Company Stories
Which restaurant did NVIDIA start at?
Denny's
Cloud-hosted business models are a great way to monetize open source. This has been a huge tailwind for MongoDB. Their Atlas product accounted for 5% of revenue at IPO, what percentage of revenue does it account for now?
~75%
Which people in enterprise software left the incumbent in a given market to start a company that disrupted said incumbent?
Potential Answers:
Aneel Bhusri / Dave Duffield leaving Peoplesoft to start Workday
Nir Zuk leaving Check Point to start Palo Alto Networks
George Kurtz leaving McAfee to start Crowdstrike
Jyoti Bansal and Lew Cirne both leaving Wiley; Jyoti starting AppD, Lew starting New Relic
Who is famous for decoupling storage and compute?
Snowflake
Who acquired VMWare in 2003? Who did this company sell to in 2015?
Which book inspired Satya Nadella to reinvent the Microsoft culture?
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Fast revenue growth is not a new thing. Which company was started in 1999 and went from $5M → $22M → $51M → $100M in the ensuing years?
Salesforce
Which person in the Valley has been CRO of 5 companies?
John McMahon (BladeLogic, PTC, Geo-Tel, Ariba, BMC)
Out of which company did PyTorch, React, and GraphQL emerge?
Meta
Salesforce has grown tremendously through M&A in recent years. What are 5 acquisitions Salesforce has made?
Potential Answers: Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, Quip, Demandware, Heroku, ExactTarget
Which company famously migrated off AWS in the mid-2010s and was able to push margins from 40% to 80% because of this?
Dropbox
Building a durable software infrastructure business can take time. How long did Databricks take to get to their first $1M in ARR?
3 years
Which enterprise software founders met at MIT Sloan while in business school?
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot met at MIT Sloan School of Management
It takes a long time for technology to get commercialized. There was a gap between when IBM invented the relational database and Oracle emerged to commercialize it - how long was this gap?
7 years. IBM invented the relational database in 1970, Oracle was founded in 1977.
How many years did Juniper Networks take to go public?
3 years (founded '96, IPO '99)
The right time to build a sales team is different for each company, often based on business model and product adoption curve. Which Australian prosumer software company waited until they hit $500M in ARR to build a sales team?
Canva
Out of the following companies, which one had the lowest ACV at IPO time?
- Snowflake
- Confluent
- Datadog
- Hashicorp
Datadog
While not referred to in the same breath as PayPal, a number of successful people have left Sun Microsystems to make a big impact in the tech world. Who are three members of the “Sun Mafia” and what did they do post-Sun?
Options include:
Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO)
Eric Schmidt (was Google CEO)
Carol Bartz (became CEO of Autodesk and Yahoo)
Bill Coleman (founded BEA Systems + was CEO of Veritas)
Where was Javascript invented?
Who was the one venture investor in Microsoft? BONUS: what was the revenue multiple on this round
TVI (Technology Venture Investors) was the only venture investor in Microsoft. They invested in the company in 1981 - the round was $1M investment at a $20M post - when the company was doing $17M in revenue. 1.18x multiple
Which company had Lyft, Shopify, Doordash, Instacart, and Foursquare as early customers?
Stripe
What was Workday's ARR when they went public in 2012?
$134M
Sridhar Ramaswamy from Snowflake, Phil Fernandez from Marketo, and Craig Weissman (Salesforce CTO) all worked together at which company?
E.piphany
The LAMP infrastructure stack was popularized by many of the frontier Web companies in the early 2000s. What does this acronym stand for, and what stack did it replace?
LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Php (ran on commodity hardware)
Replaced an OG stack of: Sun Sparc servers, Solaris OS, Oracle database
Which company almost bought Apple for $4B in 1996?
Sun Microsystems