Last month, the first company I co-founded, Palantir, joined the S&P 500. For most of 20 years, the naive mainstream view of Palantir was that it was a “glorified consultancy” – a services firm and not a real tech innovator building SaaS “products” or “platforms”. To dismiss Palantir early on was short-sighted, given they’d hired some of Silicon Valley’s top tech talent, but it was based on a factual observation: unlike most software businesses, many of our engineers spent significant time working alongside our customers. We called this team “Forward Deployed Engineers”, and they obsessed over the intricacies of our customers’ daily work, business models, and pain points.
8VC was founded to address major market gaps, and we’ve found several surprisingly close to home. We cofounded Affinity after seeing firsthand how legacy CRM falls short of real relationship intelligence, and today their platform is used by 3300 + investment firms. We noticed a similar gap in portfolio management and performance tracking, where manual work and nonexistent data were the norm. Driven by our own frustrations, we co-founded, seeded, and led the series A for Standard Metrics, which has grown to over 100 top investment firms and 7000+ companies while revolutionizing the efficiency and quality of data collection, portfolio analytics, and reporting. Now, building on the data foundation they created, they have launched Global Benchmarking, adding deep utility and macro awareness to match their micro abilities.
Whitepapers
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This paper draws on the work of economist Carlota Perez in developing the thesis that private technology companies are not in a speculative bubble. We argue instead that the world is currently in the "golden age" of the technological revolution set off by the invention of the internet.
This paper discusses a feedback cycle unleashed by the mobile ecosystem in the SMB space. As customer acquisition costs plummet for software vendors and SMBs benefit from new data and technology, hundreds of billions of dollars of value is being created.
This paper discusses the most important challenge faced by entrepreneurs building tech companies, and offers several foundational areas of focus for leaders tackling this issue.
This paper highlights the risks of investing blindly in what is popular and differentiates Smart Enterprise from ‘Big Data’.
This paper describes the market opportunity for start-ups that are bold enough to tackle business-to-government services and business models.
This paper describes a critical dimension of competitive advantage: building enterprise technology platforms that become the underlying infrastructure for valuable ecosystems of applications.
This paper describes the urgent need and unprecedented opportunity for Smart Enterprise platforms to enable app-driven innovation and disrupt large, old-line industries. There exist a variety of network effects and winner-take-all dynamics during this one-time event in which the original, closed technology infrastructure in these industries is opened up, and upgraded to leverage big data.
This paper discusses the theory and practice behind winning pre-growth investments.
This paper discusses the present age of creative destruction. New technologies will disrupt major industries, creating a large transfer of wealth and power in the global economy.
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