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48-hour, buy-one-get-one free — TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019
Every startupper we’ve ever met loves a great deal, and so do we. That’s why we’re celebrating Prime day with a 48-hour flash sale on tickets to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019, which takes place September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
We’re talking a classic BOGO — buy-one-get-one — deal that starts today and ends tomorrow, July 16, at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy one early-bird ticket ($249) and you get a second ticket for free. But this BOGO goes bye-bye in just 48 hours, so don’t wait. Buy your TC Sessions: Enterprise tickets now and save.
Get ready to join more than 1,000 attendees for a day-long, intensive experience exploring the enterprise colossus — a tech category that generates hundreds of new startups, along with a steady stream of multibillion-dollar acquisitions, every year.
What can you expect at TC Sessions: Enterprise? For starters, you’ll hear TechCrunch editors interview enterprise software leaders, including tech titans, rising founders and boundary-breaking VCs.
One such titan, George Brady — Capital One’s executive VP in charge of tech operations — will join us to discuss how the financial institution left legacy hardware and software behind to embrace the cloud. Quite a journey in such a highly regulated industry.
Our growing speaker roster features other enterprise heavy-hitters, including Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO; Aparna Sinha, Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes and Anthos; Jim Clarke, Intel’s director of quantum hardware; and Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian.
Looking for in-depth information on technical enterprise topics? You’ll find them in our workshops and breakout sessions. Check out the exhibiting early-stage enterprise startups focused on disrupting, well, everything. Enjoy receptions and world-class networking with other founders, investors and technologists actively building the next generation of enterprise services.
TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 takes place September 5, and we pack a lot of value into a single day. Double your ROI and take advantage of our 48-hour BOGO sale. Buy your ticket before July 16 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and get another ticket free. That’s two tickets for one early-bird price. And if that’s not enough value, get this: we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to Disrupt SF 2019 for every TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket you purchase (mic drop).
Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.
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How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5B company
There are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press. Then there’s Roblox, a company which took at least a decade to hit its stride and has, relative to its current level of success, barely gotten any recognition or attention.
Why has Roblox’s story gone mostly untold? One reason is that it emerged from a whole generation of gaming portals and platforms. Some, like King.com, got lucky or pivoted their business. Others by and large failed.
Once companies like Facebook, Apple and Google got to the gaming scene, it just looked like a bad idea to try to build your own platform — and thus not worth talking about. Added to that, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki seems uninterested in press.
But overall, the problem has been that Roblox just seemed like an insignificant story for many, many years. The company had millions of users, sure. So did any number of popular games. In its early days, Roblox even looked like Minecraft, a game that was released long after Roblox went live, but that grew much, much faster.
Yet here we are today: Roblox now claims that half of all American children aged 9-12 are on its platform. It has jumped to 90 million monthly unique users and is poised to go international, potentially multiplying that number. And it’s unique. Essentially all other distribution services offering games through a portal have eventually fizzled, aside from some distant cousins like Steam.
This is the story of how Roblox not only survived, but built a thriving platform.
Seeds of an idea
(Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Before Roblox, there was Knowledge Revolution, a company that made teaching software. While designed to allow students to simulate physics experiments, perhaps predictably, they also treated it like a game.
“The fun seemed to be in building your own experiment,” says Baszucki. “When people were playing it and we went into schools and labs, they were all making car crashes and buildings fall down, making really funny stuff.” Provided with a sandbox, kids didn’t just make dry experiments about mass or velocity — they made games, or experiences they could show off to friends for a laugh.
Knowledge Revolution was founded in 1989, by Dave Baszucki and his brother Greg (who didn’t later co-found Roblox, but is now on its board). Nearly a decade later, it was acquired for $20 million by MSC Software, which made professional simulation tools. Dave continued there for another four years before leaving to become an angel investor.
Baszucki put money into Friendster, a company that pre-dated Facebook and MySpace in the social networking category. That investment seeded another piece of the idea for Roblox. Taken together, the legacy of Knowledge Revolution and Friendster were the two key components undergirding Roblox: a physics sandbox with strong creation tools, and a social graph.
Baszucki himself is a third piece of the puzzle. Part of an older set of entrepreneurs, which might be called the Steve Jobs generation, Baszucki’s archetype seems closer to Mr. Rogers than Jobs himself: unfailingly polite and enthusiastic, never claiming superior insight, and preferring to pass credit for his accomplishments on to others. In conversation, he shows interests both central and tangential to Roblox, like virtual environments, games, education, digital identity and the future of tech. Somewhere in this heady mix, the idea of Roblox came about.
The first release
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Demo your startup at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019
Every year hundreds of startups launch with dreams of becoming the next enterprise software unicorn. And it’s no wonder, given the $500 billion market and the rate at which the enterprise giants snap up emerging players. If you’re the founder of an early-stage enterprise startup, join us for TC Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Even better, grab the opportunity by the horns and buy a Startup Demo Package. There is limited space available. This is your chance to plant your company in front of some of the most influential enterprise movers and shakers — we’re talking more than 1,000 attendees. Demo tables are reserved for startups with less than $3 million in funding and are available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to the event.
This day-long intensive event features speakers, panel discussions, demos, workshops and world-class networking. Get ready for a head-on, hype-free exploration of the considerable challenges enterprise companies face — regardless of their size.
TechCrunch editors will interview founders and leaders from both established and up-and-coming companies on topics ranging from intelligent marketing automation and the cloud to machine learning and AI. And they’ll question enterprise-focused VCs about where they’re directing their early, middle and late-stage investments.
The full roster of speakers is still to be announced, but here’s a quick hit of who you can expect at TC Sessions: Enterprise.
You’ll hear from Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, a company that’s changed the way developers work. Want to hear more about enterprise and the cloud? Snowflake’s co-founder and president of product, Benoit Dageville, will be on hand to talk about the company’s mission to bring the enterprise database to the cloud.
Have someone you want to hear from our stage? Submit your speaker suggestion here.
Pro Tip: For each TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket you buy, we’ll register you for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.
TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your early-stage enterprise startup in front of leading enterprise software founders, investors and technologists. Buy your Startup Demo Package today.
Looking for sponsorship opportunities? Contact our TechCrunch team to learn about the benefits associated with sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019.
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Atlassian’s co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us at TC Sessions: Enterprise
Few companies have changed the way developers work as profoundly as Atlassian. Its tools like Jira and Confluence are ubiquitous, and over the course of the last few years, the company has started to adapt many of them for wider enterprise usage outside of developer teams.
To talk about Atlassian’s story from being a small shop in Australia to a successful IPO — and its plans for the future — the company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us at our inaugural TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event on September 5 in San Francisco.
Farquhar co-founded Atlassian with Mike Cannon-Brookes, in 2001. It wasn’t until 2010, though, that the company raised its first major venture round ($60 million from Accel Partners). Even by that point, though, the company already had thousands of customers and a growing staff in Sydney and San Francisco.
Today, more than 150,000 companies use Atlassian’s tools. These range from the likes of Audi to Spotify, Twilio and Visa, with plenty of startups and small and medium businesses in between.
It’s no secret that Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes consider themselves accidental billionaires, so it’s maybe no surprise that in 2015, ahead of Atlassian’s successful IPO that valued it at well above $10 billion, he also signed on to the 1% Pledge movement.
Today, Farquhar also makes his own venture investments as part of Skip Capital, which he co-founded.
TC Sessions: Enterprise (September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center) will take on the big challenges and promise facing enterprise companies today. TechCrunch’s editors will bring to the stage founders and leaders from established and emerging companies to address rising questions, like the promised revolution from machine learning and AI, intelligent marketing automation and the inevitability of the cloud, as well as the outer reaches of technology, like quantum computing and blockchain.
Tickets are now available for purchase on our website at the early-bird rate of $395; student tickets are just $245.
We have a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event.
For each ticket purchased for TC Sessions: Enterprise, you will also be registered for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.
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How we scaled our startup by being remote first
Michael Risse
Contributor
Contributor
Michael Risse is VP & chief marketing officer at Seeq, a company building advanced applications for engineers to accelerate insights into process manufacturing data. He was formerly a consultant with big data platform and application companies, and prior to that worked with Microsoft for 20 years.
Startups are often associated with the benefits and toys provided in their offices. Foosball tables! Free food! Dog friendly! But what if the future of startups was less about physical office space and more about remote-first work environments? What if, in fact, the most compelling aspect of a startup work environment is that the employees don’t have to go to one?
A remote-first company model has been Seeq’s strategy since our founding in 2013. We have raised $35 million and grown to more than 100 employees around the globe. Remote-first is clearly working for us and may be the best model for other software companies as well.
So, who is Seeq and what’s been the key to making the remote-first model work for us? And why did we do it in the first place?
Seeq is a remote-first startup – i.e. it was founded with the intention of not having a physical headquarters or offices, and still operates that way – that is developing an advanced analytics application that enables process engineers and subject matter experts in oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and other process manufacturing industries to investigate and publish insights from the massive amounts of sensor data they generate and store.
To succeed, we needed to build a team quickly with two skill sets: 1) software development expertise, including machine learning, AI, data visualization, open source, agile development processes, cloud, etc. and 2) deep domain expertise in the industries we target.
Which means there is no one location where we can hire all the employees we need: Silicon Valley for software, Houston for oil & gas, New Jersey for fine chemicals, Seattle for cloud expertise, water utilities across the country, and so forth. But being remote-first has made recruiting and hiring these high-demand roles easier much easier than if we were collocated.
Image via Seeq Corporation
Job postings on remote-specific web sites like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Remote OK typically draw hundreds of applicants in a matter of days. This enables Seeq to hire great employees who might not call Seattle, Houston or Silicon Valley home – and is particularly attractive to employees with location-dependent spouses or employees who simply want to work where they want to live.
But a remote-first strategy and hiring quality employees for the skills you need is not enough: succeeding as a remote-first company requires a plan and execution around the “3 C’s of remote-first”.
The three requirements to remote-first success are the three C’s: communication, commitment and culture.
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Praqma puts Atlassian’s Data Center products into containers
It’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon this week and in the slew of announcements, one name stood out: Atlassian . The company is best known as the maker of tools that allow developers to work more efficiently, and now as a cloud infrastructure provider. In this age of containerization, though, even Atlassian can bask in the glory that is Kubernetes, because the company today announced that its channel partner Praqma is launching Atlassian Software in Kubernetes (ASK), a new solution that allows enterprises to run and manage as containers its on-premise applications like Jira Data Center, with the help of Kubernetes.
Praqma is now making ASK available as open source.
As the company notes in today’s announcement, running a Data Center application and ensuring high availability can be a lot of work using today’s methods. With AKS and by containerizing the applications, scaling and management should become easier — and downtime more avoidable.
“Availability is key with ASK. Automation keeps mission-critical applications running whatever happens,” Praqma’s team explains. “If a Jira server fails, Data Center will automatically redirect traffic to healthy servers. If an application or server crashes Kubernetes automatically reconciles by bringing up a new application. There’s also zero downtime upgrades for Jira.”
AKS handles the scaling and most admin tasks, in addition to offering a monitoring solution based on the open-source Grafana and Prometheus projects.
Containers are slowly becoming the distribution medium of choice for a number of vendors. As enterprises move their existing applications to containers, it makes sense for them to also expect that they can manage their existing on-premises applications from third-party vendors in the same systems. For some vendors, that may mean a shift away from pre-server licensing to per-seat licensing, so there are business implications to this, but in general, it’s a logical move for most.
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InVision announces new integrations with Jira
Today InVision announced even deeper integrations with Jira, letting users embed actual InVision prototypes right within a Jira ticket. The company also announced the Jira app for InVision Studio, letting designers in Studio see interactive Jira tickets in real time.
InVision has already had lighter integrations with Atlassian products, including Jira, Confluence and Trello. It’s also worth noting that Atlassian participated in InVision’s $115 million Series F funding round.
The partnership makes sense. Atlassian provides a parallel product to InVision, except instead of serving designers, Atlassian serves engineers.
But it brings up an interesting challenge for InVision, last valued at $1.9 billion. The company went from creating its own market with a paid prototyping and collaboration tool to competing with giants and startups alike as it introduced new products.
InVision Studio, for instance, is meant to compete with the likes of Adobe XD, Sketch, and Figma, among others.
At the same time, InVision’s strategy has always been to become a connective tissue for the broader design landscape. CEO Clark Valberg has said in the past that he sees InVision becoming the Salesforce of the design world, with a broad array of partnerships and integrations across the industry to handle each, nuanced fraction of the process in a single, fluid place.
“Up until now we’ve been a fairly horizontal player,” said VP of Product Mike Davidson. “We created the market for prototyping. There was no paid market for a prototyping tool until InVision came along. Now that you see us provide a more vertical stack of tools, we don’t want to lose the great thing we’ve built with the InVision Prototyping tool. It’s been more popular than we could have ever imagined.”
Davidson added that InVision now serves 100 of the Fortune 100 companies.
And since its launch in 2011, InVision has maintained that original strategic course of staying open, particularly with Atlassian. But InVision isn’t just friendly with Atlassian. The company also introduced an App Store and Asset Store in InVision Studio (partnerships include Slack, Dribbble, and Getty), with plans to launch a developer API so anyone can build apps for InVision Studio. Plus, InVision has made a handful of acquisitions, and launched the Design Forward Fund, which allocates $5 million toward investing in design startups.
VP of Partnerships and Community Mike Davidson believes that balancing this open garden philosophy with the desire to provide the very best products across the entire process (automatically putting InVision in competition with other design startups) is one of the company’s greatest challenges.
“We want to provide a first-cclass experience from beginning to end but we also want to provide a system that’s open enough where you can use your tool of choice for any one of the particular functions,” said Davidson. “It’s a difficult balance. We want to allow for designers and developers to choose which tools they use for whatever job they’re trying to do, but we also want to be the best choice for each one of those functions.”
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Atlassian gives Confluence a makeover, acquires Good Software
Atlassian today announced a new version of Confluence, its collaboration platform. While the company has recently focused more on tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Trello, Confluence has continued to gain traction as a content collaboration tool for technical and non-technical teams. Indeed, even though it’s been quiet around it, it’s the second-most revenue-generating product for Atlassian right now. With this release, Atlassian is once again putting the spotlight on Confluence.
To do this, Atlassian also today announced that it has acquired Good Software, a company that makes analytics tools for Confluence users and admins.
In total, Atlassian is announcing 15 new features for the product. Unsurprisingly, given the acquisition of Good Software, one of these new features is extended analytics. With this, Confluence users will be able to see how others in their company engage with their content. The idea here, Atlassian says, is to help everybody write better content and not just see who writes the most popular copy (though that’s surely how this will also be used). There are some other uses here, too, though. An HR manager may notice that a page with outdated information is still getting hits, for example.
Over time, Atlassian will integrate these features more deeply into the rest of Confluence.
Another major new feature is the introduction of an updated editor. The core features of this new editor are actually shared across most Atlassian products now, but as Pratima Arora, the company’s head of Confluence, told me, that editor is then tweaked for the individual products. For Confluence, this means support for the ever-important feature of adding emojis to your pages, but at the core of that is the new slash (/) command that, similar to Slack, lets you add tables, images and macros to your pages. Other new features include the ability to easily create better-looking tables of content, action items, roadmaps and due dates, as well as smartlinks that automatically preview content for services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Trello, GitHub and others. All of this is meant to make organizing content just a little bit easier.
Also new are a set of new templates and a new media experience.
“Once a niche wiki and documentation tool for developers, Confluence has become a universal content collaboration tool that’s easily used by any team, technical or non-technical,” Arora writes in today’s announcement. “In fact, one in four Confluence Cloud customers use it throughout their entire company, according to recent customer data.”
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Trello aims for the enterprise
Trello, Atlassian’s project management tool, is doubling down on its efforts to become a better service for managing projects at work. To do so, the team is launching thirteen new features in Trello Enterprise today, making this one of the company’s biggest feature releases since the launch of the enterprise version in 2015.
As the company also announced today, one million teams now actively use the service.
Most of these new features are for paying users, but even Trello’s free users are getting access to a few new goodies. In return, though, Trello is taking away the ability to create an unlimited number of boards for free Teams users (not regular users outside of a team). Going forward, they can only have 10 boards open in Trello at any given time. Teams without a subscription that already use more than 10 boards will continue to use them but will have to subscribe to a paid plan to add more. To help make all of this a bit easier, Trello will let existing free teams add up to 10 additional boards until May 1, 2019 — and they’ll be able to keep them going forward.
“We’re making this change to accelerate our ability to bring world-class business features to market, and Trello Business Class and Enterprise will get more useful and powerful to address our customers’ pain points in the workplace,” the company’s co-founder and today’s head of Trello Michael Pryor writes in today’s announcement — and to do bring those feature to market, it surely helps to convert a few more free users into paying ones.
One of the main new feature announcements here is that the Power-Up Butler is now available for free, for both paying and free users (though with some limitations if you aren’t on a subscription plan). Power-Up Butler is an automation extension for Trello that the company acquired in December. It makes it easier to automate workflows and other repetitive tasks in Trello — and that’s clearly something the service’s enterprise users were asking for.
With this update, Trello is also now getting a new board setting beyond ‘private,’ ‘team’ and ‘public.’ This new setting, ‘organization,’ allows you to share a board with the entire company, including those who are not on a particular team. Until now, that wasn’t really an option and creating a public board was obviously not an option for many companies.
Since IT admins love nothing more than access controls, the new version of Trello Enterprise also features a lot of new ways for them to create visibility controls, membership restrictions, board creation restrictions and more. Admins now also get tools to enforce the use of single sign-on solutions and new ways to manage public boards and users, as well as which power-up extensions employees can use.
The company also today announced that it has received SOX and SOC2 Type 1 compliance.
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Atlassian acquires AgileCraft for $166M
Atlassian today announced that it has acquired AgileCraft, a service that aims to help enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams. The service provides business leaders with additional insights into the current status of technical projects and gives them insights into the bottlenecks, risks and dependencies of these projects. Indeed, the focus of AgileCraft is less on technical teams than on the business teams that support them and help them manage the digital transformation of their businesses.
The price total of the acquisition is about $166 million, with $154 million in cash and the remainder in restricted shares.
“Many leaders are still making mission-critical decisions using their instincts and best guesses instead of data,” said Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-CEO, in today’s announcement. “As Atlassian tools spread through organizations, technology leaders need better visibility into work performed by their teams. With AgileCraft joining Atlassian, we believe we’re the best company to help executives align the work across their organization – providing an all-encompassing view that connects strategy, work, and outcomes.”
As the name implies, AgileCraft focuses on the Agile methodology, though it also offers a bit of flexibility there with support for frameworks like SAFe, LeSS and Spotify. It supports pulling in data from tools like Atlassian’s Jira, but also Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, IBM’s RTC and other services.
Atlassian will continue to operate AgileCraft, which had raised about $10.1 million before the acquisition as a standalone service. “We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers’ success,” writes AgileCraft’s founder and CEO Steve Elliott. “We remain dedicated to pioneering enterprise agility and are thrilled to team up with the outstanding people at Atlassian to help our customers thrive.”
Over the years, Atlassian started embracing users and use cases for its tools that go beyond its core tools for developers. Jira and Confluence are the prime examples for this. Today’s acquisition continues this trend in that AgileCraft aims to bring to the rest of the company many of the methodologies that tech teams use.
“One of the critical roles we play for lots of organizations is in helping drive this kind of digital transformation where we’re really empowering the teams that are building and developing the kind of technology that moves our customers forward,” Atlassian president Jay Simons told me. “AgileCraft basically complements all of that by extending visibility into what teams are using Atlassian products to do up into key stakeholders and leaders in the business that are trying to manage better visibility at a portfolio or program level.”
Simons also stressed that AgileCraft already has very strong integrations into the existing Atlassian tools — and indeed, that was one of the main drivers of the acquisition. He noted that the company plans to improve those and think about additional patterns. “We’ll continue doing what we’re doing,” he said.
Simons also noted that he expects that a lot of Jira customers will now look at AgileCraft as an additional tool in helping the businesses manage their business’s digital transformation.
Atlassian doesn’t typically make a lot of acquisitions. Its pace is close to about one major buy per year. Last year, the company picked up OpsGenie for $295 million. In 2017, it acquired Trello for $425 million, the company’s biggest acquisition to date. Other major products the company has acquired include StatusPage, BlueJimp, HipChat and Bitbucket (all the way back in 2010).
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