Each month, “Ammirati on Innovation” episodes will look at ways that the disruptive-startup mentality is spreading beyond young entrepreneurs to big established corporations. Serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon B-school professor Sean Ammirati, who sits at the intersection of these high-change dynamics, provides insight. Today, Sean and I discuss the valuation news around DigitalOcean: how does it stack up against red-hot Snowflake, what can it tell us about IaaS and Wall Street, plus more.
Episode 24
The Big Themes:
- Plotted on a bell curve: Some are amazing, and some are terrible – and some are in the middle.
- Stability is not the issue: There’s capital behind these companies that give you the same amount of runway you could expect from any of the other kinds of companies.
- The term unicorn was coined: You needed to raise money at least a billion dollar valuation from one company in your portfolio to make that portfolio be a top performing venture portfolio.
- Microsoft and Nuance: You have the sales, the partnership, and the marketing muscle that a company like Microsoft can provide.
The Big Quotes:
- “The more interesting thing to me was that in the first five months of 2021, there were 187 companies that for the first time raised money at over a billion-dollar valuation.”
- “The thing that’s more concerning to me is I think there’s a lot of reflection we, as an industry, need to do on the right way to create healthy corporate governance among these companies.”
- “I think it’s time for CFOs to stop worrying about just doing the logistics.”
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Cloud Wars Live Digital All-Stars
Sean Ammirati is one of our regular Digital All-Stars. The All-Stars are experts whose video podcasts will focus on the critical themes shaping (and re-shaping!) the business world here in the digital age of 2021. Our intention is to provide regular chunks of timely ideas and insights about high-priority subjects from industry veterans with diverse backgrounds.
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