Exploring the vast "dark matter" of the software universe

The Dark Matter of Software Valuations

Investors

Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers

Why We Will Never Have Enough Software Developers

Developers

Enterprise Software Monetization is Fat-Tailed

We interviewed developer productivity leaders. Here's what they said.

Six Trends Shaping Developer Productivity

Founders

Seed Valuations Aren’t Valuations

AI Benchmarking Is Broken

We should take AI models seriously, which means taking their evaluation seriously

The Venture Activity Index – Q4 2023

The Series A Bust

How Redpanda is Taking Data Streaming Mainstream

Measuring the state of the venture "business cycle"

The Venture Activity Index

Valuations are 60% too high relative to the volume of venture funding

The Shadow Price of Venture Capital

It's Jay Powell's world. We're just living in it.

Don't Discount Interest Rates

Where did the explosive growth in venture activity come from?

We Don't Have Nearly Enough Startups

Private valuations substantially lag public tech valuations

Old Valuations Die Hard

Venture funding hasn't grown as much as you think

It's Valuations (Almost) All the Way Down

Revenue surprises permanently shift the trajectory of SaaS companies

Beats and Misses Are Forever

Layoffs Don't Tell the Whole Story

COVID put software companies on a permanently lower growth trajectory.

COVID Hurt Most Software Companies

Low monetization requires extraordinary traction, and vice versa.

Series A Rounds Are a Math Test

A frothy funding environment means more competition for talent. Funding gets easier; hiring gets harder.

Funding Simply Shifts the Bottleneck

Rules are meant to be broken, and the Rule of 40 is no exception

Breaking Apart the Rule of 40

Preferred equity exists in a constant state of quantum superposition. It's neither equity nor debt, until it is.

Schrodinger's Balance Sheet: When Equity Becomes a Liability

ACV isn't as useful a concept as people think. We need a different SaaS monetization metric.

Introducing a New and Improved SaaS Metric: Weighted ACV

Companies don't catch up to their valuations; their valuations catch up to them.

Companies Rarely Grow Into Their Valuations

Rather than ship data to code, which is expensive and latency-prone, why not ship code to the data?

WebAssembly-ing the Pieces: Vectorized’s Data Policy Engine

In startup land, we talk way too much about relative growth. We'd do better to ground our thinking in absolute growth.

You Can't Eat Relative Growth

The super-rich earn more on their investments than the rest of us. 

Something nefarious, or something else?

Do Wealthy Investors Have an Edge?

The burden of scientific knowledge and managerial complexity is crushing our best and brightest.

PhDs Aren't Starting Companies Like They Used To

Why you shouldn’t filter for social media following or prior experience

Awesome Developer Advocates Are Hiding in Plain Sight

Quantifying the billion dollar impact of developer inefficiency

Leaving Software on the Table

The Developer Productivity Manifesto — Leaving Software on the Table

The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 3 — Leaving Software on the Table

Adding more cooks to the kitchen rarely helps

More (Developers) Isn’t Always More

The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 2 — More (Developers) Isn’t Always More

Developer productivity is falling. But it doesn't have to. The solution? The Developer Productivity Flywheel

The Developer Productivity Flywheel

The Developer Productivity Manifesto — The Flywheel

The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 1 — The Flywheel

The biggest challenges facing developer productivity startups today

Four Challenges Facing Developer Productivity Startups

Robinhood traders get fleeced not by HFTs front-running milliseconds before their order hits but by other retail investors, days earlier.

Robinhood Traders are Last to the Party

Why Vectorized's focus on developer experience will unlock real-time streaming for the great majority of developers

Why Developers Love Redpanda

Magic number is a bad metric. Sales and marketing drives much less revenue than the not-so-magical number implies

There's Nothing Magical About the SaaS Magic Number

The longer you search for product-market fit, the less likely you will find it.

Product-Market Fit is Lindy

Large Transformer trained on large datasets outperform CNN-based architectures and achieve state of the art results on image recognition tasks

(Paper Explained) An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition

Research

An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition (Paper Explained)

Transformer model pre-trained on document retrieval and reconstruction performs well on both fine-tuned and zero-shot downstream tasks

Pre-training via Paraphrasing (Paper Explained)

What's top of mind for developer productivity leaders

Top Three Strategic Priorities of Developer Productivity Startups

VCs are picky, not because they have so many options but because they have so few.

Why Don't VCs Index Invest?

You might think the value of a college degree has been increasing. You would be wrong.

The Value of College May Be Negative for the COVID Generation

Do college-educated developers earn more? Yes, but not much.

Do College Degrees Matter for Software Engineers? Maybe

Pandemiconomics: Viral Volatility

When to raise capital, what to expect from VCs, and the "new normal"

Byron Deeter and Jason Lemkin on the State of VC and the Cloud

Working remote even just a few days per month leads to higher pay

Remote Software Developers Earn 22% More Than Non-Remote Developers

Progress on narrowing pay gaps among software developers

How Age, Race, and Gender Affect Software Engineering Pay

Who will be the highest-earning software developers of 2020?

The Highest-Paid Software Engineers: 2020 Edition

How Uber and Lyft Dominated Ridesharing By Seeing Red Where Others Saw Blue

Venture capital is changing — for the better

Pattern Matching is Dead. Long Live People Matching

Why SaaS revenue retention is a double-edge sword

High Retention = High Volatility

Waitlists, registered users, and other cumulative measures better measure the size of your pride than the size of your business

Waitlists are a Vanity Metric

Why your doctor understands customer retention better than you do

How to Conquer Cohort Analysis With a Powerful Clinical Research Tool

Why survival trumps "success", and what to do about it

Entrepreneur's Ruin, or How Not to Go Bust

Why some developers make so much more than others

Meet Dev, the Highest-Paid Software Developer in America

What I learned about developer pay from analyzing the earnings of 11,037 software engineers

A framework for developing technical proficiency in today's software development environment

The Growth-Share Matrix of Software Development

Use this framework to pick your next programming language

How to decide which programming language to learn next

Compound interest, or growth, is one of the, if not the most, powerful and impactful forces in nature.

You Don't Understand Compound Growth

Einstein once (supposedly) said: Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe Of compound interest, Warren Buffet proclaims: Over time it accomplishes extraordinary things Compound interest, or growth, is one of the, if not the most

Hi, I'm Nnamdi

I'm a coder, economist, and venture investor.

Founders

Developers

Investors

Featured Essays

Seed Valuations Aren’t Valuations

The Dark Matter of Software Valuations

Why We Will Never Have Enough Software Developers

Enterprise Software Monetization is Fat-Tailed

Six Trends Shaping Developer Productivity

Latest Essays

Seed Valuations Aren’t Valuations

AI Benchmarking Is Broken

The Venture Activity Index – Q4 2023

The Series A Bust

How Redpanda is Taking Data Streaming Mainstream