DevToolsDigest: Issue #246
This week's digest includes news and resources from LaunchDarkly, 37signals, GitLab, and more.
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The Week in Developer Tools
LaunchDarkly: Dreaming Bigger
LaunchDarkly recently welcomed Dan Rogers as its new CEO. Most recently Dan was president at Rubrik, where he helped them surpass $500M ARR in under nine years and as ServiceNow’s CMO, he was a major driver of their meteoric growth journey to become an iconic SaaS company.
37signals: We Stand to Save $7M Over Five Years from Our Cloud Exit
"Any mid-sized SaaS business and above with stable work loads that does not benchmark their rental bill for servers in the cloud against buying their own boxes is committing financial malpractice at this point."
Industry Research
Avoiding the Success Trap: Toward Policy for Open Source Software as Infrastructure
For policymakers seeking to support the security and sustainability of OSS as a shared resource, this report builds on an important perspective on open-source software: OSS as Infrastructure.
Defensibility & Competition
There is a lot of discussion of whether building “a mere wrapper on top of GPT” is defensible. Most SaaS software starts off default non-defensible (hence all the HackerNews posts & Reddit threads saying as much), and tend to build a moat over time. In parallel this post delves into different forms of moats as well as competition more generally.
Developer Venture News
Andreessen Horowitz and 'Zero Interest Rate Phenomena'
In recent years, a16z built an incredible machine to accumulate "assets under management" (AUM) to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Nominally they were supposed to be doing venture capital—investing in startups and entrepreneurs—but really they were making a different play.
GitLab's Acquisition Process
GitLab's key goal in pursuing acquisitions is to accelerate their roadmap and offer better tools to customers more quickly. They seek to introduce new product categories and mature early categories faster than by building everything internally.
From the Heavybit Library
Working with Lawyers at Your Startup: Advice for Early-Stage Founders from a General Counsel
Hiring an experienced startup lawyer is one of the first things a founder should do when thinking about starting a company, but this can be a daunting task. The legal market is opaque, and it can be difficult to know how to work with lawyers if you’ve never done so before.