Dan Grillo

Data Rant #1 – Numbers without context. "It was a 4-point game, when…" Yes, that tells you nothing without context. The context? There were 8 minutes left in the NRL grand final between the Broncos and the Panthers. The Broncos were still up, but an errant kick had just led to a penalty in favour of the Panthers. My family is still too sore to speak of this loss over a year later.   Numbers without context are one of my pet peeves. For example, 4 points is an enormous lead had it been soccer – but this was Rugby League. And had it been 8 minutes into the game, versus 8 minutes remaining, it would barely be called a lead. Context changes everything. Please don’t ire the data gods by presenting numbers without context.   So how do you provide context? The two most relevant complements to a number are the target and a past value. Sometimes you can omit one of these if the other can be implied, but there is no harm in providing both. For example, if machine utilisation is 79% the context might be that this is up from 75% last month but still short of the 85% target. See how much richer the understanding is with the additional two context numbers?   An alternative is to include a chart with a target line. Charts are great because now you can see a 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘥, however, be careful not to introduce too much visual noise. There is an art to good dashboard design. I'll pick this up another time.   'nough said. Please include context! And feel free to contribute your rants. I've plenty to come.   Note: this was the 𝘉𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘦 Broncos and the 𝘗𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩 Panthers. Sensibly the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers don't play NRL. For the Australians, wondering why I'm still talking about last season, it's because this season has been wiped from my memory.

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The harsh reality of CA politics -- the state government works for Big Tech, not the citizens. Some good quotes here. Newsom's stated goal about workable "guardrails" is nonsensical as it's currently physically impossible. That's a bit like saying they are pursuing a way to apply DDT safely to agriculture.... no such method existed. Newsom and CA have zero cred on anything relating to responsible or safe AI. The question is whether that extends to Harris. I honestly don't know, but her history in defending SV and conflicting relationships that include her brother-in-law suggests that it would be difficult for her to regulate Big Tech objectively. Trump is also a wild card. He's so unpredictable that one day he might attempt to order Zuch arrested and the next brag about the power of American Big Tech. The next four years will be interesting. I have much more confidence in SCOTUS.

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We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

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I've been sending this out via email, but posting here too: (lmk if you want to be added to the email list where i go a bit deeper) Dave's Quick Hits, November 1, 2024 1. Terraforming the American West: A Climate Adaptation Moonshot (https://lnkd.in/gmjtEqzE) Strategic interventions in the American West could help address water scarcity and climate challenges. This includes innovative approaches to water management, ecosystem restoration, and climate-resilient infrastructure. 2. The Dawn of Spatial Medicine: Mapping the Body's Hidden Architecture (https://lnkd.in/gaTVMPTb) Scientists are discovering that manipulating bioelectric fields and spatial patterns in tissues could revolutionize medicine. These insights suggest we might be able to program complex anatomical structures and heal injuries by controlling the "software" of cellular organization, rather than just manipulating genes and proteins. 3. AI Content Creation Gets Wild: Or, how I made a 15 minute podcast about the AI revolution in 25 minutes (https://lnkd.in/gvrFn6Nc) I transformed Tim Urban's classic 2015 "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution" blog posts into a podcast using AI tools. Total time: 25 minutes (vs 8+ hours traditionally). Process was simple: PDF conversion → NotebookLM for content → Descript for captions → YouTube publication.

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🌉 San Francisco's Surprising Comeback: From 'Doom Loop' to Renaissance? Recent data suggests that San Francisco, once trapped in a pandemic-induced 'doom loop', is showing strong signs of recovery. Here's what's changing: 📈 Positive Trends: - Population Growth: Net gains over the past two years, with domestic in-migration positive for the first time since 2012. - Housing Market: Median home sale prices up 1.2% YoY to $1,427,500 in June. - Job Growth: The Bay Area added 7,400 jobs between January and June. Downtown Revival: Foot traffic beyond typical work hours has recovered to over 90% of pre-pandemic levels. - Crime Reduction: Property crime down 32% and violent crime down 14% in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. - AI Boom: The city is positioning itself as a hub for the AI revolution. 🚧 Ongoing Challenges: - High office vacancy rates - Homelessness and drug crisis - Lagging tourism and business travel 🔑 Key Initiatives: - "Vacant to Vibrant" program offering free rent to businesses in empty storefronts - Increased police patrols and encampment sweeping - Crackdown on open-air drug dealing 💡 Expert Insight: "The rising AI empire is giving the city a new edge. Funding, talents, and culture related to the AI revolution will help the city turn the corner." - Lu Chen, Senior Economist at Moody's Analytics 🤔 What's Your Take? Are these positive trends sustainable, or is it too early to declare a comeback? How can other cities learn from San Francisco's recovery strategies? What role will AI play in reshaping urban economies, particularly in tech hubs? https://lnkd.in/gCnPCBRU

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New Metrics Utilizing Universal Laws: Power Law https://lnkd.in/gvzr3Htx

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🚀 Exciting news! The 2024 State of Engineering Management Report is now LIVE! Dive into the report to uncover the latest insights on how engineers are shaping innovation and growth: ➡️ Engineers as strategic partners: Leading business strategy. ➡️ Embracing AI: Driving productivity by 94%. ➡️ Addressing burnout: A critical concern for 65% of respondents. With insights from over 600 professionals, this report offers invaluable data! Don't miss out—read the full report here: https://lnkd.in/e6v9CUyu

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One of my favorite people is Bob Van Nortwick. He started & built AWS for Startups in 2010. Let me share a story about Bob. It’s 2012. By this time I’ve known Bob for a few years - he was the AWS liaison to our portfolio at a16z. Credits, technical support, meeting Werner Vogels, you name it, Bob got it done. He built this team to over a thousand people by the time he left ten years later. This is a HUGE role. Startups are a large part of AWS, which is the growth engine of Amazon. You’d expected Bob to have self-portraits adorn his home, start off meetings with grandiose introduction, & relentlessly name drop founders & investors. Not Bob. He’s hilarious & humble, a combo of dad jokes with f-words sprinkled in. He listens to you with complete attention. Even when I call Bob, I can HEAR his focus. He sees me even when he cannot see me. Most of all, Bob was (& is) RESPONSIVE. Anytime I’d email him, he’d reply in five minutes or less. If I explicitly wrote “this can wait” he’d STILL reply in five minutes or less. Back to my story. It’s about 11pm ET on a Tuesday in NYC. I’m in my hotel room winding down. I should sleep but jet lag. Then I see the email no one wants.   A founder emails me about how his entire infrastructure melted down an hour earlier. I’m not technical but I understand adjectives. This is disaster. And, he’s launching his new ipad app this Thursday.   Less than 48 hours.   Which will be featured on the App Store. To millions of people. I immediately email Bob but I’m sure we’ll have to delay the launch and therefore lose the feature. As usual, he replies in five minutes, asks to be connected directly with the founder. I email the founder the next day. No reply. Not a good sign, but understandable. I email Bob. No reply. Shit. What I didn’t know was that Bob & his team were meeting every hour, pulling all nighters, do everything possible. They probably needed a week; they did it less than 48 hours. On Thursday, the founder emails “WE’RE ON THE STORE!!” The launch is a success! Whenever I share this story about Bob, he smiles & says “We’re just doing our job.” Amazingly, everything I just wrote is not the best part about Bob. He’s a fantastic dad with three grown & accomplished children. But of course he’d be a great father! He’s humble, hard working. Even though we’ve never worked formally together, when you work with Bob, you feel like you share an email address with him.   Why did I write this?   Do I owe Bob a poker debt? Is this a sponsored post by AWS? No, I just caught up with him, reminiscing about old times, & he has the same warmth, same deep attention, same dad humor. Our industry has wild & extreme personalities.   I’ve worked with some of them. It’s fun but exhausting. BUT there are very decent people here too.   They don’t get headlines. They don’t want them. But their stories,  their achievements, their character,  deserve sharing. If you know Bob, please tease & embarrass the shit out of him. 😁

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I spent five days in the SF Bay Area with B2B SaaS founders, funders, and senior software engineers. The talk is all about adding GenAI and LLM features to software apps, but they were unclear exactly how or when the AI big wave revolution will occur. AI is very cool and will be big, but it's still early to see how this will play out in the next year on the front lines of business. There's a lot of hurrying up to say you have AI features with a healthy skepticism about the user benefit of early GenAI attempts. Coders in big tech say, "Our product leaders told us we need to add GenAI features, but it still doesn't seem that interesting for users. We'll design it, code it, and ship it anyway." Founders in startup SaaS say, "We are running a lot of experiments and keeping up with the big AI platform changes. We're all more productive now but it hasn't made our app much more useful." Smaller SaaS funders say, "It's hard to tell where the winners will be to make our bets. AI tools help software companies grow more efficiently, so they don't need our funding as much. We're being very careful." Big enterprise SaaS buyers say, "We need to start investing, testing, and trying GenAI technology, which means we need to spend less on our existing SaaS apps in our tech budget." Big investors say, "It will be the next big tech wave, so we are making big early bets on chips, infrastructure, foundational models, and platforms. NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google--the big will get bigger." It's all very exciting, but it's still early and moving around quickly. That's a lot different from the last big software tech wave when SaaS apps on the web and mobile took over the last 15 years. It was easier to bet on the massive transition from on-premise Windows software to cloud-based web and mobile apps for businesses everywhere and billions of consumers. Despite that, I'm more excited about GenAI and other ML platforms than I was about VR, blockchain, and other platform opportunities that didn't materialize. It's early, but the practical AI wave will happen in ways we can't imagine or expect. What are you seeing in the current AI wave? #practicalfounders

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I'm really intrigued by this idea (not mine) that some bitcoin mining companies (Iris, Cleanspark, etc) have successfully built low-cost power shells that can now be leveraged by AI compute needs -- where power itself is becoming the gating factor in the continuing growth of AI. I think this will become a real 2025 story -- as the gating factor of "chip shortage" lessens, and the gating factor of "cheap power" rises in significance. There's not really a venture capital angle here, but there is a public market one. Perhaps more importantly, it becomes a touchpoint between "crypto" and AI. Something to ponder and keep an eye on (full disc: I own a bunch of bitcoin miner stocks, including those mentioned above).

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Totally agree with Dan DiGangi here. If you don't understand the overall strategy of a business, it's hard for you to align and be fully effective. This goes from leadership down to engineering. What are you doing to try and understand that vision? Link in comments to the full interview with Dan!

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If you're a VC, it's time to speak up. Some of the biggest names in technology—your professional peers—are openly supporting the most noxious, hateful, cruel policies and leaders. Supporting these things is not some abstract opinion. These ideas affect people right now across the United States. For example, since the restriction of abortion care, people are enduring brutal pregnancy complications while doctors are afraid to intervene. At the recent convention, attendees held signs emblazoned “mass deportations now.” Students and teachers, under pressure from ever-more queerphobic policies, are leaving their home states in search of safety. Normalizing this behavior contaminates everything that happens in our field. If you won't speak up on the grounds of decency, speak up on behalf of your portfolio. Speak up because your peers co-signing this hateful rhetoric makes it harder for the people in our field to do their best work. In the absence of your voice, technology will be tarred with a brush that will make it harder to raise money from outsiders. This is a moment of both historic peril and opportunity to shape the future. Stand and be counted alongside the cause of pluralism, multiculturalism, and fair treatment for everyone. It’s time to speak up, VCs. We need you to publicly denounce this stuff. Make it clear that not everyone leading our field embraces hate.

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“I believe that design can be an orchestration layer across the company, unifying disparate groups that touch the customer experience [...] The biggest challenge is breaking the traditional mold that cybersecurity can’t be user-friendly or visually appealing." — Deb Kawamoto I had the pleasure of speaking with Deb Kawamoto today. I'm continually inspired by the work they're doing at Vanta, and the similar challenges we seek to solve in security, privacy, and accessibility (at Stark) as a company's compliance pillars. Great writeup on Deb by Gordon Ching for the Design Executive Council! https://lnkd.in/e26iQ5Ps

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Vendor: “Our solution is running AI” Customer/Investor: turns into Captain Obvious. Focusing on the business outcome you solve for uniquely, and not on how your tool works is the way to defeat a captain obvious syndrome.

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💡Meta’s journey with Reality Labs: Oculus VR was acquired in 2014 for twice the price of Instagram. By 2019, Reality Labs’ spend hit $5B/year, exceeding $10B by 2020 with the Quest debut. Then in 2021, the company rebrands to Meta. Those are the events known to outsiders. Discover key internal events and shifts that shaped Meta’s Metaverse vision from CTO Andrew Bosworth, who joined Facebook in 2006 and led Reality Labs from 2017. His candor about the challenges and “wrong paths” taken en route to technological breakthroughs adds credibility and authenticity. 👇 #technology #innovation #future #digitaltransformation #metaverse #spatialcomputing #linkedin #leadership

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Positioning Freckle (freckle.io) as the Clay-alternative for non-technical users isn't accidental—it's a deliberate strategy. Working with Anthony Pierri 🎸, Kate, and Robert from FletchPMM taught me a valuable lesson: focus your positioning on your next revenue milestone. Let me explain. At Freckle, we're very openly positioning relative to Clay. Some of our investors were initially surprised by this direct approach, but our reasoning is strategic. See Clay has done a wonderful job of educating the market on how traditional lead lists are: ➝ Messy ➝ Incomplete ➝ And rarely get to the level of fidelity you want for your best campaigns They've also helped educate the market on the power of using many different enrichment providers and AI-research agents to enhance them. Which is what Freckle does! The thing is, we kept finding a growing audience who tried Clay but failed to activate because the product is too complex. There are also a ton of people out there who haven't heard of Clay but have the same set of challenges that Freckle and Clay solve for: VCs, talent acquisition specialists, financial brokers, community managers etc. They are constantly dealing with lists of people and company data. So we were faced with a question: do we try and position Freckle for all these use cases at once or do we go more narrow? Our answer came down to what our next big revenue milestone was as a company and aligning our positioning to get us there. If we just focused on the audience who knew Clay but are looking for an easier-to-use alternative, would that be enough to our next revenue milestone? When we ran the numbers, the answer was a resounding yes - with plenty of padding! And the results are already showing. It's been incredible to see the response. Just today, I received a cold DM on here that said "you had me at Clay for non-technical users." Now this won't be our positioning forever. As the category matures and we continue to craft new ICPs, we will evolve our positioning to hit our next milestone. And the one after that. But until then, we're "Clay without the learning curve." Oh and we're also big fans of Fletch. Won't forget the attribution this time Robert! Another great graphic from you and the team. 

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Learn from your success as much as your failure. SpaceX is forced to do it more than any other industry. "What did we do right?" is just as important as "What did we do wrong", but it's so much easier to reflect on what went wrong. They just parallel parked a high-rise building to a skyscraper!! ...and they'll be analyzing and pouring over the data from their success yesterday for quite some time. "All your success is not your fault" is a quote I love from Scott Galloway How lucky were you? How many things could have gone wrong? How much did you really do to prevent that?

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CA/WA/OR state & federal legislators (and voters!) need to be aware of food security and rural economic vitality challenges. Case in point - the 'acreage exodus' in CA is real - From 1997 to 2022, USDA Census data show that California lost 4.6 M ag acres (16% of the total) and 24,857 farms (28% of the total). Straight line these numbers for another 30 years and the numbers go to 9 M acres lost and 45,300 farms lost for 55 years – 32% of acreage and 52% of farms. Other western states - WA & OR - also need to pay close attention to policies that are negatively impacting farming. Labor laws, overtime, L&I, real estate values. It's amazing how much we're seeing ag production moving to LatAm and other areas that are much less expensive to farm. Walt Duflock

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I recently had the opportunity to discuss OpenAI’s upcoming model, ‘Strawberry,’ with PYMNTS. This new advancement is not just about the technology—it’s about how AI is reshaping industries. From optimizing supply chains to forecasting market trends with precision, AI is creating personalized customer experiences at scale like never before. The future is here, and it's AI-powered! 💡 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eZtR_y-s #AI #Innovation #BusinessTransformation #OpenAI #StrawberryModel #TechTrends #FutureOfBusiness #ArtificialIntelligence

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