Top 10 Posts of 2022

These are the top 10 posts by engagement for 2022.

Reflecting on them, I see they clustered on web3 & the fundraising market, both of which experienced a tumultuous year. Selling in the pandemic & post-pandemic also drew a lot of interest.

I’m grateful to everyone who read them, commented, debated, & shared them.

1. The Web 3 Marketing Stack: The Next Big Wave in Crypto. I wrote about my thesis that web3 technologies will underpin both a fundamental change in web2 ads by replacing the cookie with an NFT & the tools web3 startups will need to pay for growth during the current winter.
2. The State of Web3 in 2022 through Data. Delivered at DuneCon, this presentation provides an aerial view of the state of web3. About 2.5m active users, about 5k developers committing code, & 70-90% drops in activity from the beginning of the year.
3. Figma’s 50x ARR Multiple & What it Means for Startup Fundraising. Adobe’s acquisition of Figma at the highest ARR multiple ever for a company-at-scale stunned the market that was reeling from the macroeconomic shock.
4. Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy?Borne from a series of Office Hours with Lee Kirkpatrick & Bill Binch, this post advocates for quicker sales cycles with smaller ACVs to drive more predictability & superior NDR. Also, this strategy minimizes?pipeline supply shocks.
5. Growth is No Longer the Best Predictor of a Software Company’s Value. After a twelve-year long bull run, investors no longer value growth at-any-cost. Efficiency matters just a bit more in the public markets. A watershed change that cascaded into the private markets that has led to a significant?bid/ask spread between founders & investors.
6. 9 Predictions for Data in 2023?Delivered at?Monte Carlo’s IMPACT summit, I touched on the evolution of the decade of data. More than half of analytics workloads reside in the cloud in ten years.
7. Grey Skies in Cloud Earnings?I charted the earnings reports of the three largest cloud infrastructure companies as an index of software buying behavior. Growth rates for these behemoths have fallen in half from 44% on average to 22% in two quarters, underscoring the lengthening sales cycles of enterprise software.
8. Fundraising 2022 Where We Are & Where We’re Going?From Traction in Vancouver, these slides demonstrated the bid/ask spread between VCs & founders. Investors saw the public markets fall 70% & surveyed founders replied they expected a 10% decline in valuations. Where those two meet will determine the environment for 2023.
9. Imagine You’re a Venture Capitalist. This posts questions how to manage a venture fund: whether to double down on companies during a changing valuation environment.
10. $112m of Market Cap per Engineer. I calculated the total value creation in web3 & divided by the active number of developers to estimate this statistic. The figure has fallen by 80% or so since I wrote it. Regardless, I still believe in the potential of web3 technologies.