Author Archives: Danny Crichton

That dreadful VPN might finally be dead thanks to Twingate, a new startup built by Dropbox alums

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VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a mainstay of corporate network security (and also consumers trying to stream Netflix while pretending to be from other countries). VPNs create an encrypted channel between your device (a laptop or a smartphone) and a company’s servers. All of your internet traffic gets routed through the company’s IT infrastructure, […] Continue reading That dreadful VPN might finally be dead thanks to Twingate, a new startup built by Dropbox alums→

The No-Code Generation is arriving

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In the distant past, there was a proverbial “digital divide” that bifurcated workers into those who knew how to use computers and those who didn’t.[1] Young Gen Xers and their later millennial companions grew up with Power Macs and Wintel boxes, and that experience made them native users on how to make these technologies do […] Continue reading The No-Code Generation is arriving→

Gusto is expanding from payroll into a full suite financial wellness platform

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When we caught up with Gusto last year, the small business payroll startup had just raised $200 million and was launching a new office in New York City. Over the past few years though, Gusto has also been accruing new features outside of its original payroll product, features that redefine the borders between payroll and […] Continue reading Gusto is expanding from payroll into a full suite financial wellness platform→

NUVIA raises $240M from Mithril to make climate-ready enterprise chips

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Climate change is on everyone’s minds these days, what with the outer Bay Area on fire, orange skies above San Francisco, and a hurricane season that is bearing down on the East Coast with alacrity (and that’s just the United States in the past two weeks). A major — and growing — source of those […] Continue reading NUVIA raises $240M from Mithril to make climate-ready enterprise chips→

Sutter Hill strikes ice-cold, $2.5B pre-market return with Snowflake’s IPO filing

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Today is the day for huge VC returns. We talked a bit about Sequoia’s coming huge win with the IPO of game engine Unity this morning. Now, Sequoia might actually have the second largest return among companies filing to go public with the SEC today. Sequoia strikes gold with Unity’s IPO filing Snowflake filed its […] Continue reading Sutter Hill strikes ice-cold, $2.5B pre-market return with Snowflake’s IPO filing→

Datafold is solving the chaos of data engineering

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It seemed so simple. A small schema issue in a database was wrecking a feature in the app, increasing latency and degrading the user experience. The resident data engineer pops in a fix to amend the schema, and everything seems fine — for now. Unbeknownst to them, that small fix completely clobbered all the dashboards […] Continue reading Datafold is solving the chaos of data engineering→

SAP will spin out its $8B spin-in Qualtrics acquisition

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Well, this isn’t a story you see every day. Less than two years after German software giant SAP snatched experience management platform Qualtrics for $8 billion days before the startup’s IPO debut, it has now decided to spin out the company in a brand new IPO. https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/11/sap-agrees-to-buy-qualtrics-for-8b-in-cash-just-before-the-survey-software-companys-ipo/ In a press statement released Sunday, SAP said […] Continue reading SAP will spin out its $8B spin-in Qualtrics acquisition→

NS1 nets $40M “true coronavirus fundraise” amidst surging customer demand

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Apparently, the internet is still popular. With the novel coronavirus marooning people at home for work and play, those “tubes” carrying our data back and forth have become ever more important to our livelihoods. Yet while we often as consumers think of the internet as what we buy from a service provider like Spectrum or […] Continue reading NS1 nets $40M “true coronavirus fundraise” amidst surging customer demand→

Spark fast follows with a $25M Series B round into customer success platform Catalyst

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The world has been turned upside down the past few weeks, but one lesson of business remains as important as ever: treating your customers well is the best avenue to future business strength, particularly at a moment of extreme stress. As businesses come to terms with the economic crisis underway, executives are moving resources from […] Continue reading Spark fast follows with a $25M Series B round into customer success platform Catalyst→

CIOs are dead tired of dumb tech. Pulse has $6.5M to help them help each other

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The technology that runs our companies these days is staggering in its complexity. We have moved from a monolith to a microservices world, from boxes to SaaS, and while that has added agility to the enterprise, it has come at the cost of a metric f-ton of services and software platforms required by every team […] Continue reading CIOs are dead tired of dumb tech. Pulse has $6.5M to help them help each other→