Battle lines in the venture market today have been drawn over how the product — money — is wrapped. Partners differentiate on brand and expertise; Investors differentiate on speed. There are funds full of smart people who can help directly with recruiting, sales strategies, and other sensitive issues. And there are funds that can write you a $100 million check with favorable terms by the end of the week. Thanks to the rapid expansion of fund sizes and crossover investors in recent years, 2021’s market reality made valuations of 200x or 400x revenue multiples acceptable. A frequent collaborator and co-investor, Peter Wagner at Wing, recently published an excellent market analysis called the Cannonball Effect that sheds light on the pace of recent dealmaking.

Is one type of money ‘better’ than the other for a founder? Yes and no.

There shouldn’t be a stigma asking for or needing advice; the best writers need editors, the world’s top athletes all depend on an army of coaches & therapists — both mental and physical. No startup founder I know has ever claimed a straight path to success, and I believe founders and management teams benefit from the same type of expertise if they want to maximize their chances of success. Most will benefit from trusted advisors, the sounding board partners in the proverbial board room

This topic reminded me of a TED Talk from Atul Gawande, a surgeon who at the peak of his game decided to engage a performance coach, paying someone to observe him working in the operating room. While his surgeries were going remarkably well, he realized his skills in the OR had stopped improving, so as an experiment he brought a former professor in to observe a surgery and offer his thoughts. Gawande’s operation went perfectly. He felt flawless, but the professor showed him a full page of notes describing small things that Gawande should have done differently, little mistakes that he was completely oblivious of at the moment.

The Partner mindset, a time for counsel

When Loudcloud (later renamed to Opsware) raised its Series A, we specifically sought out Andy Rachleff of Benchmark for his expertise and earned insights from being an early backer of Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX). Rachleff subsequently led the $68 million Series A and joined Loudcloud’s Board. By bringing Rachleff on as our partner, he brought experience from navigating hypergrowth combined with investing in high dollar infrastructure that gave our nascent team credibility to attract outsized capital. His foresight enabled us to hire and plan ahead of our growth — perhaps too aggressively, but that’s another story.

At Vertex Ventures we like to get involved early, helping founders with the fundamentals and guiding them on what they need to do: Make the next 20 critical hires. Tweak your go-to-market strategy. Refine the product. Match-make key customer and partner introductions. We’ve been in the shoes of startup founders, and we use the company-building skills we’ve learned in the trenches to help founders and executives find their footing as they build, refine, and rebuild their businesses. A company with its first 50 to 100 employees is where a terrific Partner really matters. Our guidance isn’t a one-time event, it’s a constant force multiplier for the founders and reflects ​​our take on trends happening in the industry.

At this point, we, as early-stage investors and operators, get a Sunday night call again: The CEO is dealing with two executives fighting. Revenue isn’t as easy to generate as they thought it would be. A key customer is threatening to churn. The company is running into barriers, and they want to brainstorm. The Partner comes back into focus. We see it again and again, usually around the time a company hits the 200-employee mark, and again around 800 employees.

The Investor mindset, an undeniable lure of fast money

Of course, you can’t really blame startup founders for wanting fast money. I’m the biggest fan of sharing a vision and working closely with management teams to make that vision a reality, but who doesn’t like a war chest? Money fuels brand, extends time to experiment, and creates a perception of stability and reduced risk for job candidates.

Taking hundreds of employees to thousands and beyond requires cash, but it doesn’t require the same level of day-to-day guidance that is needed early on. It’s at this point where fast money can be crucial. You can invest responsibly up until this point, but once your business is growing you want to grow as fast as possible. I was at Facebook in 2009 when DST invested $200M at a $10B valuation. Initial sentiment was negative; Why did the company raise a down round? (Microsoft had previously invested at $15B in 2007)? Zuckerberg’s logic was sound: He had quickly increased cash on the balance sheet which provided the business the cushion it needed to operate, take risks and invest in product development.

Even when founders have had past success, it’s impossible to know everything. Startups are prototypes. The team, market, and world are constantly evolving. Having a trusted partner in the passenger seat helps navigate countless hidden dangers. The best founders in my mind are the ones that are self-aware enough to know they don’t know everything, but they do know how to leverage coaches. As a former founder myself, I know winning requires more than betting on oneself; it’s crucial to collect diverse input from your team, get outside perspective, and build a tapestry of data upon which to grow.

The meaning of a true partner

For almost every startup, there’s an ebb and flow between the values that Partners and Investors bring as the business matures and its requirements change. Unfortunately, what we often see is founders gravitating toward that no-strings-attached-fast money, regardless of where the business stands. Why wait for a Partner when you can have the fast money — or a better offer — today, for the same dilution? After all, investors are all the same when you get down to it, right?

It’s the first time we’ve seen this pace of deal-making at such young companies, but some have understood the value of both. The fundamental takeaway is that it’s important to hire your investors and put them to work just as you would your own team, getting their commitment of time and energy, not just capital. When you have smart people around you — just like Gawande in the operating room — everyone benefits.

Special thanks to Edith Harbaugh (Founder & CEO, LaunchDarkly) and Sam Lambert (CEO, PlanetScale) for their input on this topic.

When we initially invested, the company was 6 people and had a vision for being a secure financial transaction proxy. Over the subsequent four years, the company has grown to over 180 employees, has raised two financing rounds totaling $45 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs Growth, Visa, and other investors, and accrued several hundreds of customers in pursuit of becoming the global leader in security and privacy infrastructure for the Internet.

VGS operates at the intersection of two high-growth, multi-billion dollar markets: data security and compliance. Importantly, most modern regulations focus on the protection of sensitive data or personally identifiable information (PII). Large enterprises typically spend many months and millions of dollars to achieve and maintain compliance — this only represents the initial opportunity for VGS. We believe VGS is uniquely positioned with the only Zero Data™ product, offering enterprises the ability to transact with sensitive data without the liability of securing it.

VGS provides a secure data vault for fintech and enterprise customers to store their sensitive data, alleviating the need to meet regulatory compliance requirements. By encrypting and tokenizing sensitive data, VGS not only eliminates the risk associated with data, the service increases its utility by activating and presenting it on a network. Some of the key benefits are:

• Gross simplification of maintaining a variety of regulations, which increases the pace of innovation
• Reduction in PCI DSS compliance scope
• End-to-end data security
• API-first access to enable developers to pilot and implement quickly

According to a 2020 report from Juniper Research, annual revenues from tokenized payments — where account details are replaced with data useless to fraudsters — will exceed $40 billion by 2024, growing from an estimated $17 billion in 2019. Of this, over $30 billion will be through e-commerce transactions. As core banking and payments infrastructure are modernized, the importance of tokenization will become embedded to create new modes of finance. This creates a massive business opportunity for an independent network that bridges the old world with the new and makes VGS a sticky horizontal platform.

We earned the right to lead the $60m Series C financing by being engaged partners since our initial investment four years ago. Being engaged doesn’t just mean rote functions like sourcing an occasional executive candidate, to us, being engaged is defined by being available for countless weekend phone calls, incessantly questioning whether it’s “good enough” and being a trusted sounding board for the confidence and doubt that fill a founder’s mind.

As we keep our portfolio intentionally small, we have a vested interest in our portfolio founders’ success. VGS has been on a thoughtful growth trajectory since the beginning, and because the company and founders have continually exceeded all expectations, we are doubling-down on our investment in them.

The founders, Mahmoud Abdelkader (CEO) and Marshall Jones (CTO), saw a tremendous market opportunity before it was obvious and have adeptly navigated building a complex, scalable product, maturing as leaders, and setting a high standard for themselves and the entire team.

We’ve been active advisors and partners alongside Mahmoud and Marshall, and we are thrilled to continue supporting them and the team at VGS for many more to come.

Extending our relationship with VGS was originally published in Vertex Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today I am excited to share the news of Vertex US’s partnership with OpsLevel’s founders John Laban and Ken Rose. I could wax poetic about John Laban and Ken Rose’s engineering prowess from experiences building innovative products at DevOps GOATs PagerDuty, Amazon, and Shopify. Instead, I’d like to focus on what I believe is one of the biggest problems lurking below the surface in every major engineering team.

Service Ownership.

How does an organization define who “owns” a service? When a new engineer joins, how will she figure out what components to use, how to operate them, and who to go to with questions? When it’s time to deprecate a component, how is that shared and transitioned to a new service? When rolling out a new tool or a new practice — like vulnerability scanning — how do you get this requirement in front of every team and incorporated into every service? Often these questions are the provenance of the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), a position far more scarce than even a Data Scientist.

SREs and infrastructure teams often juggle 5+ monitoring systems, 3+ logging systems, and 20+ third-party vendors throwing their own data into the mix. The sprawl of tooling creates issues that flow downstream, making critical operations like finding the error in a misconfigured server or bug in CI/CD pipeline far more difficult. I saw these problems first hand when I led Facebook’s infrastructure team. As we grew from 100 to 1000+ engineers, we often found ourselves with multiple tools (and teams) building overlapping solutions. In the early years, our mantra was “Move Fast and Break Things,” which evolved to a less catchy “Move Fast with Stable Infra.” Defining service ownership was a key tenant of changing how our organization worked. As businesses migrate to the cloud they have an opportunity to improve their engineering throughput, imbue service ownership, and fundamentally improve site reliability!

This spring my colleagues Sandeep Bhadra, Madison Friedman, and I interviewed dozens of practitioners, triangulating market feedback and helping webmonsters cope with the reality of their convolutedness. Of the dozens of companies we spoke with, only two had not yet started their journey to microservices, and both were actively considering it. Large companies with established monoliths are keen to move to microservices, but costs are high, and the transition can take years. Madison summarized our research in Taming Microservice Monsters.

OpsLevel wants to make the Internet better by helping companies build more reliable and secure software. They’re building a Service Ownership Platform — starting with a Microservice Catalog — to make it easier for engineering teams to own and operate software in production. As enterprises reconstruct monolithic applications to cloud-based microservices, the idea of service ownership and wiring up applications in a durable, scalable fashion becomes massively complex. OpsLevel’s first product is akin to service scorecards, making it easy for engineers to track all the information about applications and services inside their organization — what it does, who owns it, and how to operate it.

With 1 to 10 engineers and 10 to 100 services this may not be a big deal. At scale, managing hundreds to thousands of services across dozens of teams is hard.

Microservice architectures increase the number of dependencies in systems. The concerns (CI/CD, version control, error tracking, failover, authorization, etc.) of SRE, DevOps, and Security teams then multiply, and if ignored, these concerns lead to downtime, lost data, and security gaps. OpsLevel’s catalog is the first, foundational move to eliminating questions about Service Ownership. Standardizing on a format for describing services and their properties places it at the heart of all other DevOps tools, meaning engineers don’t have to worry about keeping them updated or constantly rewiring when components are upgraded.

Apex tech giants like Atlassian, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Slack, Uber, and at least a dozen others resorted to building homegrown microservice catalogs because there was nothing good enough to buy. OpsLevel brings the capabilities of the biggest, baddest internet giants directly to modern enterprise development teams.

Ultimately we want to solve an even more substantial problem: eliminating downtime. Downtime can be caused by an innumerable number of factors. However, it’s easy to understand the outcome of downtime: lost business, lost trust, and worse still, lost customers. We are thrilled to partner with OpsLevel’s founders John and Ken, and look forward to supporting them in building an enduring company.

Bringing Sexy Back to SRE was originally published in Vertex Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we continue to navigate how the world has changed, companies around the world are making decisions about how the workplace must change, too. We held a virtual breakfast with People leaders from Earnin, Evisort, HashiCorp, LaunchDarkly, Tulip, Very Good Security, Vir Bio, and more, to learn about how their companies are adapting to Covid-19’s impact on the way people work and what that means for the future of work. Here’s a look into how these leaders are moving forward.

No Hard Return Date

Although many leaders shared estimated return dates ranging from winter to summer 2021 to help employees plan ahead, they realize such dates are fluid targets. Nearly half of the leaders who attended are waiting until a vaccine is developed before setting a concrete return date, and just as many admit that they don’t know when they’ll return. Most will allow employees to come back voluntarily, and others plan to have specific teams in-office at different times. Some have also decided to continue with fully remote teams, with others planning for hybrid options.

Putting Wellness First

Finding ways to support employees through this unprecedented time is top of mind. Nearly all of the represented companies transitioned to offer flexible hours and most reimbursed employees for money spent establishing a home office. Employees working from home face new factors that may affect their ability to work well, like caregiving, parenting, or their mental health. The biased impact of remote work on women with children at home is an issue that many are still working to resolve. While flexible hours help address some of the unique stresses working women face, some companies have also opted to reimburse childcare expenses. The weight of isolation and uncertainty undoubtedly affects most people today. Several companies added mental health apps like Headspace or Ginger to their wellness benefits.

Executives are also thinking of ways to facilitate a sense of community. Creating a space where employees can share their work-from-home experience and tips for self-care and give feedback on what would improve their day-to-day is helpful for teammates and company leaders alike. Through such a tool, one company discovered that remote employees felt less confident taking time off. Leadership responded by creating a company-wide three-day weekend every month.

Future of Performance Reviews

While most attendees have continued performance reviews this year, many expressed a need for the tradition to shift. Rather than finding a metric to label or define a team member’s work, many leaders are adopting a coaching approach. A review should be a vehicle for a conversation centered on an employee’s career, continued growth, and goals, and not tied to compensation.

Systems for Returning to the Office

Whenever it happens, getting back to a safe, in-office setting will require new processes. Many leaders expect temperature checks, seating spaced 6 ft. apart, limited capacity in conference rooms, and masks to be the new normal. Simultaneously, others may also require employees to report on which type of transportation they use and confirm they’re not currently experiencing symptoms. In locations where office work has resumed (e.g. Boston, Tel Aviv), People leaders cited the office being used for collaboration and purposeful meetings, rather than an emphasis on individual work.

We hope these perspectives provide value for startups, founders, and leaders as you’re trying to navigate the new future of work.

Is your company creating a unique path for how to move forward? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Getting Back to it: How Top HR LeadersAre Planning For the Future of Work was originally published in Vertex Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Vertex Ventures US is an upstart venture capital team in a world filled with staid, stalwart funds. We enjoy creating and investing in enterprising founders challenging big markets through software and data to take advantage of the shift from human speed to machine speed business.

Vertex Ventures US is recruiting a Head of Marketing Communications to lead marketing communications, branding, and content for the firm as the firm’s story-teller in chief. This person will also work with Vertex US’s portfolio companies to advise them on their public relations and external communications strategies. The core activities include:

• Design the external communications strategy and execute a regular cadence of newsletters and media sourced with content from the firm’s partners, collaborators, and portfolio companies.
• Build and leverage existing relationships with industry journalists and facilitate regular press opportunities.
• Organize branded thought-leadership events covering industry topics relevant to the firm’s investment thesis.
• Define an editorial calendar and collaborate with the partners to develop ideas, topics to focus on, and outward-facing brand.
• Partner with our portfolio companies to help them develop communications strategies, understand the strategic benefit of external communications, and execute major announcements.
• Craft key messages and prepare talking points for the investing team in advance of speaking engagements with the media and at industry events. Staff interviews and drive follow-up, action items, feedback, notes as needed.

Primary Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience with marketing, branding, and PR activities
• A deep network of relationships with technology and software industry journalists
• A passion for startups creating technology that makes businesses run efficiently
• Curiosity for venture capital’s idiosyncrasies

The Head of Marketing Communications will be a critically important member of the Vertex US team. If this sounds like you or someone you know, please get in touch at www.vertexventures.com

We cannot stand by in the face of clear injustice. Black Lives Matter.

These are not truths that we are just realizing today. I call upon my fellow venture investors to join me in pledging to do even more.

Please give until it hurts, and then give more. If you’ve already made donations, make them again. Match yourself. There are numerous great organizations. My favorites are the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Bail Project, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Center for Policing Equity and Code2040.

Money is not enough. We also need to pledge our time to make the technology industry more inclusive and help underrepresented groups gain access.

Commit to making 1 to 4 hours per week open for office hours to talk to anyone about technology, whether they’re an African American college student in Virginia or a person of color interested in IT.

The “warm intro” is famously the best way to meet a VC who might invest in your business or give you helpful advice. We have not done enough to connect ourselves with people who aren’t embedded in Silicon Valley. We need to hear the ideas they bring and fund the problems they are working to solve.

Regardless of how we got here, or how hard we say we are working to improve, we need to deliver results.

As a group, we’ve committed over $2.1m, and more than 145 hours per week for the next 12 months. (Updated 6/14/20)

Investors commit to join us.

Request a VC meeting at http://www.vcopendoor.com/

Committed Investors

Jonathan Heiliger, Vertex Ventures US
Insik Rhee, Vertex Ventures US
Mamoon Hamid, Kleiner Perkins
Ted Maidenberg, Tribe Capital
Ilya Fushman, Kleiner Perkins
Patrick Chung, Xfund
Aaref Hilaly, Wing
Ariel Tseitlin, Scale Venture Partners
Dayna Grayson, Construct Capital
Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer
Evan Moore, Khosla Ventures
Eric Vishria, Benchmark
Leo Polovets, Susa Ventures
Ann Miura-Ko, Floodgate
Peter Wagner, Wing
Ali Rosenthal, Leadout Capital
Ross Fubini, XYZ VC
Jade Lai, a16z
Bogomil Balkansky, Sequoia Capital
Andy McLoughlin, Uncork Capital
Mohammad Islam, Threshold
Deep Nishar, Softbank Vision Fund
Domenic Perri, Vertex Venture US
Gabriel Kra, Prelude Ventures
Karen Page, B Capital Group
Scott Raney, Redpoint
James Cham, Bloomberg Beta
Rohini Chakravarthy, NGP Capital
Jules Maltz, IVP
Timothy Chen, Essence VC
Bucky Moore, Kleiner Perkins
Chase Roberts, Vertex Ventures US
Cack Wilhelm, IVP
Ted Wang, Cowboy
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
Aaron Jacobson, NEA
Anya Schiess, Healthy Ventures
Lucas Swisher, Coatue
Amy Sun, Sequoia Capital
Ash Fontana, Zetta
Karan Mehandru, Trinity Ventures
Robin Vasan, Mango Capital
Monica Desai Weiss, Kleiner Perkins
Adam Nelson, FirstMark
Annie Case, Kleiner Perkins
John Komkov, Fathom
Kyle Lui, DCM Ventures
Patricia Wexler, Starlight Ventures
Vanessa Larco, NEA
Stephen Wemple, Spero Ventures
Cack Wilhelm, IVP
Nico Berardi, ANIMO Ventures
Antonio Osio, ANIMO Ventures
Astasia Myers, Redpoint Ventures
Jake Storm, IVP
Brian Frank, FTW Ventures
Kristina Simmons, Khosla Ventures
Darwin Ling, Good AI Capital
Jeffrey Rothschild, Angel Investor
Sam Shapiro, DFJ Growth
Jocelyn Goldfein, Zetta Venture Partners
Kevin Tu, DFJ Growth
Sangeen Zeb, Founders Circle Capital
Kleida Martiro, Glasswing Ventures
Andre Rocha, Glasswing Ventures
Meredith McPherron, Glasswing Ventures
Muzzammil (MZ) Zaveri, Gradient Ventures
Richard Bhamb, Temasek
Austin Arensberg, Okta Ventures
Pascal Unger, Darling Ventures
Chip Hazard, Flybridge & XFactor Ventures
Jesse Middleton, Flybridge Capital
Madeline Kolbe Saltzman, True Ventures
Haomiao Huang, Kleiner Perkins
Stephanie Choo, Portage Ventures
Miraj Sanghvi, DigiTx Partners
Ross Darwin, Owl Ventures
Rachel West, RevTech Ventures
Geri Kirilova, Laconia

In these past five years, we’ve partnered with founders bringing 3D printing to engineering and manufacturing and transforming how businesses communicate internally, approach data and network security, manage operations and bring new software services to market. With Fund II, we’ve already invested in nine companies (Tulip, LeaseLock, Coda, Ambidextrous, Hasura, Broker Buddha, Cyberhaven, Loris, and Evisort) tackling a new wave of salient opportunities, including data governance and privacy, productivity in the next decade, and optimizing industry 4.0.

Our journey thus far has not been perfect and we plan to ardently apply lessons learned from our first fund to our work in Fund II:

• Believing founder vision — We want to continue stretching our perception of what’s possible. Often incredible ideas hinge on a future that feels nearly inconceivable — at first. Exploring the frontier of data security with Very Good Security (VGS) showed us that the future wasn’t in security at all, but in the governance of data. Along with a lightning-fast ability to help businesses achieve a host of compliance certifications, VGS removes data and replaces it with aliases. Now, companies can opt to never handle sensitive information at all, removing the need to protect it, so their focus can remain on business growth.
• Moving faster when it’s a fit — Venture has sped up and we plan to move in stride. We first heard whispers of LaunchDarkly and its venerable founder and CEO, Edith Harbaugh, in mid-2015, but it took until the fall of 2016 to meet her. Her vision was that feature management would enable developers to ship more frequently and with higher confidence. LaunchDarkly was at 1 billion feature flags per day — today they serve over 1 TRILLION flags per day.
• Raising the talent bar above ourselves — A few years ago, Eva Khoo and Sandeep Bhadra joined the Vertex US team and have made a massive impact. Chase Roberts recently came on board and jumped in, originating our investment in Evisort which was announced in December. We also recently brought on Domenic Perri as a Partner who has taken on the helm of our Platform strategy, a key pillar in driving growth for our portfolio companies. We’ll continue to hire people who outshine and outpace us. Get in touch if that sounds like you.

We are aware that the advice we offer doesn’t scale. In order to provide our full focus to founders, we only make a few investments per year. In markets we are exposed to for the first time or are still studying, we make modest investments (typically $250–500k) to learn alongside the founders. We work hard to earn the right to invest beyond pro-rata in many of these companies. On the other end, in markets where we have unique expertise or have done considerable research, we seek large investments to generate the potential for outsize returns. We expect to follow-on into these large investments and work closely with founders through the arc of building their business.

With Fund II we’re especially interested in exploring investments in:

• The return of SRE — Site Reliability Engineers, promoted in the early 2000s by Google, were the gurus of tuning and maintaining application stability through hypergrowth. This gave way to the rise of developers taking over operations aka “DevOps.” With the rapidly rising complexity of enterprises simultaneously rebuilding applications using cloud native technologies (e.g. Kubernetes) and migrating to new platforms, we envision the SRE role returning in a new form to once again steward hypergrowth.
• Construction’s digital future and innovations that will improve how and where we live — specifically in construction and real estate. Large building projects typically take 20% longer than planned and are often up to 80% over budget, fueling the rising cost of construction. We believe deliberate uses of technology can improve construction’s efficiency, resulting in greater predictability, reduced costs, and fewer work related injuries.
• Productivity in the next decade — aka the end of dumb, repetitive work in services businesses (e.g. processing paperwork in financial services & insurance, repetitive and high-injury manufacturing work, healthcare services), and the changing nature of knowledge work.

While cash is essential fuel for growing startups, great ideas require far more than just capital to become successful businesses. Cash without mentorship, without the passing-on of lessons learned, isn’t worth much. History repeats itself when we’re not paying attention.

Inexperienced founders are bound to make some more than insignificant mistakes if they’re not mentored well. We have seen this over and over in every corner of tech.

Before starting Vertex US, we made over 40 angel investments generating 43x aggregate returns, 15 of said investments returned >10x. The high hit rate is a testament to our 20+ years of experience building and scaling technology that has impacted billions of people. Through the fullness of time, we aim to continue our outsized investment performance by sticking to what we know, and trusting founders to teach us what’s next.

With Fund II, we will continue to seek out proscriptive founders who spark an idea, and help them manifest it into an enduring enterprise that successfully fulfills customers’ wants and needs.

Vertex US Fund II: Leveling Up was originally published in Vertex Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What VGS has created is significant for a hundred reasons. One of those reasons is particularly notable as we (society) continue through what I will gently call privacy negotiations. Businesses want the right to operate with data freely, and consumers want to use the internet without compromising their privacy. There is a lot of legislation going into place to try and protect the consumer when the fact remains that businesses need to operate with sensitive data.

VGS is the first company to make sensitive data operational without compromising consumer privacy.

When someone asks you for a key, it is not because they need that key, they need the function the key enables. When a company asks you for your data, it does not really need your personal information; the company needs the ability to ship you a package, differentiate you from another customer, check your credit score, or process your payment. For the company, storing all of this sensitive data needlessly increases the complexity of their systems.

Consider this nuance when you are making a request for information or when you are fighting vigilantly for your privacy. Let’s build smarter.

We dug in as we do with every company we work with. Executive coaching, organizational insights, investor relations, market perspective, technology architecture, snacks on snacks on snacks, and capital — we invested in all the ways proper VCs should. They focused on prioritizing product features, hiring the best team and networking with customers.

“SpaceIQ’s incredible team and technology will help us build on our existing enterprise stack of workplace experience software and insights, and allow us to provide companies with workplace real estate management and optimization, including move management, space stacking, and richer portfolio analytics,” Shiva Rajaraman, WeWork’s chief technology officer.

It’s been amazing to see SpaceIQ grow from a group of talented friends sharing our office space to a big, enterprise-changing reality. We are honored to have been on this journey with them and excited to see what they’ll bring to WeWork. Read more in their announcement.

If you’ve got an idea or an idea of an idea that solves a big problem, get in touch.

We learned through conversations with many F500 companies that current firewalls weren’t sufficient protection against content-based attacks, particularly for encrypted traffic (e.g., SSL). Despite some cloud vendors offering point-solutions, there were no platforms that (1) met performance requirements, (2) were easily managed, and (3) could span local networks and multi-cloud environments. CISOs repeatedly pointed out performance and orchestration as key friction points slowing down cloud deployments.

Heretofore, enterprises adopting the public cloud had no choice but to implement brittle security technology that (1) involved stitching together disparate vendors, (2) interacting with multiple management systems, and (3) suffered from unpredictable and high latency routing through various hardware and software components. Despite this friction, a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users, showed 81 percent of respondents are working with two or more cloud providers. As organizations shift and launch new applications in the cloud, enterprise security teams face an exponentially increasing surface area to control and protect.

The oft-quoted dichotomy of good security is that adequate protection is a bottleneck to innovation. In reality, good security and innovation go hand-in-hand, which is something the team at Valtix have experienced first-hand and why we at Vertex Ventures US have partnered with them.

I met Vishal Jain, the CEO and co-founder of Valtix, in late 2017 through a mutual friend (whom I deeply respect as a brilliant technologist). He introduced us with the line, “I’ve known Vishal for nearly 20 years, he is one of the best engineers and technologists I know.” It was immediately clear that Vishal would think differently — he learned how to steadfastly execute, engage enterprise customers, and build truly scalable products as an engineering leader at Andiamo, Nuova, and Insieme (three successful Cisco spin-ins). A few days later, I met the Valtix co-founders, Vijay Chander, and Praveen Patnala, who cemented my belief that the Valtix team identified a substantial market gap and were uniquely qualified to build a novel product. All three co-founders are exceptional engineers, having created hardware, firmware, and cloud security products in their past roles — this is an unusual feat in a team nucleus.

Herein lies the opportunity for Valtix, an inline security service that functions at the pace of apps. Valtix squeezes cloud infrastructure for performance, using advanced computing to increase throughput, enhance security, and reduce latency — a centralized multi-cloud controller supports deployments for AWS and Azure (with GCP coming later this year). The firewall service is architected with built-in auto-scaling, app-aware security policies, and a single-pass pipeline for TLS, deep packet inspection (DPI), IPS, advanced WAF, and more. High performance typically comes at a high cost, Valtix prices the service on a pay-as-you-go basis, just like cloud consumption.

It has only been 15 months since we initially partnered with Vishal, Vijay, and Praveen. In that time, the team created a nouveau cloud firewall that’s already used by well-known brands. They’ve grown to 16 people, and are looking to grow a lot more! Check out the careers page if you’re hungry for packet processing involving multi-processor architectures, or enjoy turning complicated security technology into beautifully simple solutions.

Congratulations to the Valtix team on their successes thus far. We are thrilled to continue partnering with Vishal, Vijay, and Praveen, and can’t wait for what they do next!

Ushering In The Future Of Cloud Network Security With Valtix was originally published in Vertex Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.