Security-as-code startup Jit comes out of stealth with $38.5M in seed funding

Jit, a startup that helps developers automate product security by codifying their security plans and workflows as code that can then be managed in a code repository like GitHub, today announced that it has raised a $38.5 million seed round led by boldstart ventures, with Insight Partners, Tiger Global, TeachAviv and a number of strategic angel investors also participating. The company was incubated by FXP, a Boston-Israel startup venture studio

With this announcement, Jit is also coming out of stealth and announcing the addition of former Puppet CTO and Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns to its advisory board.

“Cybersecurity leaders are adding more tools, faster than their teams are able to implement, tune and configure them — increasing risk spend,” said Jit CTO David Melamed. “Creating a security plan or program is too time-consuming for high-velocity dev and product teams. Jit streamlines technical security for engineering teams over compliance checkboxes all while reducing spend. We deliver the simplest approach to implementing DevSecOps where product security is built into the software from the start along with a way to continuously maintain it in a language developers understand — code.”

Image Credits: Jit

The idea behind Jit is to offer what the company calls “minimal viable security” (MVS). Out of the box, the service offers developers MVS plans that have already codified a minimum set of tools and workflows that they’ll need to secure their apps and the infrastructure they run on.

“Instead of having to research, configure, implement and do the work to integrate open source security tools into your stacks and CI/CD pipelines, the security research team at Jit has taken the time to curate and select the tools that will provide the first line of defense for your applications, without having to figure it out yourself,” the company explains.

The company argues that its approach also means developers will only get alerts if there are important vulnerabilities they have to react to right away — and can then remediate them from inside their existing workflows. The tool will create automatic security reviews inside of pull requests or find AWS misconfigurations or issues with security controls for third-party services like npm-audit.

With this, the service can also make it easier for businesses to start their gap analysis for a number of compliance programs like SOC2 or ISO 27001 by giving them a dashboard that lays out their current status.

“With the rapid increase in the number of applications being developed and managed, product security needs to be simple and easy to use as code, as well as work within current CI/CD pipelines,” said Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at boldstart ventures. “Jit ensures that modern engineering teams can build secure cloud-based applications by design, all while simplifying continuous security. Jit is unique in that it unifies a variety of open source security tools while natively integrating the entire security as code experience into the current developer workflow.”

Image Credits: Jit

Boldstart Ventures has two new funds to plug into teams with an idea and little else

Boldstart Ventures, a seed- and early-stage venture firm that markets itself as a “Day One partner for developer-first, crypto-infrastructure and SaaS founders,” has closed on two new funds roughly 14 months after announcing its last two funds.

The firm — which began in New York with a $1 million proof-of-concept fund in 2010 — has closed its sixth flagship fund with $192.2 million, it is announcing today; it also closed its third opportunity-style fund to back its breakaway companies with $175 million in capital commitments.

Early last year, Boldstart closed on $155 million in capital commitments for its fifth flagship fund and $75 million for its second opportunity fund, so its newest later-stage vehicle is a big step up in particular. It also comes at an auspicious time, given that some of the industry’s most active late-stage investors, including SoftBank and Tiger Global, are writing fewer and smaller checks at the moment. (The less competition for late-stage deals, the less frothy the deal terms and the more time for due diligence, and so on.)

Not much has changed otherwise, unless you count the move of firm co-founder Ed Sim to Miami, which is notable given that Boldstart’s early focus was largely regional, including a focus on New York, as well as on underfunded Canadian talent. (The firm remains active up north.) The firm will still writes checks as small as $250,000, it says; it is also willing to invest up to $30 million in a single portfolio company.

Some of its best-known deals to date include Snyk, a company that helps developers use open source code and stay secure and whose valuation, as of last fall, was $8.5 billon; Blockdaemon, a blockchain infrastructure company valued at $3.25 billion earlier this year; and the data intelligence platform BigID, valued at $1.25 billion by its investors last year. Boldstart was also among the first investors in Kustomer, a startup that specializes in customer-service platforms and chatbots and which Facebook acquired in November 2020 for a reported $1 billion.

We talked with Sim last week about the markets, which he noted “suck” right now. At the same time, he’added, “I do think that things [had grown] a bit too frothy.”

Among the newer developments he has observed are pulled term sheets, he told us, particularly on the later-stage side. He said he also saw terms for a 2x liquidation preference inserted into a sizable round, meaning investors demanded that in exchange for their funding, they be guaranteed twice the amount of their invested capital in an exit scenario — before anyone else gets paid.

Like a lot of VCs right now, Boldstart is also actively counseling its startups to conserve cash so that they aren’t in the position of having to accept terms that can hurt them down the road. “Founders can get shocked when they see that because on the one hand [they’re thinking], ‘I’ve raised money. I maintained my valuation,” said Sims. “The reality is maintaining your valuation is not great if you take a 2x liquidation preference [to do it].” If you do, “under certain scenarios,” he continues, “you’re not gonna make a dime.”

​Why a downturn can separate the recession-proof startups​ from the ‘hacks’

The inevitable physics of economics is upon us — what goes up must come down — and we appear to be headed for the down part of the equation.

But all is not lost. If you need a reminder, Venmo, Instagram, Uber and WhatsApp all launched during the Great Recession of 2008.

When I think about recessions, I remember what an electrician said while working on my house during the dot-com blowup. I’d asked him if he was worried about the economy affecting his work, and as he drilled another hole for the wiring, he looked up at me and said, “Nah. A bad economy just weeds out the hacks.”

If your company is lacking basic business fundamentals and burning cash, well, maybe you’re in for a reckoning. But then again, maybe you always were. But if you have a well-grounded startup built on a good idea with a solid foundation, you can probably ride out whatever storm is coming.

The question is this: Are you building something essential at the core of your customer’s business, which Operator Collective founder and CEO Mallun Yen refers to as painkillers? Or are you building something less essential, which she calls vitamins?

Painkillers versus vitamins

“Companies building painkillers rather than vitamins, especially solutions that are technically hard or tricky to develop, or anticipate fundamental but yet-to-be-mainstream shifts in an industry, are particularly well positioned to weather the macro conditions that are out of their control. Painkillers include products that increase revenue or significantly lower costs in a tangible way,” Yen told me.

She said those startups can be in any category as long as they are helping companies work smarter, which is even more essential in an uncertain economy.

“For instance, we have one company we are investing in that enables customers to significantly increase their sales by enabling them to do things in a way that hasn’t been done before. Another is materially lowering cloud infrastructure spend — a pain point that will only increase for companies across the board as more data is stored in the cloud and corresponding queries and other analysis need to be run.”

Derek Zanutto, general partner at CapitalG, said that while many companies will experience some short-term hiccups due to market fluctuations, his firm still expects to see many grow and thrive over the coming years.

“Some of the greatest companies have been founded or emerged stronger than ever during weakened market conditions. I’m particularly bullish on startups that are helping enterprises harness the power of their data. Data, when leveraged well, can help enterprises both rein in costs and generate more money, making it, over the long term, a recession-proof business sector,” Zanutto said.

Soma Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Ventures, said his firm has been investing in intelligent applications, adding that regardless of what’s happening in the macro environment, they are sticking to the plan.

Selling to developers is no longer a sure path to insane valuation multiples

The business of building for and selling to developers is big. Startups around the world are busy creating new developer-focused — or at least developer-forward — solutions at a rapid clip.

The “developer tools” tag on TechCrunch has been busy this year. We’ve covered recent news in the space from Hardhat, CodeSee, Harness and Gadget, to share a few individual items.


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The concept of selling to developers is attractive. Many startups are building in an API-first way, creating tools and services that software engineers can hook into their existing products or workflows. This creates a dynamic where sales are often self-serve and pricing is based more on usage than the per-seat model that SaaS made ubiquitous.

Investors are also enthused by building stuff for developers and selling directly to their end-user. Data indicates that more than $37 billion went into developer tools startups last year, a huge sum for any category.

The space we’re describing is broad, including companies like Hashicorp, which went public last year and builds developer tools relating to infrastructure and security. GitLab also went public last year on the back of its git-style code repo service for devs. And Samsara went public as 2021 came to a close, selling IoT solutions to developers, including an API.

You might think that with venture capital piling into the technology business model category and a number of recent IPOs to point to, the market for such work would be hotter than ever. And yet.

Boldstart Ventures’ Ed Sim noted yesterday that public developer- and infrastructure-focused startups are seeing their valuations fall in recent quarters:

Naturally, this got us thinking, as the wave of 2021 venture capital that developer-first products raised was partially predicated on that year’s public market-signaled valuations. And those have come down dramatically. The trend is not precisely new, though recent data does make the point very clear.

It’s worth mentally circling back to the C3.ai IPO from late 2020. The company’s growth story was a little odd, and its pricing was seemingly a little rich. Then it shot out the public-market gate like a racehorse, pushing its valuation into the stratosphere. Since then, however, things have changed.

As the SPAC frenzy continues, questions arise about how much the market can absorb

Another week and the biggest story in a sea of big stories continues to center on SPACs, these blank-check companies that raise capital through IPOs expressly to acquire a privately held company and take it public. But some industry watchers as starting to wonder: Is this party just getting started, with more early guests still trickling in? Have we reached the party’s peak, with the music still thumping? Or did someone just quietly barf in the corner, a sure indicator that it’s time to grab one’s coat?

It certainly feels like things are in full swing. Just today, B Capital, the venture firm cofounded by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, registered plans to raise a $300 million SPAC. Mike Cagney, the fintech entrepreneur who founded SoFI and more recently founded Figure, a fintech company in both the home equity and blockchain space, raised $250 million for his SPAC. Even Michael Dell has made the leap, with his family office registering plans this afternoon to raise a $500 million blank-check company.

Altogether, according to Renaissance Capital, 16 blank-check companies raised $3.4 billion this week, and new filers continue to flood into the IPO pipeline, with 45 SPACs submitting initial filings this week (compared with 10 traditional IPO filings). Perhaps it’s no wonder that we’re starting to see headlines like one in Yahoo News just yesterday titled, “Why some SPAC investors may get burned.”

Interestingly, such headlines could help puncture the SPAC bubble. So argues INSEAD professor Ivana Naumovska in a new Harvard Business Review piece that’s ominously titled, “The SPAC Bubble is About to Burst.”

Naumovska points to research showing that when more people adopt a practice, it will become increasingly widespread due to growing awareness and legitimacy. (See Clubhouse.) But when it comes to something that’s more controversial — which it could be argued that SPACs are — outsider concern and skepticism also grows as the practice becomes more widely used. Thus are born headlines like that one in Yahoo Finance.

Naumovska has studied this phenomenon before, focusing on earlier reverse mergers that, as she notes, “surged in the mid-2000s, outnumbering IPOs in some years, and peaked in 2010, before falling off a cliff in 2011.” She says she and fellow researchers collected a plethora of data on the use of reverse mergers and market responses to them, including how the media evaluated such vehicles. Of the 267 articles published between 2001 and 2012, she says, 6 were positive, 148 were neutral, 113 were negative.

Notably and unsurprisingly, the negative articles grew as the number of reverse merger transactions involving firms with relatively low reputations increased. The same thing happens whenever the “IPO window” is open. Great companies go public, then good companies, then half-baked companies that think they might just blend in with the others. Except that the media picks up on these companies, as do regulators, and with investors, regulators, and the media feeding off one another’s cues, the party typically comes to a screeching halt.

Anecdotally, much more of the coverage around SPACs right now remains positive to neutral. If business reporters are privately skeptical of SPACs, they are reserving judgment, possibly because save for some highly concerning cases —  like when the electric truck startup Nikola was accused of fraud — there isn’t much to criticize yet.

That’s partly because these things appeared so abruptly that public shareholders are still trying to understand them.

The argument that most investors have for creating a SPAC — which is that a lot of so-called unicorn companies are ready to be publicly traded — also resonates, particularly given how bloated the private market has become.

Further, because many of the SPACs raised over the last six months or so have yet to announce their targets (they have two years from the time they raise funds from investors to zero in on a company or else have they have give back those IPO proceeds).

In the meantime, some of the SPACs that critics have long expected would begin to unravel have not, like Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company that kicked off SPAC mania when it went public in the fall of 2019.  Sir Richard Branson founded the company in 2004 in order to fly passengers on suborbital trips to space. Even after putting off plans yet again to attempt a rocket-powered flight to suborbital space last week, its shares — which more than doubled in anticipation of the event — remain in the figurative stratosphere. (The company is currently valued at $12 billion.)

Other offerings haven’t gone quite as smoothly. Clover Health, a health insurance company that, like Virgin Galactic, was taken public via a SPAC organized by famed investor Chamath Palihapitiya, is “facing a confluence of existential threats” to its business, as observed in a lengthy story by Forbes, with “The Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and influential short-sellers  all digging into Clover’s business practices, including how the company incentivizes doctors and patients to buy its insurance and use its technology.”

(Clover has rebutted the allegations, but it is still facing at least three class-action lawsuits that have been filed over the company’s failure to disclose ahead of its IPO that the DOJ was investigating the company.)

“I don’t get it,” said skeptic Steve Jurvetson last month in conversation with this editor of the SPAC frenzy. The veteran venture capitalist, who sits on the board of SpaceX, said there are “some good companies [being taken public]. Don’t get me wrong; they aren’t all fraudulent.” But many are “early-stage venture companies,” he noted, “and they don’t need to meet the forecasting requirements that the SEC normally requires of an IPO, so [SPAC sponsors are] specifically looking for companies that don’t have any operating numbers to show [because they] can make any forecasts they want . . .That’s the whole racket.”

If many agree with Jurvetson, they hesitate to say so publicly. Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures in New York is one of few VCs in recent months who to say outright, when asked, that they aren’t considering raising a SPAC at any point. “I have zero interest in that honestly,” says Sim. “You can come back to me if you see my name or Boldstart [affiliated] with a SPAC two years from now,” he adds, laughing.

Many more investors stress that it’s all about who is sponsoring what.

During a call yesterday with Kevin Mayer, the former Disney exec and, briefly, the CEO of the social network TikTok, he noted that there are “many fewer public companies now than there were 10 years ago, so there is a need for supplying another way to go public.”

Mayer has a vested interest in promoting the safety and efficacy of SPACs. Just yesterday, along with former Disney colleague Tom Staggs, he registered plans for a second a SPAC, after it was announced earlier this month that their first SPAC will be used to take public the digital fitness specialist Beachbody Company.

Still, Mayer argued that not every SPAC should be judged by the same yardstick. “Do I think it’s overdone? Sure, everyone and their brother is now getting to a SPAC, so yeah, that does seem a bit ridiculous. But I think . . . the wheat will be separated from the chaff very, very soon.”

It might have to happen if SPACs are to endure. Working against SPAC sponsors already are numbers that are starting to trickle in and that don’t look so great.

Late last week, Bloomberg Law reported that based on its analysis of the companies that went public as a result of a merger with a SPAC dating back to Jan. 1, 2019, and for which at least one month of post-merger performance data is available, 14 out of 24 (or 60%) reported a depreciation in value as of one month following the completion of the merger, and one-third of the companies reported a year-to-date depreciation in value.

The number of securities lawsuits filed by SPAC stockholders post-merger is also on the rise, noted the outlet.

Certainly, SPACs — more recently heralded as a lasting fix for a broken IPO market — could still prove durable rather than vehicles whose demise will come as the quality of offerings invariably sinks.

In the meantime, given the rate at which SPACs are being formed, as well as the some of the companies in their sights — some of them still in the prototype phase — the question of whether this phenomenon is sustainable is one that more are beginning to ask.

As for Professor Naumovska, she thinks she knows the answer already.

Slim.ai announces $6.6M seed to build container DevOps platform

We are more than seven years into the notion of modern containerization, and it still requires a complex set of tools and a high level of knowledge on how containers work. The DockerSlim open source project developed several years ago from a desire to remove some of that complexity for developers.

Slim.ai, a new startup that wants to build a commercial product on top of the open source project, announced a $6.6 million seed round today from Boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP Ventures and TechAviv Founder Partners.

Company co-founder and CEO John Amaral says he and fellow co-founder and CTO Kyle Quest have worked together for years, but it was Quest who started and nurtured DockerSlim. “We started coming together around a project that Kyle built called DockerSlim. He’s the primary author, inventor and up until we started doing this company, the sole proprietor of that of that community,” Amaral explained.

At the time Quest built DockerSlim in 2015, he was working with Docker containers and he wanted a way to automate some of the lower level tasks involved in dealing with them. “I wanted to solve my own pain points and problems that I had to deal with, and my team had to deal with dealing with containers. Containers were an exciting new technology, but there was a lot of domain knowledge you needed to build production-grade applications and not everybody had that kind of domain expertise on the team, which is pretty common in almost every team,” he said.

He originally built the tool to optimize container images, but he began looking at other aspects of the DevOps lifecycle including the author, build, deploy and run phases. He found as he looked at that, he saw the possibility of building a commercial company on top of the open source project.

Quest says that while the open source project is a starting point, he and Amaral see a lot of areas to expand. “You need to integrate it into your developer workflow and then you have different systems you deal with, different container registries, different cloud environments and all of that. […] You need a solution that can address those needs and doing that through an open source tool is challenging, and that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity to provide premium value and have a commercial product offering,” Quest explained.

Ed Sim, founder and general partner at Boldstart Ventures, one of the seed investors sees a company bringing innovation to an area of technology where it has been lacking, while putting some more control in the hands of developers. “Slim can shift that all left and give developers the power through the Slim tools to answer all those questions, and then, boom, they can develop containers, push them into production and then DevOps can do their thing,” he said.

They are just 15 people right now including the founders, but Amaral says building a diverse and inclusive company is important to him, and that’s why one of his early hires was head of culture. “One of the first two or three people we brought into the company was our head of culture. We actually have that role in our company now, and she is a rock star and a highly competent and focused person on building a great culture. Culture and diversity to me are two sides of the same coin,” he said.

The company is still in the very early stages of developing that product. In the meantime, they continue to nurture the open source project and to build a community around that. They hope to use that as a springboard to build interest in the commercial product, which should be available some time later this year.

How startups can shake up their first idea and still crush the market

When Quibi announced it was shutting its doors recently after raising $1.75 billion, it begged an obvious question: If the original idea didn’t work, why not adjust its model or do something completely different while it still had capital? It wouldn’t have been the first company to decide to shift gears. Perhaps because of the unusually large amount of money it burned through in just six months of public operation, pivoting wasn’t an option for Quibi, but it has been for countless other successful companies over the years. Sometimes an original idea simply doesn’t pan out, a market gets too crowded or a company’s founders stumble onto something they have built that is actually a better business than the original idea.

There are many such examples:

These examples — and many more — show that when your first approach doesn’t work, pivoting may be the the only logical course, but it takes courage from founders and patience from investors.

We spoke to several founders and VCs who have been through this to find out how pivots happen, and how all the parties involved adjust to shifting priorities.

Sometimes it’s a long and twisting road

A big part of founding a company is having vision. You need to believe in your idea of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go. Sometimes it pays to move on. The king of pivots might be the aptly named Pivotal, which changed direction several times and even swapped owners before it went public and got acquired, all in the span of about 20 years. Ed Sim, co-founder at boldstart ventures was part of Dawntreader Ventures in the late 90s when his firm invested in an early version of the company called Metapa. Sim had a front row seat to every twist and turn in the company’s long and intricate history.

“Greenplum, which was sold to EMC and eventually became Pivotal Software, was initially called Metapa. Metapa was in the Akamai space and as the markets cratered in 2001 for funding infrastructure projects, Scott Yara (the company’s founder) and team bought a small company called Didera and turned it into Greenplum, the first petabyte scale data warehouse built on top of open-source technology,” Sim told TechCrunch. It didn’t end there though as Sim continued, “Once again, years later, Scott recruited his replacement CEO, Bill Cook, and they paired together to sell Greenplum to EMC and eventually spin back out and take the company public as Pivotal Software.

It’s worth noting that Pivotal eventually ran into financial problems when its stock tanked last year, but fellow Dell/EMC family member VMware saved the day by acquiring it for $2.7 billion.

Sometimes you stumble onto an idea

Segment, the customer-data platform company that was recently sold to Twilio for $3.2 billion was originally a college lecture sentiment platform, according to CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt. “Our first idea was a classroom lecture tool, ClassMetric, which gave students a button they could press in class to let professors know, in real-time, that they were confused. I like to think of it like a pulse monitor for class confusion,” Reinhardt told TechCrunch

That idea quickly failed when professors testing it found that inviting students to open their laptops to test their sentiment just led them to start playing Solitaire or checking Facebook. Professors weren’t thrilled and they moved on. The founders, who were MIT students at the time, decided they wanted to build an analytics tool instead, but it turned out that competition from Google Analytics and Mixpanel at the time proved too steep.

“We spent a year on development, but it was a crowded market and we struggled to carve out our own niche. We were rapidly running out of capital and the pressure was on to find something new,” he said. They were actually considering simply packing it in, but they had developed a tiny open-source tool called analytics.js, which they used to get data into their failed analytics product. At that point, desperate for an idea, one of the founders suggested posting the open-source tool on Hacker News.

How startups can shake up their first idea and still crush the market

When Quibi announced it was shutting its doors recently after raising $1.75 billion, it begged an obvious question: If the original idea didn’t work, why not adjust its model or do something completely different while it still had capital? It wouldn’t have been the first company to decide to shift gears. Perhaps because of the unusually large amount of money it burned through in just six months of public operation, pivoting wasn’t an option for Quibi, but it has been for countless other successful companies over the years. Sometimes an original idea simply doesn’t pan out, a market gets too crowded or a company’s founders stumble onto something they have built that is actually a better business than the original idea.

There are many such examples:

These examples — and many more — show that when your first approach doesn’t work, pivoting may be the the only logical course, but it takes courage from founders and patience from investors.

We spoke to several founders and VCs who have been through this to find out how pivots happen, and how all the parties involved adjust to shifting priorities.

Sometimes it’s a long and twisting road

A big part of founding a company is having vision. You need to believe in your idea of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go. Sometimes it pays to move on. The king of pivots might be the aptly named Pivotal, which changed direction several times and even swapped owners before it went public and got acquired, all in the span of about 20 years. Ed Sim, co-founder at boldstart ventures was part of Dawntreader Ventures in the late 90s when his firm invested in an early version of the company called Metapa. Sim had a front row seat to every twist and turn in the company’s long and intricate history.

“Greenplum, which was sold to EMC and eventually became Pivotal Software, was initially called Metapa. Metapa was in the Akamai space and as the markets cratered in 2001 for funding infrastructure projects, Scott Yara (the company’s founder) and team bought a small company called Didera and turned it into Greenplum, the first petabyte scale data warehouse built on top of open-source technology,” Sim told TechCrunch. It didn’t end there though as Sim continued, “Once again, years later, Scott recruited his replacement CEO, Bill Cook, and they paired together to sell Greenplum to EMC and eventually spin back out and take the company public as Pivotal Software.

It’s worth noting that Pivotal eventually ran into financial problems when its stock tanked last year, but fellow Dell/EMC family member VMware saved the day by acquiring it for $2.7 billion.

Sometimes you stumble onto an idea

Segment, the customer-data platform company that was recently sold to Twilio for $3.2 billion was originally a college lecture sentiment platform, according to CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt. “Our first idea was a classroom lecture tool, ClassMetric, which gave students a button they could press in class to let professors know, in real-time, that they were confused. I like to think of it like a pulse monitor for class confusion,” Reinhardt told TechCrunch

That idea quickly failed when professors testing it found that inviting students to open their laptops to test their sentiment just led them to start playing Solitaire or checking Facebook. Professors weren’t thrilled and they moved on. The founders, who were MIT students at the time, decided they wanted to build an analytics tool instead, but it turned out that competition from Google Analytics and Mixpanel at the time proved too steep.

“We spent a year on development, but it was a crowded market and we struggled to carve out our own niche. We were rapidly running out of capital and the pressure was on to find something new,” he said. They were actually considering simply packing it in, but they had developed a tiny open-source tool called analytics.js, which they used to get data into their failed analytics product. At that point, desperate for an idea, one of the founders suggested posting the open-source tool on Hacker News.

Box CEO Aaron Levie says thrifty founders have more control

Once upon a time, Box’s Aaron Levie was just a guy with an idea for a company: 15 years ago as a USC student, he conceived of a way to simply store and share files online.

It may be hard to recall, but back then, the world was awash with thumb drives and moving files manually, but Levie saw an opportunity to change that.

Today, his company helps enterprise customers collaborate and manage content in the cloud, but when Levie appeared on an episode of Extra Crunch Live at the end of May, my colleague Jon Shieber and I asked him if he had any advice for startups. While he was careful to point out that there is no “one size fits all” advice, he did make one thing clear:

“I would highly recommend to any company of any size that you have as much control of your destiny as possible. So put yourself in a position where you spend as little amount of dollars as you can from a burn standpoint and get as close to revenue being equal to your expenses as you can possibly get to,” he advised.

Don’t let current conditions scare you

Levie also advised founders not to be frightened off by current conditions, whether that’s the pandemic or the recession. Instead, he said if you have an idea, seize the moment and build it, regardless of the economy or the state of the world. If, like Levie, you are in it for the long haul, this too will pass, and if your idea is good enough, it will survive and even thrive as you move through your startup growth cycle.