Perspectives, not platitudes.

Q123 data indicates that the growth slowdown is continuing - and most companies failed to meet even the conservative plans they set earlier this year. This was the fourth consecutive quarter of decrease in both top-decile and median year-over-year ARR growth, with only 22% of companies achieving their Q123 plans. 

This is a guide for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and others who have questions around terms, definitions, high-level scenarios, and structure.

it is nearly impossible to define alignment, let alone achieve it. Human beings, in all their variance, capacity, and folly, make up the entire training pipeline, and we take such comfort in the fact that we call them all by the same name. But every human is individual, and models will change as their trainers do.

We built a bot to help you get VCs off your back. Hopefully, this doesn’t put the author out of a job.

Segment-specific startups frequently outperform their horizontal counterparts and do so with greater efficiency, lower churn, and simpler GTM motions. So why the aversion from some investors?

The way these plugins are designed is as open as I can possibly imagine, which means we can peek under the hood at how they are made. That is, if you know where to look. It also offers us a glimpse into potential business ramifications, which we’ll take a look at at the end of this post.

Autonomy is making its way into more corners of the warehouse - from forklift operations, to depalletizing, to picking, packing, and trailer unloading. Several years ago, there was still a palpable skepticism around whether automation was here to stay. That mindset has now shifted: the same skepticism has been replaced by not just acceptance, but a series of questions around which automation solutions will be the right ones to choose.

We believe that we are at an inflection point where stream processing will become the standard that powers user-facing analytics. The growing importance of the use cases enabled by stream processing is being met with solutions that are increasingly easy to adopt.

Vantage is a self-service cost visibility platform that helps businesses manage and optimize their cloud infrastructure costs. The founding team brings a nuanced understanding of modern enterprise needs related to infrastructure cost management and offers native support for service providers beyond the big three clouds.

We are thrilled to announce that we are leading an investment in Plus One Robotics as part of the Company’s $50M Series C financing. At its core, the company specializes in streamlining the movement of mixed parcels, bags, and products for logistics providers in the likes of DHL, FedEx, and MSC Industrial, many of which Plus One counts amongst its growing rolodex of customers.

No one can tell exactly what 2023 will bring, but one thing is for certain: there is a sprint to efficiency with improving burn multiples and slowing revenue growth across the board. Comparing 2022 performance with 2023 plans shows the stark reality. The slowdown in ARR Growth we saw in 2022 will result in a slowdown in GAAP Revenue Growth in 2023. At the same time, startups have tightened their belts to become more efficient.

Earlier this week I had the chance to sit down with Box CFO Dylan Smith and discuss how Box was able to dramatically improve their cost structure while continuing to innovate and grow in the face of tough competition. The learnings Dylan shared from the journey Box embarked on in 2020 are broadly applicable to the challenges tech companies are facing going into 2023.

This Is What Winning In SaaS Looks Like In 2023. A case study of Box Inc.'s sharp focus on profitability beginning in 2020, leading to over-performance in a down market.

Here's the data we're sharing with our portfolio companies as they develop 2023 annual plans.

Some high-level thoughts about how CFOs of technology companies should be thinking about their annual planning ahead of 2023.