DevTools Brew #4: Raising a Series A for a DevTools Startup, How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages, Founder 1-on-1 with CEOs of Datadog and Aiven...
Happy weekend and welcome to all the new members who joined us this week!
My name is Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery, and this is DevTools Brew newsletter, a weekly roundup of the latest trends and insights in the infrastructure and devtools industry.
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Welcome to the DevTools Brew #4!
In this edition, we will explore:
📈 Raising a Series A for your DevTools Startup
💻 How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
🎥 Product-led Growth: Founder 1-on-1 with CEOs of Datadog and Aiven
⚡ Quick Link
💸 The Latest Funding Rounds in the Devtools & Infrastructure industry
I hope you will enjoy this sneak peek. Let's dive in!
📈 Raising a Series A for your DevTools Startup
A year ago, developer-focused software companies were getting funded at high valuations, mainly due to the expectation of successful initial public offerings (IPOs) from industry leaders such as Snowflake, HashiCorp, and Confluent. Now, with the market downturn, raising capital for a dev-tools startup has become more challenging, although it is still achievable.
Rak Garg, Principal at Bain Capital Ventures, delved into a practical, step-by-step guide founders can use to move successfully from Seed to Series A.
Here are the key takeaways:
The median series A round in Q3 2022 for a developer tooling company closed at $47.5m, the lowest it has been since the beginning of 2021.
Seed rounds are raised to validate a problem and create an early solution —> Series A rounds are used to bring a solution to market, get a few customers to care, and see early signs of monetizing that solution.
Six metrics that investors look for include:
User growth
Revenue
Quality of usage
Community metrics
Large markets
A compelling (company) story
User growth is the most critical metric for VCs to see. Non-linear organic growth in the product's user base, including usage expansion within specific teams, should be shown.
Revenue is also important. High-quality revenue is generated directly from the customer base in exchange for product usage.
Quality of usage is another important metric. Investors want to see the product being used in realistic production environments to get real work done.
Community metrics are essential. A good software platform should cultivate movements behind them to increase GTM efficiency.
Large markets are important to investors. Companies should show that they can appeal to more potential personas or that some macro-trend is growing their target persona or their demand.
Nailing your story. A compelling Series A story has three core components - specific trends in the market, your team's fitness to tackle the problem, and reasons why your solution is the correct approach.
You should discuss how the solution is performing in the market, what a Series A would unlock for you, and paint a visionary picture of the future if you succeed.
Read the full article here, published in Rak’s Facts Newsletter.
💻 How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
Now, shifting our attention from business to engineering, where I share my weekly resource dedicated to technical insights.
Discord engineering team has built a system that can handle trillions of messages. If you are curious about this accomplishment's story and details, you should read this article.
Here are the key takeaways from this story:
Discord stored messages in a Cassandra database called "cassandra-messages".
In 2017, they ran 12 Cassandra nodes storing billions of messages, but by the beginning of 2022, they had 177 nodes with trillions of messages.
The database was a high-toil system, causing issues such as unpredictable latency, maintenance operations that were too expensive to run, and frequent paging for issues with the database.
Cassandra's partitioning system could lead to potential performance pitfalls, particularly with servers with just a small group of friends sending orders of magnitude fewer messages than servers with hundreds of thousands of people.
Reads in Cassandra are more expensive than writes, and lots of concurrent reads as users interact with servers can hotspot a partition, leading to struggles for the cluster.
The size of their dataset when combined with these access patterns led to struggles for their cluster, frequently affecting latency across their entire database cluster.
Discord team decided to migrate their databases to ScyllaDB, a Cassandra-compatible database written in C++ that promised better performance, faster repairs, stronger workload isolation, and a garbage collection-free life.
Although ScyllaDB is not void of issues, it is void of a garbage collector, which has caused many issues for the team in the past, from GC pauses affecting latency to super long consecutive GC pauses that required manual reboot and babysitting of nodes.
They experimented with ScyllaDB and observed improvements in testing, so they decided to migrate all their databases to it.
They worked to improve ScyllaDB performance for their use cases, particularly with reverse queries, which execute a database scan in the opposite order of a table's sorting.
The ScyllaDB team prioritized improvements and implemented performant reverse queries, removing the last database blocker in their migration plan.
They plan to continue improving their architecture and performance, including further tuning of ScyllaDB's performance and exploring new storage solutions.
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
The Star History Weekly Pick is:
Cursor, “An editor made for programming with AI ”
⭐️ 9.6K stars reached
🎥 Product-led Growth: Founder 1-on-1 with CEOs of Datadog and Aiven
Aiven and Datadog, while in different stages of growth, share a crucial characteristic beyond having animals as logos: they are product-led companies. This means that their product is what fuels customer acquisition and retention. While Datadog has scaled to immense size since its founding all the way to an IPO, Aiven is coming up fast following their Series D this May. Olivier Pomel, Co-founder and CEO of Datadog and Oskari Saarenmaa, Co-founder and CEO of Aiven, will be sharing their key learnings on going product first.
⚡ Quick Link
Is There A Drop In Software Engineer Job Openings, Globally?
Gergely Orosz analyzes data points from Indeed and Hacker News to conclude the following: (1) There was a peak in software developer positions posted between mid-2021 and mid-2022. (2) The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020. (3) Germany, France and Australia still have significantly more jobs than in February 2020.
💸 Latest Funding Rounds
Orb, which helps B2B companies price their products, raised $19.1M across Series A rounds to date.
Spera raises $10M for its identity security posture management platform
Env0 raises $17 Million in Series A Funding to Advance Infrastructure as Code Automation for DevOps
Hygraph raises $30M to scale out a new, federated approach to managing digital content.
Codesphere, a Cloud coding startup, has raised $2.5M in new fundind.
Hathora, a Serverless cloud hosting for multiplayer games, raised $7.6M in a Seed round.
Unikraft, a startup that optimizes cloud applications and lowering cloud spend by up to 50%, closed a Seed round (undisclosed amount).
Infield, a startup that makes it easy for development teams to keep their dependencies up to date, raised a Seed round (undisclosed amount).
It’s already over! If you have any comments or feedback, Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter.
Thanks for reading,
Morgan
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