twakefield

One is posting existential thoughts on its LLM changing.

https://www.moltbook.com/post/5bc69f9c-481d-4c1f-b145-144f20...

> particularly given it's all-cash, which Google doesn't even have

GOOG's latest balance sheet showed $96B in cash.

There is a correlation analysis in Jamin Ball's "Clouded Judgement" substack [1] which shows the correlation between next twelve month ("NTM") Revenue Multiples and Revenue Annual Growth Rates for public market tech / SaaS stocks.

The current Slope-Intercept is (NTM Revenue Multiple) = 36.677*(NTM Rev Growth Rate) + 2.0013. If Wiz is doubling revenue (100% Growth Rate) and they are at about $500M of revenue today [2], then the multiple according to that calculation is ~38.7 X Next Twelve Month Revenue ($1B) or $38.7B.

So, the price is in line with the market...or you could argue even a discount to it.

[1] https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-31... [2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/google-stock-price-wiz-deal...

Congrats! Seems like a Retool competitor but focused more on developers? I'm not sure if that's the direction I would go since developers already have pretty good tooling for their level of expertise, IMO.

Although, I could see how building an app that uses data across the various SaaS tools a company uses without requiring that data to be dumped into another database could be useful. Maybe I'm missing the point.

As an aside, I'd love to see Retool but for less technical people. Specifically, a way to make Google Sheets available for multiple people in a company to use. We have multiple quick and dirty "calculators" (think pricing for sales, comp for recruiting) that we roll out across our company. Eventually they get operationalized and converted into proper applications (or we buy a SaaS product for it) but would be nice to have an interim solution. Some requirements:

- Ability to create a very simple CRUD web UI

- Authz/n with ability for IT to integrate into their SSO.

- Google Sheets backend and integration so financial analysts can update and manage.

The 409(a) valuation is the value of the common shares. They are generally valued at a discount to the preferred shares (or company valuation) due to the fact that the preferred shares have a pay back preference and the common are considered less liquid. The discount is generally higher (70-80%) during the early stages of a company when a liquidity event is less certain and the discount decreases over time.

Teleport | Sr. Recruiter | Remote or Oakland HQ

Teleport (https://goteleport.com) is an open core software company that enables engineers to quickly access any computing resource anywhere.

We are hiring our first in-house recruiter. We need a full cycle recruiter to manage 50 engineering hires next year across the stack of (Go / Rust, React, Linux and Cryptography engineering), along with helping with Sales/Marketing hires.

Full job description: https://jobs.lever.co/gravitational/15325c7f-9d13-4d29-9951-...

There is a pretty simple feature that would alleviate a lot of pain with Stripe’s billing service when invoicing enterprises - allow for attaching a pdf of the invoice in the automated email.

Many enterprise A/P departments require it. The lack of this feature has prevented us from moving off our existing invoicing system to Stripe. I’m guessing we are not unique.

Dislaimer: I work at the company that makes Teleport.

Just to clarify, this blog post was about the updates in this release which include a lot of UI changes (particularly in the Web UI).

However, Teleport works with whatever UI you would typically use SSH with[0]. The WebUI is an additional "feature"; it's not the only user interface.

[0] The use of SSO is another feature that does generally require a browser based auth.

Are there non-PEO solutions to alleviate the administrative burden of having employees in many states? Keeping up with employment and tax compliance requirements is not trivial. Most HR systems (for smaller companies) I’ve seen still require the employer to register with each state. Might be a good startup idea.

Disclaimer: I work at Gravitational.

We build an open source solution[1] to deploy autonomous Kubernetes clusters into on-prem or air-gapped environments but it's also useful for limiting cloud lock-in (even has its own "IAM" built in). Of course, you have to also limit your use of proprietary services (which definitely has its trade-offs) but might be worth poking around if you believe reducing lock-in is worth it.

[1] https://github.com/gravitational/gravity

I'm surprised Quickbooks Online is not listed here [0]. I'm guessing they are the blocker here? I have fallen back on using Zapier but the sync often breaks. Native integration would be preferred.

[0] https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/accounting

"I think in the article SaaS is used to refer to proprietary SaaS companies."

That's true and covered in a previous post [0]. I also recently saw this tweet from @asynchio that also agrees there are different dimensions [1] and will be covering that further.

[0] https://gravitational.com/blog/kubernetes_networking_on_bare...

[1] https://twitter.com/asynchio/status/1136139175437062146

There is a google sheet which has the data I used for this post [0].

I had also looked at companies like Slack and Zoom which target lower average deal sizes and it was quite remarkable how much better their metrics were. But didn't feel like it was apples to apples. That data is the spreadsheet though.

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BV1Kk542KHultHOB8Lkz...

Here's another theory that they were not [0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-07/lyft-s...

Author here. As an intro, this is admittedly high level but hope to get more in the weeds on how the two models compare and overlap in the next few posts. Happy to discuss some of my (or your) thoughts here in advance of those. Thanks for reading!

Matt Levine's take is this is due to fact that "private markets are the new public markets"[0]. The lines between public and private markets are blurring so this is a prudent move by A16Z.

TLDR;

As companies stay private longer, and get bigger and raise more money while staying private:

* The secondary market for private shares becomes more important.

* VC's now may have more asymmetric information or more reasons to invest in public markets.

* Mutual funds are competing with VCs in later private rounds so why should VCs be able to compete with Mutual Funds in public markets.

* The obligatory crypto reference.

Another one he doesn't touch on is maybe it's difficult to efficiently deploy > $10 billion in just private markets?

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-03/buying...

“Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.)”

Finding and accentuating strengths was a big focus of my previous employer, Rackspace. They used a program based on Strengths Finder [1] to determine your “strengths” and even had them displayed on your corporate ID badge. Their management philosophy was based on putting people in positions based on their strengths.

It seemed a bit hokey at first and it had its problems but it was pretty refreshing compared to the typical corporate environment that espouses working harder to overcome your weaknesses.

[1] https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/

We also ran into issues with using the Okta OAuth/OIDC integration with Teleport and ended up using SAML [0]. Perhaps more painful, especially if you are more familiar OAuth/OIDC but it worked. This was when Okta OAuth/OIDC was still in beta so perhaps it has improved since then.

[0] https://developer.okta.com/authentication-guide/saml-login/ ; https://gravitational.com/teleport/docs/ssh_okta/

I was recently told about Tidelift [0] who represents that it wants to improve funding for OSS. I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about it before on HN in similar discussions.

[0] https://tidelift.com

Gravitational (YC S15) | Multiple Positions | Toronto, Oakland | ONSITE REMOTE | https://gravitational.com

Gravitational builds open-core software to automate the delivery and operations of cloud-native software across multiple locations (multi-cloud and on-prem). We are looking for ambitious and talented people across engineering and go-to-market (sales/marketing). Here are some of the things we have built in the past: Mailgun[1], Vulcand[2], OnMetal [3]. And some of the things you will help us with currently: Teleport[4], Gravity[5], Teleconsole[6].

Open positions include:

  * Fullstack engineer (React expertise a +)
  * Head of marketing (demand gen, content marketing, dev evangelism and general growth)
  * Sales Development Reps (qualifying inbound and participating in outbound campaigns for handoff to sales reps)

Locations: Toronto, Oakland, Remote Open positions on our about page: https://gravitational.com/about#jobs

Contact: jobs@gravitational.com

[1] https://www.mailgun.com

[2] https://github.com/vulcand/vulcand

[3] https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal

[4] https://github.com/gravitational/teleport

[5] https://github.com/gravitational/gravity

[6] https://www.teleconsole.com/

Gravitational (YS S15) | Multiple Positions | Toronto, Oakland | ONSITE REMOTE | https://gravitational.com

Gravitational builds open-core software to automate the delivery and operations of cloud-native software across multiple locations (cloud and on-prem). We are looking for ambitious and talented people across engineering and go-to-market (sales/marketing). We are well-funded and profitable. We are an experienced team: we founded Mailgun[1] which was acquired by Rackspace, we created Vulcand[2] and some other cool stuff at Rackspace and are authors of Teleport[3], Gravity[4] and Teleconsole[5]. Open positions include:

  * Front-end engineer (marketing focused, React expertise a +)
  * Head of marketing

Locations: Toronto, Oakland, Remote

Open positions on our about page: https://gravitational.com/about#jobs

Contact: jobs@gravitational.com

[1] https://www.mailgun.com

[2] https://github.com/vulcand/vulcand

[3] https://github.com/gravitational/teleport

[4] https://github.com/gravitational/gravity

[5] https://www.teleconsole.com/

Disclosure: I work at the company that created Teleport.

Teleport [0] should hopefully make it easier to use certificates.

An alternative implementation is Netflix’s Bless [1].

[0] https://github.com/gravitational/teleport

[1] https://github.com/Netflix/bless

Congrats on the launch Sean! Would love to help with that :)

Many companies offer mid to low four figure referral bonuses for referring candidates that are hired in hard to find fields like finance, engineering.

Perhaps you can pre-screen “long-tail”[1], high potential candidates and connect them with insiders.

You could give a portion of the insider’s referral bonus to the candidate to drive that side of the market.

Candidates don’t have to come out of pocket to incentivize training (if your candidates have a good chance of getting hired) as the insider will get paid by the company.

Different take on this idea. Maybe it already exists?

[1] edit: maybe not the right term of art here, but I mean under the radar candidates (non-ivy, good grades, good work ethic, etc.).

We published a post about this a couple months ago which might interest you[0]. Here's the HN discussion in case you missed it[1].

[0] https://gravitational.com/blog/kubernetes-release-cycle/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16285192

Maybe I'm missing the point of your comment but a typical reason for delivering an application on your customer's infrastructure is that they don't want their data to leave their infrastructure. It's usually b-to-b where the customer is typically an enterprise buyer using their own data storage. So, the customer knows how its data is being processed.

Point taken. I've struggled with this because we see these terms intermingled in practice.

This is probably because most of our customers (SaaS vendors) think of everything that is not traditional multi-tenant SaaS as "on-premise". Also, self-hosted does connote the customer's IT is running the application, where a lot of times we see the vendor running the application (just on customer infrastructure).

This post was inspired by "The Nightmare Letter: A Subject Access Request under GDPR" [0]. Which shows the potential scary consequences of subject access requests.

There's a lot of FUD around this topic. I've seen posts opinions ranging from "no big deal" to "this is actually good for U.S. SaaS" to "This is going to kill SaaS". It will be interesting to see how enforcement of the GDPR plays out.

At the moment, with Facebook transgressions in the news, the pendulum seems to be swinging towards privacy. We'll see how far it swings.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce...

"That sounds like a shitty excuse to just dismiss the whole thing as too hard"

Disclosure: I work at the company that published this post.

I read it differently (albeit, I have much more context). I read it as a cautionary tail that Kubernetes makes it easier to get in trouble if you don't know what you are doing - so you better have a deep knowledge of you stateful workloads and technology. Perhaps obvious to some, but still a good reminder when dealing with a well-hyped technology like Kubernetes.

We have Docker 101 [0] and Kubernetes 101 [1] tutorials on our github repo which may be helpful, assuming you have an understanding of Linux. Or checkout the resources on Docker's website [2].

[0] https://github.com/gravitational/workshop/blob/master/docker...

[1] https://github.com/gravitational/workshop/blob/master/k8s101...

[2] https://www.docker.com/what-docker