Leading-edge software developers are amazing – yet incredibly demanding – early adopters.  For products and platforms that increase development velocity, remove complexity, and drive performance and scalability, their initial support is a leading indicator of future success.  Companies that channel this early support into creating a passionate, engaged, developer community build better products, see stronger adoption, and ultimately build better businesses than their non-community-driven peers.  This is an important investment theme for Flybridge and one we have seen play out successfully with our prior investments in companies such as MongoDB, which is now a $30+B value public company whose industry-leading database has been downloaded over 200 million times from their website, and Firebase, which now has more than 3 million apps using its services and in which we were seed and Series A investors prior to their acquisition by Google in 2014.  

Fast forward to 2021 and one of the fastest-growing developer communities is forming around Appwrite.  Initially developed by Founder and CEO, Eldad Fux, as a passion project to solve his own problems (as all the best developer platforms are), the Appwrite community has exploded in the last 9 months growing to over 50K members and over 375 code contributors across the globe.  Developers love the platform, which now has over 13,000 Github stars, making it one of the fastest-growing repos on Github, and usage is up 24 times in the last 6 months.  The passion for and engagement with Appwrite can be seen in their most recent release, where open source contributors outnumbered maintainers and over 100 community-driven pull requests were merged into the main branch.  

Appwrite is a secure open-source backend server for web, mobile & flutter developers, that is often referred to as an open-source version of Firebase.  Google has been an excellent steward of Firebase, but nearly 10 years after its initial release which enabled real-time applications, and after integrating several acquisitions, we and the Appwrite community believe there is an opportunity to create the leading backend service for the next 10 years.  

Specifically, Appwrite was written from the ground up to be the best backend as a service on the market, with consistently designed services that drive a better developer experience and APIs that are designed to work well as a whole, yet with the flexibility to be consumed separately.  All the protocols are ones that developers already know, which shortens the learning curve and the time to wow.  Finally, in today’s multi-cloud, privacy-aware, and security-focused world, Appwrite can be hosted on any infrastructure, location, and platform which allows application developers to control their data, users’ privacy, and comply with local regulations.

Given this success, we were thrilled to co-lead the company’s recently announced $10M Seed round alongside Bessemer, Ibex Investors, and Seedcamp.  The resources will be used to expand the team (careers page here) and drive the roadmap, including releasing Appwrite 1.0 and the Appwrite Cloud service as well as deepening the platform’s database, storage, authentication, and functions services, all while being responsive to new ideas brought forward from this incredible community.  We look forward to the journey!

A month ago our portfolio company MongoDB went public. The stock priced at $24.00 per share and closed the first day of trading at $32.07 per share. While an IPO is merely a financing event in the trajectory of a successful company and, in the words of the company’s super talented CEO, Dev Ittycheria, “NOT an end but rather a new beginning for MongoDB”, it’s still an important milestone and one worth celebrating and reflecting upon.

My association with MongoDB has been an absolute pleasure, having served on the board since Flybridge led a $3.4M financing in the company at a $12M post-money valuation ($0.66 per share) in October of 2009. In that month, MongoDB had 2,563 downloads for its nascent product. Today, it has had over 30 million. When we announced the investment, I wrote about what led to our decision to support the company: a phenomenal team, a large market with trends in the company’s favor, and a great product that customers loved. What strikes me upon re-reading that post 8 years later, is how simple, but true, that analysis was.

Since the beginning, under the leadership of co-founders Eliot Horowitz and Dwight Merriman, MongoDB has had one of the most talented, creative and driven technical teams I have had the pleasure of working with. Further, throughout the company-building process, the company benefited tremendously from the advice and guidance of Kevin Ryan, the company’s third co-founder and Chairman. Our market thesis was that the database market was large, growing (at the time, $30B in annual revenue; in 2016, $44.6B) and trending towards more special purpose solutions rather than the legacy, one-size fits all relational database model. This market insight has played out broadly. In addition to MongoDB, alternative datastores like Hadoop and its derivatives in the analytics market have thrived in the market. Finally, on the product front, MongoDB has continued to be loved by developers for it’s simplicity, flexibility, scalability and the fact it can run in any environment from the company’s database as a service offering, Atlas, to the cloud, on-premise or in hybrid environments.

What we did not write about publicly, but discussed in our internal analysis, were three additional observations:

• MongoDB is a classic disruption story. When we were conducting diligence on the company, many of our friends and experts with deep expertise in the relational database market were quick to point out all the product’s shortcomings and the features it lacked. These objections failed to recognize that user’s desires to (1) develop software in a more agile, iterative manner; (2) deploy databases in horizontally scalable cloud architectures; and (3) utilize a product that was easy to access and allowed for immediate productivity gains all created benefits that more than compensated for the product’s supposed shortcomings at the time. Today, this “nice toy” of a database, as one of these experts called it, sees 30% of it’s new paying customers come from applications migrating off of relational databases (the other 70% comes from net new applications).
• Developers are the new King of IT. When we first invested, it becoming apparent that the proliferation of software applications across all enterprises coupled with the rise of of the cloud, and more distributed architectures, was making the developer the new “King of IT”. This allowed, and continues to allow, MongoDB to go-to-market with a very developer-centric approach and then leverage this grassroots adoption into paying customers over time. I have written much about this developer adoption strategy in general, and as it applied to subsequent investments we made in companies such as Firebase, Stackdriver and Crashlytics (all successful investments and interestingly, all now owned by Google), but the approach of building a passionate user base prior to selling into a large enterprise has proven to be a successful one.
• Land and Expand is a powerful business model. The flip side of a grassroots adoption first model is that when you do land a paying customer, you often land them for relatively small dollars. But, with a recurring revenue model and a product that delivers on its promises, over time these small customers renew and expand and this can build a large and growing recurring revenue base as shown in the chart below. In the case of MongoDB, this led to annual revenues that grew from $40.8M in FY 2015 (Jan) to $101.4M in FY 2017; in almost 300 customers that now spend in excess of $100K per year, up from 110 in early 2015; net ARR expansion rate of over 120% for each of the last ten quarters; and, annual cohorts that show, in the case of 2013 for example, 4.1x expansion over 4 years (i.e $5.3 million in FY13 grew to $22.1 million in FY17).

Of course getting the investment thesis right only matters if the company is able to execute. And the team at MongoDB has executed exceptionally well. Along the way, the founders were joined by Dev Ittycheria, who to no one’s surprise given his track record of success, has proven to be a remarkable, strategic, focused and results oriented, leader. He is also an exceptional recruiter and under his guidance the company has added well over 400 employees, including Michael Gordon, an extremely adept CFO (who after the IPO process is in need of a good night’s sleep), Carlos Delatorre, CRO who has built a world-class sales team, and Megan Eisenberg, CMO who has the unique talent in a marketing executive of being to drive both high level corporate marketing and a demand generation machine. Under Eliot’s leadership as CTO the company has also built a world-class, deeply technical, enterprise software team in New York City (which many thought was not possible, but it turns out to be a distinct advantage), including Cailin Nelson, SVP Cloud Engineering, Dan Passette, SVP Core Engineering, and Richard Kreuter, SVP Field Engineering. A hat tip to all of these executives, plus the 800+ other employees at MongoDB, on what they have built together.

It has been my distinct pleasure to work with such a talented team for the last 8 years. But, again, the IPO is just a financing. The company feels like it’s just getting started in its quest to disrupt this massive database market. I look forward to remaining on the company’s Board and continuing the journey for many years to come, building an important, anchor public technology company in New York City.

This post orginally appeared on KDnuggets in May of 2014 and came out of a panel discussion at Analytics Week in Boston that was moderated by Gregory Piatetsky of KDnuggets.  On the panel, I was asked to discuss where we see investment opportunities in the Big Data landscape and this post will expand on my comments.  The lens through which I make these observations is from our role as a seed and early stage venture capital investor, which means we are looking at where market opportunities will develop over the next 3-5 years, not necessarily where the market is today.

Over the past few years, billions of dollars of venture capital funding has flowed into Big Data infrastructure companies that help organizations store, manage and analyze unprecedented levels of data.  The recipients of this capital include Hadoop vendors such as Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR; NoSQL database providers such as MongoDB (a Flybridge portfolio company where I sit on the board), DataStax and Couchbase; BI Tools, SQL on Hadoop and Analytical framework vendors such as Pentaho, Japsersoft Datameer and Hadapt.  Further, the large incumbent vendors such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, HP, EMC, Tibco and Informatica are plowing significant R&D and M&A resources into Big Data infrastructure.  The private companies are attracting capital and the larger companies are dedicating resources to this market given an overall market that is both large, ($18B in spending in 2013 by one estimate) and growing quickly (to $45B by 2016, or a CAGR of 35% by the same estimate) as shown in the chart below: 

While significant investment and revenue dollars are flowing into the Big Data infrastructure market today, on a forward looking basis, we believe the winners in these markets have largely been identified and well-capitalized and that opportunities for new companies looking to take advantage of these Big Data trends lie elsewhere, specifically in what we at Flybridge call Full-Stack Analytics companies.   A Full-Stack analytics company can be defined as follows:

1. They marry all the advances and innovation developing in the infrastructure layer from the vendors noted above to
2. A proprietary analytics, algorithmic and machine learning layer to
3. Derive unique, and actionable insights from the data to solve real business problems in a way that
4. Benefits from significant data "network effects" such that the quality of their insights and solutions improve in a non-linear fashion over time as they amass more data and insights. 

A Full-Stack Analytics platform is depicted graphically below:

Two points from the above criteria that are especially worth calling out are the concepts of actionable insights and data network effects.  On the former, one of the recurring themes we hear from CIOs and LIne of Business Heads at large companies is that they are drowning is data, but suffering from a paucity of insights that change decisions they make.  As a result, it is critical to boil the data down into something that can be acted upon in a reasonable time frame to either help companies generate more revenue, serve their customers better or operate more efficiently.  On the latter, one of the most important opportunities for Full-Stack analytics companies is to use machine learning techniques (an area my partner, Jeff Bussgang, has written about) to develop a set of insights that improve over time as more data is analyzed across more customers – in effect, learning the business context with greater data exposure to drive better insights and, therefore, better decisions.  This provides not only an increasingly more compelling solution but also allows the company to develop competitive barriers that get harder to surmount over time.  In other words, this approach creates a network effect where the more data you ingest, the more learning ensues which leads to better decisions and opportunities to ingest yet even more data.

In the Flybridge Capital portfolio, we have supported, among others, Full-Stack Analytics companies such as DataXu, whose Full-Stack Analytics programmatic advertising platform makes billions of decisions a day to enable large online advertisers to manage their marketing resources more effectively; ZestFinance, whose Full-Stack Analytics underwriting platform parses through 1000s of data points to identify the most attractive consumers on a risk-adjusted basis for its consumer lending platform; and Predilytics, whose Full-Stack Analytics platform learns from millions of data points to help healthcare organizations attract, retain and provide higher quality care to their existing and prospective members. 

Each company demonstrates important criteria for success as a Full-Stack Analytics company:

1. identify a large market opportunity with an abundance of data;
2. assemble a team with unique domain insights into this market and how data can drive differentiated decisions and have the requisite combination of technical skills to develop and;
3. manage a massively scalable learning platform that is self-reinforcing.

If your company can follow this recipe for success, you will find your future as a Full-Stack Analytics provider to be very bright!

I was at the GigaOm Structure conference last week which provided me with an opportunity to reflect on trends in the cloud computing world and how my thoughts on the market opportunities and trends have changed since I last wrote about this market in depth almost three years ago.

Before looking ahead, it is worth revisiting that old post, which can be found here, as not surprisingly i got some things right and missed some things.  Observations that in hindsight I got right include:

1. The advent of cloud computing is a fundamental architectural shift that will create numerous opportunities up and down the enterprise IT landscape.  This has, and continues, to come to pass in spades.
2. Competing as a company in the public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market is a fool's errand.  One only needs to look at the pace of innovation at AWS, which is awe inspiring, and their dominant market share, to realize that this too was correct.
3. The cloud will be a huge enabler of innovation.  This in hindsight, is the most fundamental impact and has changed how entrepreneurs think about starting and building companies, not to mention how venture capitalists fund them.
4. Latching on to developer communities, which I also discussed in depth here, has also proven to be a successful go-to-market strategy for many companies.
5. Some of the specific ideas I discussed such as tools to better manage cloud environments (NewRelic, OpsCode come to mind) and SaaS applications for vertical markets (Jive, SuccessFactors) have also proven to be fruitful market opportunities for talented entrepreneurs.

Observations that, with the benefit of hindsight, I missed include:

1. Enabling enterprise data centers to be more cloud like has not proven to be as fertile an area as I suspected.  Yes, VMware is seeing success with their software defined data center strategy, but as of yet none of the private cloud  platforms has broken out of the fray with significant revenue momentum.
2. Bridging the cloud enterprise boundary has also not really developed into a significant market opportunity.
3. The impact of mobility on cloud adoption.  No use case has driven cloud adoption the way the explosion of mobile devices has, and in hindsight, even three years ago this trend should have been identified more explicitly.
4. The impact cloud scale data centers would have on networking technologies.  One only needs to looks at the >1,000 people that attended the recent Open Networking Summit to realize that the trend to Software Defined Networking and OpenFlow is gaining steam, although in my defense this was less evident in 2009.

So where does this leave entrepreneurs and investors on a go forward basis as we collectively look for opportunity in the cloud computing market?  A few thoughts:

1. The public cloud is going to win.  Due to a combination of innovation at large companies such as Amazon, the OpenStack initiative that will enable Amazon's competitors and the fact that the vast majority of young companies developing innovative new solutions will be focused on the public cloud, it is going to be tough for private clouds other than at the largest of companies (JP Morgan and Zynga come to mind, or perhaps some highly regulated industries) to compete with the public cloud on a cost, performance or features basis.  This will, in turn, increasingly drive usage to the public cloud, in turn furthering the pace of innovation and differentiation for the public cloud creating a virtuous cycle.
2. Driving efficiency will remain critical.  As cloud adoption continues apace, driving the efficiency of these large scale systems will be of paramount importance for cloud operators and their customers.  This means there is significant running room for companies not only that effect the labor side of the equation by driving efficiency in DevOps but also across other operating costs, especially power consumption (both in aggregate and in terms power usage effectiveness, or PUE.  As the CIO of Zynga said at Structure, "we need more innovation on power").
3. Performance and response time demands from consumers will continue to increase.  The threshold of patience from any consumer of cloud services, whether they be delivered over the web or a mobile device, continues to decline rapidly.  Technologies that offer greater performance, or a path to developing applications with greater performance, to address this trend will see great demand.
4. Leveraging developers to drive adoption remains critical.  As fundamental infrastructure architectural decisions get delegated into the cloud, developers increasingly will make critical application level decisions, so tools that increase their efficiency and/or offer new functionality that speed application development have the potential to see rapid uptake in the market.
5. Look for ways to leverage the cloud to bridge data and applications onto mobile devices.  Just as Dropbox did for consumer file access, there are a myriad of applications and use cases that can harness the combined power of mobile and the cloud to provide unique user experiences.

I am sure another 3 years down the road, some of these insights will also prove to be off base, but let me know what you think or other opportunities I should be adding to the list!

 

One of the investment themes we are pursuing here at Flybridge within our Dynamic Computing (which my partner David Aronoff covered in detail here) is the rise of developer driven business models.

Ten years ago architectural standards in large or mid sized companies were set by the CIO or Architecture review boards and the choices were fairly limited (Solaris, Linux or Windows for the OS; Oracle, DB2 or mySQL for the database; Weblogic, Websphere or jBoss for the app server, Java or .Net for languages, etc).  In today's world, on the other hand, the choices have expanded by a couple of orders of magnitude with the rise of open APIS (what Ross Mason calls the ninja slicing of the application stack) open source, virtualization, cloud computing and dynamic scripting languages.  This has empowered the developer to experiment, prototype and ultimately drive the adoption of new technologies in ways that were not previously practical.

As a result many companies are seeing great success in infiltrating large customers not with a top down approach marked by expensive sales people, but rather on with a bottoms up, developer led approach that demonstrates value on a project by project basis before the CIO even knows what is happening.  So what are the keys to success in driving this grassroots adoption?

The most important point is the simple one: your product needs to work and have a clear value proposition.  In other words the age old better, faster, cheaper still applies.  But assuming that, here are ten concrete suggestions for getting the developer driven business model to work for your company:

1. Rapid time to value: Developers are always stretched and have more to do than time to do it.  Your product needs to show value fast.  Traditionally this meant less than 30 minutes to be up and running, although today this is compressing even further (one of our companies has a 5 minute register, download, install, integrate and run goal).
2. Free to start: Have a fully functional, high value, free product that allows experimentation.  If your developer customer needs to pay to do anything useful, they wont adopt.
3. Superior documentation and support: Related to point one, your documentation needs to be clear, easily searched and any support issues need to be addressed quickly and thoroughly.  Get everyone in your company into your support forums providing high value assistance.
4. Leverage existing communities of interest: As an early stage company it is hard to create a movement on your own.  Tap into existing communities with momentum and where your potential customers can be found.  NewRelic, which out of the gates latched on to the growing Ruby community, has always struck me as one company that did this well.
5. Buy your engineers plane tickets (or at least subway passes): Find where your developer customers congregate and get your team into the community to attend meet-ups, show off your product and explain what it does and why it solves real problems.  Overtime, generic meet-ups can become more targeted around your specific solution as we have seen withour portfolio company 10gen, and the highly successful events they put together for the mongoDB community.
6. Facilitate word of mouth: Get your customers to speak on your behalf, either live or via their own blogs.  Share presentations and use cases via slideshare.  Contribute positively to HackerNews & Stackoverflow.  Work twitter.
7. Have a CEO that can code: Street cred matters both externally and internally and respect in the community will build if the leader of your company has walked in the shoes of your customers.  If you are a CEO and are not a hard-core developer, fix some bugs, work on the front end code, and resolve support issues. 
8. Don't market:  Developers are smart and cynical.  Slick marketing wont work.  Speak their language, solve their problems, add value first.  That gives your credibility to expand usage and ultimately get paid.
9. Have a clear pricing model:  Historically people think developers don't pay for anything.  This is true, but their bosses will.  If you are adding value, people will want to pay (and in fact a company with out clear revenue model may actually see slower uptake as Sean Ellis wrote about here), but they will need to know on what basis they will be charged so they can understand the longer-term implications of working with you.
10. Help your early adopters sell internally: Once you have some champions at a customer, especially in larger organizations they may need to convince their bosses that what they want to do is the right idea.  Be ready to arm them with information on security, performance, integration points and other similar implementations to make this easy for them.  

This is my top ten list, would love to hear other thoughts on what works, or does not work, for you.

Last week I did several reference calls on a new project we were looking at in the enterprise IT market.  In each case I was speaking with a senior IT executive at a large financial institution.  The calls were not to the company's existing customers, but rather to people I just felt would be thoughtful on the company's market opportunity.

As it turned out, each had actually evaluated the company's product and they started out the conversation by saying how impressed they were with the company's technical approach, how it was really innovative and superior to other solutions, and how much they liked the company's management team. So far, so good.

Then I asked the obvious next question: so did you buy the solution?  In each case, the answer was no. The why behind the no, however, is what is illuminating on some of the recurring  challenges for traditional start up enterprise IT companies.  Although they used different words, the consistent themes were:

1. We went with our incumbent vendor.  We know their solution is not as good, but it is good enough and it is already integrated into our infrastructure and we know how to work with them.
2. This project, while important, was not high enough on our priority list to get everyone's attention.  Given tight budgets, the only new initiatives we are doing relate to driving revenue or addressing pressing regulatory changes in our business.
3. The company wanted to do a paid pilot with us to prove how much superior their solution was, but given a pilot required standing up new iT infrastructure and integrating into some of our core systems, this was a significant undertaking and not something we were willing to do given point two above.  Further, the pilot was required to demonstrate the business case which left us in a Catch-22 situation.

Many of the takeaways from this conversation are the same as I wrote about two years ago in my long enterprise IT post, but I felt they are worth repeating in the light of this conversation.  First, if your product/market focus requires a traditional enterprise IT approach, which for me means high touch direct sales with a product that requires some level of IT support and integration, you better make sure that:

1. Your "superior solution" is significantly superior.  As in 10 times better, not 50% better.
2. You are focused on a company's top three strategic initiatives, because nothing else is going to get funded in amounts or in a timeframe that will make you happy.

As you have likely figured out, these two things are hard.  In the fast paced technology world, sustainable 10x product differentiation is uncommon and fitting that with the ever-shifting strategic priorities of large organizations is even harder.

The alternative, of course, is to think creatively about ways to reduce the friction in the adoption process which is why we continue to be attracted to open-source, freemium and SaaS business models.  Instead of the conversation I had above, imagine if the customer was able to download/ sign up for the company's product -  without consuming any IT resources or getting into a lengthy procurement cycle – and then use the product and see its value.  If the product was easy to use and understand, did not require deep integration or if it did, the integration came "pre-built" via some partnerships, the potential customer would have been able to develop its business case and pre-qualify themselves as a relevant customer.  Thus they would consume minimal resources from the vendor until they raised their hand and said, I am ready to buy.  While this is by no means easy, if you have the right focus across your company in terms of product management, development and sales and marketing, it is likely an easier approach than trying to find that magical 10x better product that meets your customers top strategic priorities in an era of constrained budgets and shifting priorities.