Keep pulling the thread on Villi Iltchev.
In 2009, Salesforce was larger than the entire SaaS ecosystem combined.
Marc Benioff was consistently willing to sell Salesforce, but his asking price was always based on the company's projected value in the following year, which deterred potential acquirers.
A few months after its Series B, GitLab inadvertently deleted customer production data due to a database failure.
In response to a major database failure, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij broadcasted the company's recovery process live on YouTube, a move that ultimately built significant customer trust.
Under CEO Mark Hurd, HP gutted its R&D organization, including HP Labs, in favor of short-term cost-cutting, which hindered its ability to compete with rising cloud services.
The adoption of the SaaS model enormously expanded the total addressable market for software, making it accessible to small businesses, not just large enterprises.
The market for developer tools expanded dramatically because competition across all industries, from insurance to industrial equipment, shifted to the software layer.
Villi Iltchev asserts that seed-dedicated funds are 10 to 100 times more likely than multi-stage firms to provide follow-on support and bridge financing to a portfolio company that is struggling.
San Francisco's city budget is approximately $12 billion for a population of 800,000 people.
In 2009, HP was one of the largest companies in the world, with approximately $100 billion in revenue.
Under CEO Mark Hurd, HP gutted its R&D organization, including HP Labs, in a short-sighted focus on cost-cutting.
HP's leadership rejected a strategy to offer compute and storage as a service due to fears it would cannibalize the existing hardware business.