Billion-Dollar B2B

Not too long ago, open-source technology projects were pursued in large part for altruistic reasons—they were “almost religious,” and not viewed as businesslike or potentially profitable, says Jay Kreps, the founder and CEO of newly public data company Confluent*.

Today, companies like Confluent have changed that perception. Confluent—which commercializes the Apache Kafka open-source project and specializes in continuous, real-time data processing—went public this past June and just reported its first financial quarter with more than $100 million in revenue. On this episode of the Billion-Dollar B2B podcast, Battery General Partner Dharmesh Thakker talks with Kreps about the company’s journey from a small project developed inside business-networking site LinkedIn into a large, public technology company.

Jump straight into:

00:00 - Creating Apache Kafka and Jay’s start at LinkedIn - “The idea behind Kafka LinkedIn was that it could be like the central nervous system that would have those real-time impulses of what's happening.”

05:03 - How to monetize an open-source company? - “You try and build a successful open source product and then build something that is unique to the company and completes the picture.”

12:17 - Partnering with cloud providers and handling competitors - “When we do something it's accessible to everybody in the world, and that just makes it easier to build that community, and that kind of takes on a life of its own.”

16:27 - Enterprise sales: Upgrading to bigger customers - “If you're able to do cloud only, which is easier, then I think it is better to start with self-service and get that going.”

20:07 - Best practices for cloud or on-premise enterprise setting - “You need this very low friction self-service usage, which is how you can attach to developers. And then you turn it into part of the architecture that's used across the company.”

26:19 - Confluent’s visionary consumption model - “Customers can decide to do more at any time, they can spin up the next application. It's very low friction and I think it's a really powerful thing.” 

31:17 - Successfully managing your roadmap and going public as a company - “The key thing for us was less about the scale of the business. It was just about getting to a point where we felt we could operate predictively.”

36:16 - Confluent’s major inflection points and Jay’s final words of wisdom - “We felt very strongly that over time the bulk of the business was going to be in the cloud and if we could master that it would be a huge competitive move.”

The views expressed here are solely those of podcast guests, not Battery.

The information provided in this podcast is solely intended for the use of entrepreneurs, corporate CEOs and founders regarding Battery Ventures’ potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies. The information is current as of the date it was published. The contents are not intended to be used in the investment decision making process related to any product or fund managed by Battery Ventures. Battery Ventures provides investment advisory services solely to privately offered funds. Battery Ventures neither solicits nor makes its services available to the public or other advisory clients.

Investments identified above are for illustrative purposes only. No

In this episode of our “Billion-Dollar” B2B podcast, Battery’s Dharmesh Thakker talks with Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and former CTO of endpoint-security pioneer CrowdStrike, about that firm’s evolution from a small startup to a global, cloud-native enterprise with more than a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. How did CrowdStrike do it? According to Alperovitch, there were a number of factors that helped the company scale.

Take a listen.

Jump straight into:

00:20 - To the US from Russia: Dmitri Alperovitch’s early interest in cybersecurity - “I ended up going to college at Georgia Tech, where I was the first graduate out of their master's program then called Information Security.”

04:52 - How CrowdStrike was born: On solving a worldwide cybersecurity problem - “There are only two types of companies: Those that know that they've been hacked, and those that don't yet know.” 

10:41 - Differentiation & success: Some of CrowdStrike’s key decisions - “Ultimately the way you win is to have the best team on your side, the best humans that are able to leverage tools very effectively.”

16:17 - From endpoints to the cloud: Is the cloud an attack vector? - “We took a lot of internal lessons learned from how do we protect CrowdStrike to how do we adapt that to protect the others?”

18:23 - The right moment to diversify: When did CrowdStrike introduce new products - “One of the keys to our philosophies was understanding adversaries and understanding what they're trying to do.”

22:13 - Enterprise sales & pricing: CrowdStrike’s sales strategy: “Our market is whoever is going to buy the product. If it's going to be a retail shop, we'll sell it to them. If it's going to be a bank, we'll sell it to them.” 

30:01 - A distributed worldwide model: Building the team that led the company to success - “I knew that building something of this complexity would be super hard and we needed to find literally the best people in the world to do it.”

33:21 - Running a public company: The most important inflection points in Dimitri’s career - “We ran the company from day one as if it were a public company, it was really important for us not to miss quarters and to execute flawlessly.”

36:29 - Dimitri’s last piece of advice: Talent, culture, and problem-solving - “Talent is everything. Hire the best people you possibly can. Don't ever, ever settle.”

Resources:

Episode blog post here

Introducing “Billion-Dollar B2B”

The views expressed here are solely those of podcast guests, not Battery.

The information provided in this podcast is solely intended for the use of entrepreneurs, corporate CEOs and founders regarding Battery Ventures’ potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies. The information is current as of the date it was published. The contents are not intended to be used in the investment decision making process related to any product or fund managed by Battery Ventures. Battery Ventures provides investment advisory services solely to privately offered funds. Battery Ventures neither solicits nor makes its services available to the public or other advisory clients.

It used to be cool to build a B2B software company to a hundred million in revenue, but you know what is cool now? Scaling a B2B tech company to a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, and potentially a market value of 50 billion, or even a hundred billion! Welcome to the Billion-Dollar B2B Podcast, a show where your host, Dharmesh Thakker, breaks down the secrets to a cloud-first, business-to-business tech company in today's fast-paced market.

On this episode, Dharmesh is joined by Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB, to talk about the fast paced evolution of the B2B environment and dynamics, the best practices around pricing, demand generation and sales, and the two factors that will ultimately determine if a business is truly scalable. If you want to learn more about building scalable businesses, B2B technology and how to better navigate a $75 billion market, this episode is definitely for you!

Jump straight into:

00:35 - The 500 million business: On the astounding evolution of the B2B ecosystem - “We're in one of those once in a generation sort of platform shifts, software is eating the world.”

02:20 - On Sahir’s career trajectory and the evolution of MongoDB’s market strategy - “Even from the early days, we constructed both a product roadmap and a go-to-market strategy that allowed us to think about the entirety of the $75 billion market that we're going after.”

09:22 - The rise of Atlas: Why a transformation mindset is key to building a scalable business - “It's not just a new product or a new skew that we're launching, this is really a company business model transformation.”

15:02 - Open source vs cloud product and Sahir’s philosophy around pricing - “There's a dichotomy from who monetizes and buys the technology versus who's actually the one benefiting from the true result of the foundational open source technology. With SAS, those things become aligned.”

22:52 - On MongoDB’s best practices around demand generation - “We’re in a massive market, so to be able to reach the entirety of that market we need multiple ways of monetizing and interacting with customers.”

30:06 - The secrets behind an effective and engaged sales team, and the importance of building strategic relationships with competitors - “​​You’ve got to make sure your people are spending their time on the right portions of the journey.”

36:09 - On MongoDB’s future inside a $75 billion market - “The reality is we're a very small percentage player in the overall environment. We have to focus on what is happening really, how do we get to scale?”

Resources

Introducing “Billion-Dollar B2B”: The New Revenue and Valuation Paradigm for Today’s Rapidly Growing, Consumer-Like B2B Standouts

The views expressed here are solely those of podcast guests, not Battery.

The information provided in this podcast is solely intended for the use of entrepreneurs, corporate CEOs and founders regarding Battery Ventures’ potential financing capabilities for prospective...

Several factors are driving explosive growth at a handful of cloud-native, B2B technology companies these days—and Databricks*, a high-profile decacorn which makes next-generation data-analytics technology, is a prime example.

In this first episode of our “Billion-Dollar B2B” podcast, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi chats with Battery’s Dharmesh Thakker about how technical founders can effectively scale their cloud-native B2B companies today. Ghodsi, a former academic who grew up in Sweden, says leadership qualities like empathy and respect, in addition to technical chops, are crucial to fueling hypergrowth—and that building well-rounded teams with expertise in non-technical areas like human resources/talent, sales, finance and communications is essential.

The views expressed here are solely those of podcast guests, not Battery.

The information provided in this podcast is solely intended for the use of entrepreneurs, corporate CEOs and founders regarding Battery Ventures’ potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies. The information is current as of the date it was published. The contents are not intended to be used in the investment decision making process related to any product or fund managed by Battery Ventures. Battery Ventures provides investment advisory services solely to privately offered funds. Battery Ventures neither solicits nor makes its services available to the public or other advisory clients.

*Databricks is a Battery portfolio company. Investments identified above are for illustrative purposes only. No assumptions should be made that any investments identified above were or will be profitable. It should not be assumed that recommendations in the future will be profitable or equal the performance of the companies identified above. For more information about Battery Ventures’ potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies, please refer to our website. For a complete list of portfolio companies, please click here.

Content obtained from third-party sources, although believed to be reliable, has not been independently verified as to its accuracy or completeness and cannot be guaranteed. Battery Ventures has no obligation to update, modify or amend the content of this podcast nor notify its audience in the event that any information, opinion, projection, forecast or estimate included, changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate.