The Latest from Ron Miller
Hydra aims to be the open cloud data warehouse alternative to Snowflake
Hydra, a member of the Y Combinator winter 2022 class, has a broad ambition. It is building an open source cloud data warehouse and hopes to eventually compete with Snowflake. The data warehouse conce
Gartner says Chromebooks take biggest hit as PC sales plunge
With a perfect storm of economic upheaval, war in Ukraine and supply chain difficulties, Gartner is predicting that worldwide PC sales could drop almost 10% this year. But all the woes can’t be attr
Focal Point focuses on modernizing procurement with $3M seed investment
Focal Point founder Anders Lillevik has spent more than 25 years in procurement, where he has observed that the vast majority of business was still being conducted using spreadsheets and email. He saw
What downturn? The total cloud market reached $126B in Q1 2022
Imagine for a second that you could roll up the entire cloud market, everything from SaaS to infrastructure to platform, CDNs (content delivery networks), managed private clouds, data center rentals &
With $2.4M seed, Zing Data wants to put data analysis in the palm of your hand
If data is at the heart of any modern business, it needs to be easier to access and manipulate it without expertise. While there are many data analysis tools available, including the sophisticated dat
Google Cloud’s new sustainability platform aims to bring enterprise climate goals down to earth
If you ask most executives if they want to do the right thing by the planet, chances are they are going to say yes, even if they don’t know exactly what that involves. Some companies could exaggerat
After several bruising months, industry analysts see Zendesk sale as pressure release
Maybe now, as Zendesk goes private, it can take a deep breath and get back to work outside of the white-hot public investing spotlight where activist investors can lurk, sometimes wreaking havoc.
Red Sox CTO: Baseball teams need modern tech stack as much as any other biz
The Red Sox are no different than most businesses when it comes to a tech stack.
Zendesk’s final selling price is a warning shot for unicorns
Zendesk selling for a mid-single-digit multiple with positive free cash flow, 30% revenue growth and a recent re-acceleration of top-line expansion should be downright terrifying for unicorns.
Zendesk drama concludes with $10.2 billion private equity acquisition
Zendesk has had a difficult time over the last several months. It has been hounded by activist investors, Jana Partners. It turned down a $17 billion acquisition in February believing it was worth mor
ConductorOne is bringing automation to identity and access management with $15M investment
The founders of ConductorOne, an identity and access control startup, both came from Okta, which is itself a single sign-on vendor based on the zero trust model. In fact, they were in charge of authen
Appsmith, a low-code platform for building business apps, lands $41M
For the last several years, Appsmith has been quietly building an open source platform for internal development teams to build the custom apps they need. These are business applications that companies
CloudQuery raises $15M to demystify your cloud infrastructure setup
CloudQuery CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Pats helped launch the startup because he needed a tool to give him visibility into his cloud infrastructure resources, and he couldn’t find one on the open mar
Fermyon wants to reinvent the way programmers develop microservices
When Fermyon’s founders were working at Microsoft, they helped build a lot of cloud native technologies. They noted that the development process, particularly around Kubernetes, was complex and deve
Makelog looks to revitalize software release notes with $3M seed
When Makelog founder and CEO JJ Nguyen was working in product management and customer success positions at companies like Segment, Scale AI and Warby Parker, she saw a constant stream of product updat
Emory University student venture fund is raising a new generation of investors
Students at Emory University's Goizueta Business School launched Peachtree Minority Venture Fund, which aims to teach students about VC while investing in real companies with minority founders.
Dynaboard is building a low-code platform to bring design, product and development together
Dynaboard founder Alex Kern has been programming since he was a teen, and over the years has attended more than 100 hackathons, even launching one of his own, Cal Hacks. Later he helped build a compan
Microsoft is elevating Viva from pure employee portal to job support platform starting with sales
When Microsoft launched Viva last year, it framed the platform as an employee portal where you might go to find out parental leave policy or other internal communications directed more generally at co
DataStax proves it’s still possible to raise nine-figures at higher valuation in 2022
When DataStax hired Chet Kapoor as CEO in October 2019, one of the first moves he made was to bring in his old pal Sam Ramji to be chief strategy officer, someone he had worked with for many years and
Arkestro brings game theory and machine learning to procurement with $26M investment
Procurement involves buying supplies and services you need to run your business. For the most part, companies still use email and spreadsheets or legacy tools to find the best price and come to an agr