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Startup Reading List: S-1 Bonanza - Snowflake, Asana, Unity, SumoLogic

Hey everyone! My name is Chris McCann and I'm really excited to be re-joining this reading list as yo
Issue #120  •  August 31  •  View online  •  Suggest a link
Startup Digest Reading List
Startup Digest Reading List
A curated list of the top stories in technology, startups, and venture capital.
Hey everyone!
My name is Chris McCann and I’m really excited to be re-joining this reading list as your curator.
Before I start let me give a huge thank you to Zubin Chagpar who has been leading and curating this newsletter for over 6+ years! You were an amazing steward of the Reading List and I’m proud to be taking it back over from here.
I was one of the original founders of Startup Digest and originally helped created this Reading List which spawned a whole generation of tech newsletters. Without further ado here is this week’s reading list.
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This week we saw a flood of high growth tech companies filing to go public. I read through each of these companies’ S-1 filings and pulled out some of the more interesting stats to highlight. 
To conclude, I also share a few of my broader observations on what this means for the markets, startups, and investors.
Snowflake S-1
  • Company Description: Snowflake is a full stack cloud data platform.
  • Founded: 2012
  • Customers: 3,117 
  • Customer Notes:
  • Snowflake has 56 customers paying $1M+ ARR
  • Capital One accounted for 11% of Snowflake’s revenue.
  • Featured Customers: Nielsen, AXA, Capital One, Experian, Stava, Sony, Logitech, Blackboard, Instacart, Adobe, Dropbox, and Akamai.
  • Revenue: $264M
  • Revenue Growth (YoY): 132%
  • Gross Margin: 62%
  • International: 88% US Revenue, 12% International
  • Largest VC holders: Sutter Hill Ventures (20%) Redpoint Ventures (9%) Sequoia Capital (8%)
Deeper dive into Snowflake’s S-1 Filing: https://blog.publiccomps.com/snowflake-s1-ipo-teardown/
Asana S-1
  • Company Description: Asana helps teams organize, track, and manage their work.
  • Founded: 2008
  • Customers: 1.2M paying users, 75K paying companies.
  • Customer Notes:
  • 4.8% free to paid conversion rate 
  • 9% of revenue from top 100 customers
  • Featured Customers: Autodesk, Viessmann, SiteMinder, and G2.
  • Revenue: $142M 
  • Revenue Growth (YoY): 86%
  • Gross Margin: 86%
  • International: 60% US Revenue, 40% International
  • Largest VC holders: Benchmark (10%), Founders Fund (6.5%)
Deeper dive into Asana’s S-1 Filing: https://tomtunguz.com/asana-s-1/
Unity
  • Company Description: Unity is a 3D development platform for games, animation, and enterprise. 
  • Founded: 2004
  • Customers: 1.5M active creators
  • Customer Notes:
  • 62% of their revenue comes from a revenue sharing model (operate solutions)
  • 716 customers contributes more than $100K ARR 
  • Customers spend on average 4.9 hours per day using Unity
  • Featured Customers: Electronic Arts, Tencent, Ubisoft, Samsung, Skanska, and Volvo.
  • Revenue: $700M
  • Revenue Growth (YoY): 42%
  • Gross Margin: 79%
  • International: 30% US Revenue, 70% International
  • Largest VC holders: Sequoia Capital (24%) Silver Lake (18%)
Deeper dive into Unity’s S-1 Filing: https://macro-ops.com/unity-software-breaking-down-s-1-filing/
Sumo Logic
  • Company Description: SumoLogic is a machine data analytics platform for security, operation, and BI.
  • Founded: 2010
  • Customers: 2,131 customers
  • Customer Notes:
  • 329 customers contributing greater than $100K ARR
  • 27 customers contributing greater than $1M ARR
  • Featured Customers: 23andMe, Alaska Airlines, LendingTree, MLB, Netflix, PagerDuty, Salesforce, and Twilio.
  • Revenue: $155M
  • Revenue Growth (YoY): 49%
  • Gross Margin: 69%
  • International: 84% US Revenue, 16% International
  • Largest VC holders: Greylock (22%), Sapphire Ventures (7%), Accel (6%), DFJ (5%)
Deeper dive into SumoLogic’s S-1 Filing: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/sumo-logic-benchmarking-the-s1-data
Observations
Here are a few broader observations to share:
Startups are a long term endeavor - On average it took ~11 years for these companies to go public.
Expect more market uncertainty - While it’s awesome all of these solid technology companies are going public, this rush of filings is most likely pointing towards more market volatility, especially as we get closer to November.
Concentrate and follow through - While spray and pray investing (small checks into lots of companies) is all the rage in Silicon Valley right now, the real winners are the firms who were able to stick it out and maintain 20%+ ownership through IPO. These phenomenal firms include - Sequoia, Greylock, and Sutter Hill Ventures.
Disclosure: I previously worked at Greylock Partners.
Techstars Startup Digest Startup Digest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann Chris McCann - General Partner @ Race Capital, former Greylock Partners
chris@startupdigest.com
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