How Klaviyo used data and no-code to transform owned marketing

Email is the communication medium that refuses to die. “Eventually, every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?” wrote the venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2007. Three years later, he updated readers that other forms of messaging had outgrown email. “It […] Continue reading How Klaviyo used data and no-code to transform owned marketing

Marketing in 2021 is emotional and not just transactional

Brands are emotions made physical. The clothes we wear, the media we consume, the devices we use — all signal not only to others what we value and see in ourselves, they also are a way to construct our very identities. Experimenting to deepen that bond has been at the core of the marketing profession […] Continue reading Marketing in 2021 is emotional and not just transactional

Drama and quirk aren’t necessary for startup success

Many of the stories in our EC-1 series tell tales of startups in the wilderness hacking out green field opportunities. Klaviyo is a different breed of company: One that went into an established market and challenged powerful incumbents, ultimately finding success with a new, more data-oriented generation of email marketers. As such, the lessons that […] Continue reading Drama and quirk aren’t necessary for startup success

Select Star raises seed to automatically document datasets for data scientists

Back when I was a wee lad with a very security-compromised MySQL installation, I used to answer every web request with multiple “SELECT *” database requests — give me all the data and I’ll figure out what to do with it myself. Today in a modern, data-intensive org, “SELECT *” will kill you. With petabytes […] Continue reading Select Star raises seed to automatically document datasets for data scientists

Lightspeed and Max Levchin bet on Balance to bring B2B payments into the digital world

Consumer payments is by no means a solved problem (I’ll trigger one hundred blockchain people if I say otherwise), but it sure as heck a pretty improved one. Checkout is a breeze with modern tools ranging from Stripe and PayPal to Fast and Rapyd to Apple and Google Pay. If you happen to need financing, […] Continue reading Lightspeed and Max Levchin bet on Balance to bring B2B payments into the digital world

Best practices as a service is a key investment theme to watch in 2021

Enterprise IT has been completely transformed by SaaS the past decade. Okta last week published a report which showed that the largest companies now use 175 apps, a doubling over the past few years. More professionals have more tools to do their jobs than ever before. It’s an explosion of creativity and expressiveness and operational […] Continue reading Best practices as a service is a key investment theme to watch in 2021

Datafold raises seed from NEA to keep improving the lives of data engineers

Data engineering is one of these new disciplines that has gone from buzzword to mission critical in just a few years. Data engineers design and build all the connections between sources of raw data (your payments information or ad-tracking data or what have you) and the ultimate analytics dashboards used by business executives and data […] Continue reading Datafold raises seed from NEA to keep improving the lives of data engineers

Greylock’s Asheem Chandna on ‘shifting left’ in cybersecurity and the future of enterprise startups

Last week was a busy week, what with an election in Myanmar and all (well, and the United States, I guess). So perhaps you were glued to your TV or smartphone, and missed out on our conversation with Asheem Chandna, a long-time partner at Greylock who has invested in enterprise and cybersecurity startups for nearly […] Continue reading Greylock’s Asheem Chandna on ‘shifting left’ in cybersecurity and the future of enterprise startups

Extra Crunch Live: Join Greylock’s Asheem Chandna today at 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT on the future of enterprise and cybersecurity investing

Yes, there is an election, but that’s getting pretty boring at this point. What’s far more interesting is the future of enterprise and cybersecurity startups, markets where companies are dumping billions of dollars in the wake of the largest change in office work in decades. Old notions are being discarded, new ideas are in — […] Continue reading Extra Crunch Live: Join Greylock’s Asheem Chandna today at 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT on the future of enterprise and cybersecurity investing

Redpoint and Sequoia are backing a startup to copy edit your shit code

Code is the lifeblood of the modern world, yet the tooling for some programming environments can be remarkably spartan. While developers have long had access to graphical programming environments (IDEs) and performance profilers and debuggers, advanced products to analyze and improve lines of code have been harder to find. These days, the most typical tool […] Continue reading Redpoint and Sequoia are backing a startup to copy edit your shit code