Today, Rippling announced $200M in funding at a $13.4B valuation. In 2023, the company had ~$350M in ARR.

But back in 2019 at ~$3M ARR, the team put out a Series A memo laying out everything they wanted to accomplish.

Here’s how they’ve stacked up to their own expectations… 1️⃣ In 2019, Rippling laid out the vision: "businesses should have a single system for employee information across every department within the company"

The risk was getting stuck in HR with a competitive market (Workday, Paycor, Zenefits, Gusto, BambooHR)

So what happened?

The internet is filled with incredible company analysis, across both public and private companies.

But sometimes the best research isn't coming from banks or venture funds. It's coming from anonymous Twitter accounts.

Here's a guide to some of the best analysis on FinTwit: First off, it's true that a LOT of FinTwit (aka the corner of the Twitter universe where investing nerds hang out) is focused on public companies.

Part of the reason for that is because that's where the bulk of information exists. @Contrary_Res exists to fix that.

The US spends $700B per year on education. With 60M+ students in the US, education touches ~20% of the population.

So why is it such a notoriously difficult market for software? Because outcomes don't seem to be a priority.

Here's how that impacts EdTech startups: The amount the US spends on education has been fairly consistent, at ~$700-800B a year.

That is about the same as the $700B+ defense budget in 2022.

Never let a crisis go to waste – CFOs know that better than anyone.

Between the allure of AI, re-orgs, and an evolving tech stack – what does the New Frontier in Finance look like?

We asked 21 CFOs their perspectives on this question.

Let's unpack this in our latest deep dive: First, some basics.

How have CFOs evolved?

Traditionally the CFO had 3 tasks: financial reporting, investor relations, and compliance.

Number-crunchers who operated behind the scenes, telling you “no” when there wasn't budget.

Strategic decisions were left to other C-Suite.

Databricks has led the data revolution with open source software and complementary products, building a $30 billion company in the process.

But when the Databricks team first got started, their pitch deck was one of the worst Ben Horowitz had ever seen.

Here’s their story: With origins in academia, Databricks was founded by the original creators of Apache Spark: Delta Lake & MLflow.

In 2013, a group of Berkeley CS PhDs @alighodsi @matei_zaharia @pwendell @rxin @andykonwinski Ion Stoica & Arsalan Shiraji started @databricks
web.archive.org/web/2014062503…

Latest developments in AI from Hugging Face, Microsoft, OpenAI, Klarna, Apple, Nvidia, and Yelp.

Plus new memos on AssemblyAI, Primer, and more.

Here's what we have been reading and a new batch of memos from last week: Pop star Grimes told fans to create AI-generated music with her voice, saying she would split 50% of royalties:

forbes.com/sites/martinep…

80% of developers say internal tools are critical to their company's operations, but 60% say their orgs aren't investing enough in internal tools

Since starting in 2017, and last valued at $3.2 billion, over 500K internal apps have been built on Retool. Here's the breakdown... Everyone knows software engineers are expensive.

Companies with 5-10K employees spend 40% of their engineering team’s time on internal tooling.

Even for companies with under 10 employees its still ~20%.

Online payments are exploding, with transaction volume in the trillions.

As that grows, so does fraud. Online fraud will reach >$300 billion in a few years.

Sardine helps Brex, Wealthsimple, Metamask and Bitski reduce fraud. Here's the story... Over 2 billion make purchases online.

Digital payments are projected to cross $10 trillion by 2026.

As the world of digital payments grows, so does online payment fraud.

Some forecasts put online payment fraud losses at over $340 billion between 2023 and 2027!

Fintech valuations, vertical SaaS opportunity, interviews with TikTok and Mozilla CEOS, and product updates from Shopify, Neeva, Instagram & Zoox

Plus new memos on Calendly, Chargebee, Instacart and more

Here's what we have been reading and the memos we published last week: Zoox, the self-driving startup owned by Amazon, carried passengers in its fully autonomous vehicle on public roads for the first time:

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Resilience of climate change startups, tech predictions, Stripe's new round, and developments in life sciences

Plus new memos on Helion Energy, Merge, Sorare, and more

Here's what we have been reading and the memos we published last week : A group of investors and founders shared recaps of the biggest stories of 2022 and their predictions for 2023 across the crypto, commerce, manufacturing, fintech, healthcare, and more

Hear from @alexchungtweets @ben_grosse and others

noted.beehiiv.com/p/new-eras-tec…

As the resurgence of US manufacturing continues to become pivotal for mission-critical sectors, emerging startups like @HadrianSpace are becoming integral to the supply chain.

We just published a report on Hadrian, the factory manufacturer for aerospace & defense companies: Hadrian builds vertically integrated factories that help customers build precision products in aerospace/defense faster and cheaper.

To learn more about Hadrian, read our full memo written by @arudansk

research.contrary.com/reports/hadrian

From bankruptcy & $30K in debt to raising over $300M.

The story of three cofounders who beat impossible odds to build a $4B company through remarkable grit.

Here is the story of how @webflow got built and the critical lessons from the founders we picked up during our research: For context, @webflow is a visual web development platform.

It enables users to create customized websites and online stores without coding.

They offer an extensive library of customizable templates that make designing a website easy with drag-and-drop features.

Discover the fundamentals of software investing, top fintech trends for 2023, and how to scale from $5M to $100M without hiccups.

Here are the best resources and stories we saw last week that you might have missed: .@Tracy_Young, the co-founder of TigerEye shared some important lessons for startups.

She shared some of the critical failure points that are common when scaling rapidly from $5M to $100M in ARR

linkedin.com/pulse/failure-…

Zapier has become a critical layer in no-code automation

Their network effect extends over 4K+ integrations for the long-tail of prosumers

From a bootstrapped hacker tool, they've grown to over $100M ARR

Let's unpack the rise of Zapier: First, some background:

@zapier is a central hub that allows users to automate workflows, recurring tasks, and business processes without writing a single line of code.

It serves as a middleman to translator btw web APIs & orchestrates communication of web tools

This is the story of two Stanford dropouts who turned a last minute pivot into a company worth $12B

The co-founders of Brex recently shared lessons learned along the way to building a multi-billion dollar business in less than 5 yrs

Take a look: Back in 2017, @hdubugras & @pedroh96 co-founded @brexHQ.

Today, Brex is a provider of fintech and software services for startups.

These include corporate cards, business accounts, expense management, automated bill payments, and more.

How did they manage to do it all?

One of the most universal problems for professionals is how to get more sleep in less time.

@eightsleep is using advanced technology to improve how much rest people get.

Sleep is a $30B market, so let's dig into the business of sleep: The world continues to see AI used across every category to solve a wide variety of real-world consumer problems

@eightsleep is a company that creates smart mattresses. They utilize AI/ML to improve sleep by adjusting temperatures and monitoring key health metrics.

OpenAI's partnerships, the defense-tech race, new memos on Rippling, Plaid, and more.

The best resources and stories we saw to get the new year started: After the success of ChatGPT, OpenAI has been putting together a secondary tender that would value the company at $29 billion.

Microsoft also plans to leverage ChatGPT to level up their Bing search engine.

wsj.com/articles/chatg…

Everyone’s heard that ChatGPT grew to 1 million users in 5 days.

But it’s also probably costing OpenAPI ~$100K PER DAY to run it.

Let’s talk about the hidden costs of API-based business models… ChatGPT is a variant of GPT-3. Most people using ChatGPT have used the familiar chat interface at chat.openai.com

But both models are also accessible through API, which means applications can be built using models like GPT-3. Every new application means more API calls.

Every year, private tech companies set out to build the future.

To build the future, many of the founders and investors around these companies attempt to predict the future

From AI to nuclear fusion and beyond. Let's look at the predictions from top VCs and founders for 2023... But before we get carried away looking for someone to tell us the future, remember that no one knows for sure.

https://twitter.com/10kdiver/status/1608809864909979652?s=20

DARPA was once hailed as an organization “that shaped the modern world," building technology like satellites, GPS, the internet, and more.

Could a research organization with the talent density of OpenAI achieve the same level of impact? Here's our last deep dive of 2022: Every decade has seen a seismic shift in technology.

From computers to the internet.

- AWS rode cloud computing
- Apple with the adoption of mobile
- Facebook with the rise of social

Could @OpenAI be on the precipice of leading a generational shift in AI?

h/t: @Base10Partners

Downrounds, trends top investors are watching for in 2023, and the future of AI. You don't want to miss this one.

Here are the best things we saw last week: Coupa was taken private by Thomas Bravo in an $8B deal. Coupa is a leading platform for business spend management.

The acquisition price came as a surprise to many, despite management’s strong forecasts.

thomabravo.com/press-releases…