Coté

Earlier this month I did a webinar with Nick at 451. He does a great job summarizing all the digital hoopla going around and I finish up with, predictably, why and how Pivotal can help out there, along with a few customer examples. Check it out!

The San Francisco-headquartered business revealed it pulled in $187.7m last year, up 170 per cent from its $110.3m in revenue in 2015. Gross profits were just over $138m from $78m, and net losses decreased to a piddling $49.6m, down from $65.4m the year before. Another take from Barb Darrow, inc.: Mulesoft has raised $1.5 billion in venture funding from such backers as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad, and New Enterprise Associates.

Less than 5% of white men surveyed said they considered a lack of diversity a top problem. Three-out-of-four respondents were unaware of any initiatives to make their companies or portfolios more diverse. And 40% of male respondents were sick of the media going on and on about it. Meanwhile, in political land: the more privileged you are, the less that oppression personally affects you, the less urgency you perhaps have to get involved in the fight.

At first, you’re like, “oh, another piece where someone makes fun of us nerds and misunderstands our damagingly sarcastic way of saying everything that belies the privilege we all live under.” Then you’re like, “oh, this is actually a good piece.” E.g.: Human rights work attempts to prevent the abusive deployment of power against those who have little of it. While technology might disrupt some power structures, it might also reinforce them, and it is rarely designed to empower the most vulnerable populations.

From Snap’s S-1, via Ben: In a world where anyone can distribute products instantly and provide them for free, the best way to compete is by innovating to create the most engaging products. That’s because it’s difficult to use distribution or cost as a competitive advantage—new software is available to users immediately, and for free. We believe this means that our industry favors companies that innovate, because people will use their products.

It’s a sore point for many shoppers, who are ready and eager to spend more on designer clothes if only they were available: 78% of respondents in a recent survey of plus-size shoppers said that they’d be willing to spend more money if designers offered more options, and 80% said they’d likely purchase an item from their favorite designer if that designer made plus sizes. File under “if anything, more money.

Today, nearly 45 percent of trading is done electronically, according to Coalition, a U.K. firm that tracks the industry. Pay: Average compensation for staff in sales, trading, and research at the 12 largest global investment banks, of which Goldman is one, is $500,000 in salary and bonus, according to Coalition. Seventy-five percent of Wall Street compensation goes to these highly paid “front end” employees, says Amrit Shahani, head of research at Coalition.

“In the drone industry, it seems counterintuitive, but we actually want regulation. And not having regulations is putting a halt to the growth of this industry,” says West. As ever: don’t make blanket assumptions about complex systems, here: all the regulations put in place by the federal government. Link

Some intersting history of how Facebook grew users. Of course, this the case study is for a free service, that focuses on a high volume of users. I.e.: not an enterprise sales business that charges $3m+ per user-cum-customers. Contextualizing aside, there’s some good product thinking: Better know what your product is good for: Knowing true core product value allows you to design the experiments necessary so that you can really isolate cause and effect.

Worldwide revenues for information technology (IT) products and services are forecast to reach nearly $2.4 trillion in 2017, an increase of 3.5% over 2016. In a newly published update to the Worldwide Semiannual IT Spending Guide: Industry and Company Size , International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that global IT spending will grow to nearly $2.65 trillion in 2020. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.3% for the 2015-2020 forecast period.