Shomik Ghosh
@shomikghosh21
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@boldstartvc - partner at inception for enterprise founders from first line of code, @carnegiemellon alum
San Francisco Bay Area
Joined August 2019
Hello Twitter! For my first post, I thought I'd share the slides of a talk I've recently given at a large tech company and institutional investment funds on qualitative aspects of enterprise software investing and the way to identify the quality companies.
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Probably will close out 2019 w/ 45 books read, ones I thought were most impactful:.Poor Charlies Alamanc.Alchemy.The Halo Effect.Why We Sleep.Boyd.Red Notice.Thinking In Bets.Farsighted.Rereads: Fooled By Randomness and Thinking Fast & Slow
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So yes stocks are down but can we all talk about how freakin crazy the execution of $DDOG has been!!. When people talk about expanding TAM and using a core product as a wedge into a core workflow, Datadog is the case study to bring up 🤯. 👀 customers w/ 4+ products section
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❤️ Twitter. @JerryCap asked how many companies trading at >10x sales have been multi-baggers. @jaminball did the excellent analysis: 27 companies (not including M&A like Mulesoft) all beat the Nasdaq with > 10% CAGR trading > 10x NTM sales at one point
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Say 👋🏾 to da Professor . His And1 Mixtape is incoming shortly. He’s been a fighter and gone through a lot in the month since his birth, but he’s taught my wife & I the true meaning of resilience, strength & gratitude. 🙏🏾 send me your best parenting tips!
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@sethrosen Coming out of banking and joining a startup was the worst day of my life. Went from having a great Intel laptop to a MacBook with no freaking Excel access and none of the keyboard shortcuts id worked so hard to learn were applicable 🤣. Now I can’t go back to a PC lol.
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Some Personal News. 🔥 up to be a partner @Boldstartvc . 🥳 to my colleague @ellenchisa for also becoming a partner. Wanted to share a few things I've learned along the way to commemorate the occasion. Check out our new fund announcement in 🧵below!.
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4 yrs ago multiple people took a leap of faith. Me transitioning from growth to inception investing. @edsim, @etdurbin and the entire @Boldstartvc crew taking a bet on me. When I first met Ed, the longest job I had held was 2 years, I’d done multiple things for 1 yr stints from.
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💥HUGE NEWS💥. Software Snack Bites - The Podcast is Here 🔥. Guests:.@dschenkelman- Employee 10, @auth0 .@eaescob- CISO, @datadoghq .@jaminball- Partner, Altimeter.Julian Alvarez- CEO, @logixboard .@FoolAllTheTime- Author, Fabricated Knowledge . 🙏 to my wife for the artwork. 🧵
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Great thread on the risks that Germany and places like California face by shutting down nuclear power facilities. @wolfejosh you’ve been talking about this for awhile and this thread lays out the risks coherently. Really hope California does not weaken the power grid further.
1/ By systematically shutting down baseload-critical nuclear power facilities and replacing them with intermittent renewable energy, Germany has left itself – and by extension, the entire European Union – vulnerable to shortages of reliable sources of electricity.
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Some personal news . I'm taking my talents to South. ern California 🤣. Moving to Santa Monica in early Oct. Yes, still @Boldstartvc, our companies are all over the globe so doesn't matter where I am. If you have folks I should meet in LA, please tag them below or DM me!
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Some personal news. just messing with y'all 🤣 . I created a personal website on Notion w/ talks, blog posts & other random stuff (link in bio). Also I'm 🚀 a blog called Software Snack Bites! It's free & <5 min reads weekly on Weds. Subscribe below!👇.
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Some fun news 🥳. Couldn’t be more excited to have additional 🔥power to support more incredible founders at company formation 🏗. For the IT nerds out there, see if you can spot the Easter egg 👀.
Announcing $367M in new @Boldstartvc funds, vi $192,168,111 + opp iii $175M for existing cos🚀. Same mission + more excited than ever to be a Day One partner for technical, under🐶 founders building the future of Developer First, Crypto Infra & SaaS . Who's ready to build 🏗️?
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The classic VC response is “sorry it’s not a fit right now but let’s stay in touch for the future”. Fun thing about being a first check seed investor means when you say this, you legit mean let’s keep hanging out since I just lost our chance to ever invest 🤣.
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Software Snack Bites #17: Constellation Software & Org Design. - Why $CSU.TO makes 💵.- How CSU's competitive advantage is more of a function of org design than anything else.- What can we learn from the org design and how does it help CSU operate.
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If you’re not long $GOOGL today then you should probably just be indexing.
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Damn @sequoia gets complimented by Charlie Munger as the "most remarkable investment firm out there". That may be the highest compliment a VC fund has ever received!.
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Makes you wonder if we're all trading and "doing too much work" when we could just own the below and chill. Altarock 13f
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Taking first “steps” holding 25% weight in my boot!! 💪🏾. Recovery process fully on its way 🎉
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Snack Bites #48: I'm Moving Back to SF!. ❤️ LA but the network effect in SF especially in enterprise software is too 💪 to keep me away. Can't wait to see everyone much more often especially around conference time and other events!.
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This was soooo good. Zuck Harvard CS 50 lecture in 2005, a year after starting Facebook. Talks about scaling distributed systems, managing database complexity, mental models for building a company, etc. Some particular thoughts I enjoyed in thread below 👇.
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Spurred on by the podcast between @collision & @patrick_oshag I continue to think one of the most fun things about studying public companies is the broader learnings you can use to apply to company building at the earlier stages, 👇🏾.
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The reason for recent $V share pressure emerges in $JPM earnings report
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For the 1st time in @Boldstartvc history we are hiring an Associate!. If you're passionate about enterprise software and helping founders achieve their goals, we'd love to hear from you!. Please apply below. We're excited to meet!.
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Wow never looked at Amazon’s products like this before. Pretty interesting framework. Betting on infrastructure in all parts of of a business not just software.
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🎧 Nivida, Groq & HBM - What's Ahead for Semis. @_fabknowledge_ dropping knowledge as always. - What is High Bandwidth Memory.- Where Inference Specific Chips Fall Short.- ASICs vs GPUs.- Why $NVDA is well positioned to keep winning. More in 🧵
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Just got cleared to 🚴 again!!. Almost 6 months since the Achilles tear, let’s go!!!. If anyone wants to hit the road with someone who will be slow and with limited current stamina (sounds like a good time i know 🤣), give me a shout!.
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Weight loss update. Down 22 lbs in 5 months. Can see from graph below that have fought plateaus and increases (mostly from going out to eat more with friends post vaccine). @territoryfoods has been a godsend. Also some light macro focus, eating more protein as % of each meal
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IT'S TIME TO GET LONG ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE AGAIN. The backdrop for B2B tech has never been more attractive than it is now. We are coming of of a tech recession that lasted about 3 years. Across the board B2B companies are running more capital efficiently, scrutinizing spend more.
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Announcing the $INFRA index, the worlds first pure Software Infrastructure Index powered by @go_thematic . Read more in post below or this 🧵. Mission critical software infra will continue to power the world going forward & we need a way to capture it.
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This is THE BEST tactical podcast I've heard to date on leadership, recruiting, sales practices, & engineering an amazing gtm engine . John McMahon created the MEDDIC sales qualification framework & board member on $SNOW, $MDB, etc. Learnings in a 🧵👇.
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Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park is one of the best hikes I’ve ever done. The views are worth the fear of heights and narrow chain climbs.
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I don't think investors (me included) think about enough is Base Rates, essentially the probability of something occurring based on historical context, it's a bayesian way of probabilistic thinking, I want to use this thinking in the context of Slack
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I've been quoted saying "the market won't bottom until $DDOG hits 10x sales". Well we're there. Hard to call a bottom especially since so much uncertainty around NTM rev # but at ~$2B ARR with the steady state FCF margin profile of this biz, the dog is cheap imo. 🎩 @KoyfinCharts
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The year is 2035. we all login to book our travel through Silver Lake’s modified LP portal.
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Interesting market map of the ML Ops ecosystem! . 👀. Number of products and categories exploding 💥
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The classic @okta state of Apps report is out and it’s a great one to read. Some standout charts to me are threaded below but there’s tons of good detail in the report
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The Better Bagel is freaking 🪄. Calories - 170.Net Carbs - 5g.Protein - 26g. Super clean ingredient list. Legit magic!
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Incredible transcript on multidisciplinary learning from Peter Kaufman, author of Poor Charlie's Almanac (best book I've ever read on thinking). Kaufman in the paragraph attached describes how he went about learning the big ideas from different fields.
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@trengriffin @patrick_oshag Oooh that’s a good one, also Munger’s Psychology of Human Misjudgement just playing in repeat to sear incentives into your brain .
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@sriramk DevOps Weekly newsletter by @garethr .Enterprise Ready by @GrantM .Kubelist by @mccode .The Changelog.InfoQ.SE Daily @the_prion .NewStack.API Evangelist.
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There's a quote by @FrankQuattrone on success that I love because of its simplicity .90% is showing up.9% is likeability.1% is smarts. Qatalyst performs consistently at the top of its field and its employees still repeat this quote to remind them of what matters.
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New SSB pod w/ @chrishuskey, Partner at Octahedron Capital. The @databricks deep dive you've been waiting for!. - GenAI impact.- The fast evolving competitive landscape.- Overview of platform components. Audio clips in 🧵 below.
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First time at The US Open today!. Got to see Djokovic play, ate some good tacos and hung out with some good people 🥳
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Hashi’s S-1 is like Stripe level hype for infra folks 🤣. Super Bowl for infra. I could keep going with analogies but too excited to read 😂 👀.
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Ain't no better feeling then having enough 💰 to give your parents whatever the f*$k they want 🤣. Past yr gave dad a new grill and my mom a water rower, stuff that they wouldn't purchase on their own & couldn't when younger as they were saving up for my sis and I 🙏
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I was today years old when I realized that every single VC is on a messaging app called Telegram.
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First time going Axe Throwing. Good way to get the aggression out 🤣. (I promise the axe is not as close to my wife as it looks in this pic lol)
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A 3 year exhaustive search with a successful ending!. Today we are thrilled to announce @Boldstartvc is co-leading @Memphis_Dev $5.5M seed round with @AngularVentures . Congrats to @Yanivbh1, @AvrahamNeeman, @IdanAsulin1, & @memphisveta .
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Teams that work out together stay together 💪🏾. Nearly all the @Boldstartvc team getting pumped for the AGM!. @edsim & I didn’t coordinate outfits I promise 🤣. Special guest appearance from the newest Boldstart partner Walter (joining George…hard to tell ‘em apart 😀)!!
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Our @Boldstartvc offsites are pretty much always taken over by one of @edsim 🐶. Say 👋🏾 to George 🤗
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In a world where all the focus is on Net Retention. ServiceNow $NOW stands alone on consistently reporting renewal rates every year. The results are 🤯. Cohort chart showing expansion is below
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In honor of @BluegrassCap & OG Fintwit. 13F Position Tracker across 22 Funds. Criteria:.> 3% position.No China (personal bias)."Higher concentrated" growth focused funds. Quick notes below
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Whoa! Hands down the best movie I’ve seen recently is “Molly’s Game” on Netflix. True story about a 2 time Olympic skier who ran legal and illegal poker games with some of the richest people in the world and got indicted by the govt in a RICO case involving mobs.
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Some books that I've read this yr, most impactful ones that I either reread or will reread in future were:.Halo Effect.Poor Charlie's Almanac.The Score Takes Care of Itself.Boyd.Why We Sleep.Dead Companies Walking.Thinking Fast & Slow.Thinking in Bets.Never Split the Difference
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Well the cats out of the bag, excited to be joining @Boldstartvc. The companies that we back are defining the enterprise software ecosystem and I can't wait to be spending all of my time helping founders accomplish their goals. Looking forward to hustling hard for our founders!.
New York’s Boldstart Ventures has raised $157 million across two funds to back nascent enterprise startups by @cookie
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@HarryStebbings Good stuff happening to good people as a result of immense hard work. Congrats Harry! Excited to partner with you on many more companies in the future.
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An article I wrote up re OSS companies @crunchbase.- Why OSS opens up the TAM.- How the ecosystem flywheel forms and spins.- Ways to monetize.- Product decisions for early startups to consider. Ft @cloudqueryio @AtomicJarInc @elastic @MongoDB .🙏 @tvan415.
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Counting calories works!. Down 5 lbs in a month simply by logging cals & sticking to target. Biggest thing you notice is evaluating tradeoffs in food. You want a cupcake and that may mean no pizza or that hot chocolate that tastes like crap?. prob not worth it. Still lots to do!.
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The folks that keep bidding up $ESTC now are missing the forest for the trees. The bull case was they would be able to expand TAM by moving into security as they had the prices for logging & SIEM. Poor execution led this opportunity to be wasted. Now folks are bidding them on RAG.
$ESTC Guidance:. "While we continue to see significant opportunity across all our solutions and believe we are well positioned to capture this opportunity, we are updating our guidance to reflect our first quarter performance and current outlook. In terms of our guidance
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Portfolio Position Update:.$GOOGL - 27%.$KSI.TO - 13%.$CSU.TO - 8%.$TOI.TO - 7%.$TTEK - 7%.$TVK.TO - 6%.$SII - 5%.$ADBE - 5%.$KPG.AX - 5%.$MELI - 5%.$PYPL - 5%.$CMG.TO - 5%. How I would classify my current B2B tech positions are bucking the "AI is killing this company narrative".
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Software Development Lifecycle market map from Morgan Stanley. What's most interesting is how many winners there are in each area. Rising tide lifts all boats
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Ashamed to admit this but my favorite workout playlist is pretty much from my middle school years. Blink 182.Sum 41.Smash mouth.Linkin Park.
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This post by @itunpredictable is a must read. I've been looking for a concise overview of dev tooling for awhile now and Justin's post is the only one I've seen. Covers writing, shipping, and monitoring code! Best thing I've read this week!
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@DeepSailCapital I think it’s a combo of 1 & 2 and maybe a little of 3 in how you leverage the existing LLMs to train new ones . But without a doubt I think they have access to a lot of GPUs. It’s not like CPUs magically got better at parallelization.
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A case study should be written on $DDOG (Datadog) execution in APM from GA to best of breed in 5 years!!. The below marked up magic quadrant is from @hhhypergrowth excellent premium newsletter. Highly recommend subbing for those who closely watch software infra. The dog 👀
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Big day for the @Boldstartvc family 🎉. @clay_gtm announcing $1.25B Series B .👏@kareemamin @vxanand . @grepr_ai announcing $9M Seed.👏 @jadtnaous . Both incredible teams who stayed focus on finding deep end user pain points before scaling during Product Market Fit (not before).
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The Future of FinTech: A Venture Capitalist's Perspective Ft. Marc Andre. Excellent podcast with some great anecdotes about business models and founders; favorite quote is Stripe co-founder saying our customers do not exist yet.
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Software Snack Bites #22: State of OpenCloud Report Deep Dive. - 1st post of 2022 covering some personal news 🤣.- Diving into my favorite annual report on OSS and infra software from @BatteryVentures .- GTM models, software trends, and of course the ☁️.
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❤️ this backend "burger" diagram. great visualization of how the pieces fit together 🤣🤤. 🎩 @alexxubyte and his awesome @bytebytego newsletter
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🙏to the 200+ people that signed up for my substack already . 1st <5 min read post delivered!. Its about the convergence of product & gtm as told through the lens of product, messaging, & onboarding website screenshots from @CrowdStrike and @snyksec . 👇.
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I may tape a sign to my forehead reading. "AI is not a moat, utilizing AI is not product differentiation". 😡.
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🔥 This was a masterclass on Semiconductors 🔥. SSB Pod #4 - @FoolAllTheTime, Founder of @_fabknowledge_ . Detailed Primer on Semis Industry, AI's effect on Chips, Trends in Chip Specialization. Full Episode 👇.Apple: Spotify:
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Purchases that have changed my life recently. Cordless dyson vacuum. Vitamix. 8 Sleep mattress. (Cleaning, smoothies, and sleep highlights are how I know I’m getting old 🤣)
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Slow summer month they said. Partnering with 4 new companies @Boldstartvc in the last few weeks!! . Quality of founders utilizing LLMs to AUGMENT core products and REIMAGINE existing legacy categories has us fired up over here!.
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Snack Bites #25: Atlassian $TEAM - Racing to the ☁️. - Why Atlassian is so focused on cloud.- How are they pulling of the migration.- Why Jira Service Mgmt is such a big deal in attacking a massive market with a new gtm and product approach.- 🤯 stats.
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Crazy to look at trends overtime. In 2013 I was 180lbs, from there a steady climb for 8 years till Jan 2021 when I was 219. A health scare and I was able to drop to 200lbs and bounced between 200-205. Recently started working w/ @bencanning87 and am now 192lbs w/ better body comp
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What a nightmare in the data landscape currently looks like from a real customer:. Use Redshift for data storage, MySQL for operational data, Periscope for BI, dbt for ETL into Redshift, and Stitch to ETL crm data. 😱🤯.
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What does Abdiel know about $FSLY that the rest of the market doesn’t. …and why is the rest of the market wrong 🤣
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Thoughtful commentary on Snowflake vs GCP $GOOG and why GCP distribution for $SNOW is so low (2%). Full LinkedIn post here by @l1rs :
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Officially purchased a Nintendo Switch. I haven't played a video game in like 10 years . But suddenly got a craving to play Wii Tennis and DDR 🤣. Apparently the only way to do that these days is through the Switch so any game recs, throw them my way!.
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All of @Boldstartvc ♥️ working together because of the work @edsim puts in leading from the front. This profile by @_IainMartin captures the 🪄 & boundless energy of Ed in Inception Investing.
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Happy Birthday to my colleague and friend @edsim!. Although you’re close to getting that senior citizen discount, I still learn new things from you everyday 🤣. Lots more to do together 💪🏾. This cake says it all about Ed’s mentality
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Fun time hanging out with @jonbma and @Chowybear. Nothing like meeting internet friends in person finally!. 🎉
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Nothing like closing a term sheet on a Sunday!. Gets you 🔥 up for the week ahead 🎉.
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Coatue has navigated the past few major market pullbacks like 🪄. Great short interview with @plaffont : I liked this part, mind you still in 70% cash but seeing some good opportunities now and continued focus on transformational trends
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The IPO window is basically closed until either Stripe or Databricks breaks it open and the public market remembers how crazy the growth of some of these enterprise software companies are 🤣. P.S. Yes I know growth is not the same as free cash flow or relative valuations.
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Fintwit is back to its fav topic of do DCFs matter. What matters is understanding expectations underlying the valuation & then examining drivers that could create upside/downside to that. If you want to use a DCF, eat a donut, or go running to do that then who the hell cares.
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🔥 up to announce @dylibso $6.6M seed funding co-led by @Boldstartvc & @felicis to enable devs to use WebAssembly in Production. 🎉 @nilslice, @bhelx, & Zach 🎉. in partnership with @pebble_bed & @crew_capital 🤝. 🧵👇.
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You know when someone in the US hasn’t been to SF before . “San Fran”. Makes me cry a little inside every time 🤣.
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Boulder, Colorado is a freaking beautiful place nested in the 🏔️. Fun times hanging w/ @nilslice @dizzyd @nseldeib @moritzplassnig @itsRobPicard 🍔. Missed @nora_js & @technosophos 😭
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🎧 How Hackers Do their Work w/ @ArchAngelDDay . - Figuring out entry points for an exploit.- Most common vulnerabilities.- Bug Bounties vs Pen Testing. Douglas is a top grossing hacker, @Hacker0x01 & Sr Security Eng @elastic . Links to listen in 👇 tweet
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We @Boldstartvc are excited to support startups building on @Cloudflare Workers 🎉. @liveblocks a portfolio co, currently uses Workers & Durable Objects to provide APIs to devs efficiently!. We hope to find & support many more in the future. Congrats @miawang__ on this launch 🚀.
The world’s leading venture capitalist firms commit $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers. #BirthdayWeek🎂.
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