Issue #4 - The Future of Manufacturing
Welcome to Issue #4. This issue focuses on the case for services in enterprise SaaS, 3D printing running shoes, the Hannover Messe and a flying fox.
I hope you enjoy reading it. Any feedback, shares or links are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: thoughts and opinions expressed in the newsletter are my own.
What I enjoyed reading
🤖 Martin Casado, former co-founder and CTO at Nicira and now at a16z, writes very good content for Enterprise SaaS founders in my eyes. I already shared his piece about product-market fit in one of my earlier issues. One of his latest pieces focuses on the case for services in enterprise software startups. He emphasizes that service can help to ensure that a product works and gives some recommendations about a healthy service revenue share (20-40% early on).
🤖 The Atlantic wrote an interesting piece about the future of Walmart's workforce. Similar to Amazon convenience stores, Walmart plans to introduce more self-checkouts and tries to increase automation. In addition, it is also gig-fying its own workforce, similar to what we see in other industries.
🏃 I think we are still at the very beginning when it comes to industrial applications of 3D printing. One of the most interesting ones I stumbled upon recently is how Nike is using a computational design for its new elite running shoe. The outcome looks a bit magical if you watch this video. The shoe is incredibly light and weighs only 11 grams (!). To compare, the running shoes I use for training weigh between 220-250 grams.
🦊 Have you ever seen a flying fox in real life? If not, you can watch the bionic flying fox built by Festo, a supplier of pneumatic and electrical automation technology. It is equipped with a motion-tracking system so that it can constantly master the agile flying maneuvers of its natural role model. I'm always impressed by how Festo is mirroring our nature e.g. with their smart bird or smart kangeroo.
🏭 This factory in China went from 650 workers to only 60(!) workers by leveraging computer-controlled robots and unmanned transport trucks. This is impressive and a dramatic shift - and I'm sure we will see more examples like this in the next years.
About industrial Startups and Companies
💸 Microsoft announced that it will invest $5bn into IoT, especially into security, new products, and services. The article also highlights the massive increase of connected devices until 2021, namely 25.1 billion up from 6.3 billion according to Gartner.
🤑 NEA is doubling down on Munich-based Konux. The predictive maintenance solution for railway operators announced a fresh $20M round led by NEA last month. This brings its total funding to $38.5M according to Crunchbase. Konux wants to be active in more than half a dozen countries by the end of the year which is a very ambitious goal given the long sales cycles in this industry.
🕹️ Orchestrating all the IoT devices can be a huge mess. Israelian-based Axonize is trying to solve that problem and for doing so, they just announced a $6M Series A lead by Meron Capital. You can, for example, add heat map charts for a better overview of the behavior of your sensors or compare and correlate readings and events from different sensors by using their IoT platform.
Additional thoughts on recent development
Impressions from Hannover Messe
I spent a full day at the Hannover Messe - the world's biggest industrial fair. It was my first time and it's simply massive. I mostly walked around Halle 6 where the main topic was about "Digital Factory". From the outside, it was often not easy to understand what the companies are actually doing - I saw way too many buzzwords (e.g. AI, deep learnings, predictive maintenance) rather than solutions for a problem or specific use cases. If you have a brand already (e.g. Telekom, Cisco) then this might work but for smaller companies, this did not catch my interest.
My presentation at the AWS booth at Hannover Messe
I was invited by AWS to do a presentation about how I see the industrial landscape from an investor perspective. You can find my slides here - feel free to share them 👋
And if you have any feedback, please reach out here.
Point Nine SaaS Meetup in Munich
🤝 We organized a SaaS Meetup in Munich recently and talked about enterprise sales among others. You can read more about the event here. Heiko, co-founder of Riskmethods (P9 portfolio), also shared his slides about lessons learned in scaling sales where he talked about e.g. how to run deal clinics or how to build a sales academy. You can find the link to the slides in the blogpost - please share 😊
Thanks to everybody for supporting this newsletter and for sending me interesting links. As always, any input, shares, and feedback are always warmly welcome.
Robin
P.S. I will be in Vienna and in Munich towards the end of May, let me know if you want to meet