored in the AWS-eu-west-1 region.

Data 181

Data AWS Scale Engineering 181

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

And more importantly – which ones are really going to deliver a return on investment for your precious (and limited) budget? AWS – Cloud computing. Many of the biggest and best companies in the world use AWS – and many of them were once startups using AWS, too. Look for tools that can scale with you. Apply now.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

Subscribe now Foundation Models Are to AI what S3 was to the Public Cloud Many people look at 2006 as the birth of the public cloud - the year Amazon launched AWS. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 176

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS Azure 176

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

Databricks’ CEO, Ali Ghodsi, shares why Open Source is becoming a multi-billion investment, why it’s taking over multiple industries, and why it’s here to stay. For us, the SaaS model Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered was an amazing one to look at. Open Source and Linux dominate every industry they’re a part of.

Enterprise 243

Enterprise AI AWS SaaS 243

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184