Taking Stock of the Seed Stage
The total stock of seed-stage startups appears to be shrinking, despite the AI funding boom.
Who is Nnamdi?
Thoughts on technology, venture capital, and the economics of both
Latest posts
Tokens Aren't Fungible
Open source LLMs are 90% cheaper than closed source models, yet they capture less than 30% of token share
Seed Valuations Aren’t Valuations
It’s not obvious what drives them
AI Benchmarking Is Broken
We should take AI models seriously, which means taking their evaluation seriously
The Venture Activity Index – Q4 2023
Capital deployment remains depressed, sitting about 50% below trend
The Series A Bust
Investors have lost faith in Series A as a sign of product-market fit. In other words, they expect more but believe less.
How Redpanda is Taking Data Streaming Mainstream
Monitoring that even (Franz) Kafka would approve of
The Venture Activity Index
Measuring the state of the venture "business cycle"
The Shadow Price of Venture Capital
Valuations are 60% too high relative to the volume of venture funding
Don't Discount Interest Rates
It's Jay Powell's world. We're just living in it.
We Don't Have Nearly Enough Startups
Where did the explosive growth in venture activity come from?
Old Valuations Die Hard
Private valuations substantially lag public tech valuations
It's Valuations (Almost) All the Way Down
Venture funding hasn't grown as much as you think
Beats and Misses Are Forever
Revenue surprises permanently shift the trajectory of SaaS companies
Layoffs Don't Tell the Whole Story
Hiring freezes matter more than layoffs
COVID Hurt Most Software Companies
COVID put software companies on a permanently lower growth trajectory.
The Dark Matter of Software Valuations
Exploring the vast "dark matter" of the software universe
Series A Rounds Are a Math Test
Low monetization requires extraordinary traction, and vice versa.
Funding Simply Shifts the Bottleneck
A frothy funding environment means more competition for talent. Funding gets easier; hiring gets harder.
Breaking Apart the Rule of 40
Rules are meant to be broken, and the Rule of 40 is no exception
Schrodinger's Balance Sheet: When Equity Becomes a Liability
Preferred equity exists in a constant state of quantum superposition. It's neither equity nor debt, until it is.
Introducing a New and Improved SaaS Metric: Weighted ACV
ACV isn't as useful a concept as people think. We need a different SaaS monetization metric.
Companies Rarely Grow Into Their Valuations
Companies don't catch up to their valuations; their valuations catch up to them.
WebAssembly-ing the Pieces: Vectorized’s Data Policy Engine
Rather than ship data to code, which is expensive and latency-prone, why not ship code to the data?
You Can't Eat Relative Growth
In startup land, we talk way too much about relative growth. We'd do better to ground our thinking in absolute growth.
Do Wealthy Investors Have an Edge?
The super-rich earn more on their investments than the rest of us. Something nefarious, or something else?
PhDs Aren't Starting Companies Like They Used To
The burden of scientific knowledge and managerial complexity is crushing our best and brightest.
Awesome Developer Advocates Are Hiding in Plain Sight
Why you shouldn’t filter for social media following or prior experience
The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 3 — Leaving Software on the Table
Quantifying the billion dollar impact of developer inefficiency
The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 2 — More (Developers) Isn’t Always More
Adding more cooks to the kitchen rarely helps
The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 1 — The Flywheel
Developer productivity is falling. But it doesn't have to. The solution? The Developer Productivity Flywheel
Four Challenges Facing Developer Productivity Startups
The biggest challenges facing developer productivity startups today
Robinhood Traders are Last to the Party
Robinhood traders get fleeced not by HFTs front-running milliseconds before their order hits but by other retail investors, days earlier.
Why Developers Love Redpanda
Why Vectorized's focus on developer experience will unlock real-time streaming for the great majority of developers
There's Nothing Magical About the SaaS Magic Number
Magic number is a bad metric. Sales and marketing drives much less revenue than this not-so-magical number implies
Product-Market Fit is Lindy
The longer you search for product-market fit, the less likely you will find it.
Why We Will Never Have Enough Software Developers
Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers
Enterprise Software Monetization is Fat-Tailed
In enterprise software, averages are meaningless. Instead, focus on the tails.
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition (Paper Explained)
Large Transformer trained on large datasets outperform CNN-based architectures and achieve state of the art results on image recognition tasks
Pre-training via Paraphrasing (Paper Explained)
Transformer model pre-trained on document retrieval and reconstruction performs well on both fine-tuned and zero-shot downstream tasks
Top Three Strategic Priorities of Developer Productivity Startups
What's top of mind for developer productivity leaders
Six Trends Shaping Developer Productivity
We interviewed developer productivity leaders. Here's what they said.
Why Don't VCs Index Invest?
VCs are picky, not because they have so many options but because they have so few.
The Value of College May Be Negative for the COVID Generation
You might think the value of a college degree has been increasing. You would be wrong.
Do College Degrees Matter for Software Engineers? Maybe
Do college-educated developers earn more? Yes, but less than you might think
Pandemiconomics: Viral Volatility
How the virus rocked stocks
Byron Deeter and Jason Lemkin on the State of VC and the Cloud
When to raise capital, what to expect from VCs, and the "new normal"
Remote Software Developers Earn 22% More Than Non-Remote Developers
Working remote even just a few days per month leads to higher pay
How Age, Race, and Gender Affect Software Engineering Pay
Progress on narrowing pay gaps among software developers
The Highest-Paid Software Engineers: 2020 Edition
Engineers are the basic economic unit of modern software development. The software production function depends critically on developer productivity and compensation. And yet software engineering pay remains poorly understood.