AI – Matt Turck

In Conversation with Amit Bendov, CEO, Gong

“It wasn’t a walk in the park. Today, Gong is a super hot company. But at that time, we got a lot of no’s, by not stupid people. There were a lot of objections, like salespeople are going to hate it as a big brother, and Google and Amazon will compete with you“, says Amit Bendov, the CEO of Gong.

From those early days of facing skepticism, Gong has indeed become a hot startup loved by customers and ushering its own category, revenue intelligence. It’s also had tremendous fundraising success with VCs, raising $305M in less than 18 months, including a $200M round on a $2.2B valuation, announced in August 2020.

We were thrilled to welcome back Amit at Data Driven NYC, where he had spoken a few years ago, when he was CEO of SiSense.

Resilience and Vibrancy: The 2020 Data & AI Landscape

In a year like no other in recent memory, the data ecosystem is showing not just remarkable resilience but exciting vibrancy.

When COVID hit the world a few months ago, an extended period of gloom seemed all but inevitable. Yet, as per Satya Nadella, “two years of digital transformation [occurred] in two months”. Cloud and data technologies (data infrastructure, machine learning / artificial intelligence, data driven applications) are at the heart of digital transformation. As a result, many companies in the data ecosystem have not just survived, but in fact thrived, in an otherwise overall challenging political and economic context.

Perhaps most emblematic of this is the blockbuster IPO of Snowflake, a data warehouse provider, which took place a couple of weeks ago and catapulted Snowflake to a $69B market cap company, at the time of writing – the biggest software IPO ever (see our S-1 teardown). And Palantir, an often controversial data analytics platform focused on the financial and government sector, became a public company via direct listing, reaching a market cap of $22B, at the time of writing (see our S-1 teardown).

Quick S-1 Teardown: Palantir

The Palantir S-1 is a long and meaty read, and a pretty fascinating one considering the company was highly secretive, and often controversial, for so many years. It is also written in a very opinionated style: the newly Colorado-based company takes aim at Silicon Valley and is not exactly charitable to its competitors.

Particularly compared to a Snowflake that has had a meteoric rise since inception in 2012 (see our Snowflake teardown here), the Palantir S-1 also presents the picture of a company that, while unique, has had a long road since it was founded in 2003.

It seems that the company went through an important transition in the last couple of years on the product and go to market front – evolving away from a services company into more of a software one – perhaps in anticipation of an IPO.

Ironically, in some ways, this evolution has made Palantir look more like the Silicon Valley companies it feels so different from.

Here are some quick thoughts and notes (from Avery Klemmer and myself)

AI, Data, Culture: In Conversation with Ben Horowitz, GP, a16z

Photo Credit: Jack Cohen. Bottom left picture: Amr Awadallah (VP Developer Relations, Google Cloud), Matt Turck (FirstMark), Ben Horowitz (a16z), Michael James ( Founder and Chief Software Architect at Cerebras Systems)

Ben Horowitz resoundingly falls in the category of “needing no introduction”: a highly successful entrepreneur who navigated a perilous situation with his business (Loudcloud, which became Opsware) to a $1.65B acquisition by HP, he’s also the founder of premier Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (aka “a16z”), and the best selling author of two books: “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and the newly-released “What You Do Is Who You Are”.

It was a special treat to host Ben for a fireside chat at the most recent most recent edition of Data Driven NYC – a great evening that included two other terrific speakers: Amr Adwallah, now VP of Developer Relations at Google Cloud, and previously co-founder and CTO at Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) and Michael James, co-founder of AI chip Cerebras.

We spent a good hour with Ben and covered a bunch of topics, loosely organized in two parts, first AI and data, and then culture an his new book.

Below are two videos covering each part, as well as a FULL TRANSCRIPT for anyone who prefers to read.