283. The Future of Cloud, Business Model Transitions from Subscription to Consumption, and The Shift from Technology-first to End-User Value (Dharmesh Thakker)

Dharmesh Thakker of Battery Ventures joins Nick to discuss The Future of Cloud, Business Model Transitions from Subscription to Consumption, and The Shift from Technology-first to End-User Value. In this episode, we cover: Walk us through your background and path to VC. What’s the thesis at Battery? Any significant differences in types of products being built across geographies? How does Battery segment the cloud infrastructure market and find opportunity areas in the subsegments of most interest? To what extent do legacy IT and legacy software impede the rate at which we can progress with new toolsets and new infrastructure? Is there more appetite for modern solutions, just due to demographics? When ROI is opaque, how do you measure time to value and how might time to value might be different for different decision-makers within the organization? What does top-down enterprise selling moving to bottom-up user and influencer adoption mean to ROI of significant scale implementation to new infrastructure? What sorts of businesses lend themselves well to product-led growth? You’ve said that managing churn and focusing on customer success is more important now more than ever. In what ways have you observed leading tech companies apply innovative approaches to customer success (expansion and retention)? Should Startups price on a consumption basis early on? Do you believe should the customer success leader report up through the CRL? What are your thoughts on open source and licensing models? There are impassioned, differing viewpoints on this with some worried about the integrity of open source while others cast blame on large tech companies, like Amazon, that are efficiently able to monetize R&D that they didn't invest in. What's your position and how does it inform the way you approach investing in open source? You've been investing in cloud since, I believe, 2008... what stands out to you as you look across the biggest winners? Any common threads or key differentiators? What do you know, you need to get better at? Battery Ventures provides investment advisory services solely to privately offered funds and neither solicits nor makes its services available to the public or other advisory clients. Nothing herein should be construed as investment advice. This podcast mentions certain Battery portfolio companies; for a full list of all Battery investments and exits, please click here. Content obtained from third-party sources, although believed to be reliable, has not been independently verified as to its accuracy or completeness and cannot be guaranteed.