Hi, this is Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock. The following podcast is from our new project, Castles in the Cloud. You can find more at greylock.com slash castles.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter. The podcast from Greylock where we share stories and insights from company builders and business leaders. I'm Alisa Shriver, marketing partner at Greylock.
On this episode, we'll be sharing an audio version of Jerry Chen's essay called Castles in the Cloud. Jerry is a general partner at Greylock and invests in enterprise software.
Castles in the Cloud is a new interactive project that maps multiple data points of the Cloud computing ecosystem and plots new opportunities for startup success.
If you're interested in this content, please subscribe to Grey Matter on Spotify, SoundCloud, and wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Greylock's interactive project that maps multiple data points of the Cloud computing ecosystem and plots new opportunities for success. An essay by Jerry Chen.
Among the great technology platform shifts of modern times, perhaps none have revolutionized industries at the speed, impact, and rate of innovation as significantly as Cloud computing.
在现代伟大的技术平台转变中,也许没有哪一项像云计算一样以如此高速、影响力和创新速度彻底改革了行业。
The Cloud has created thousands of opportunities for new businesses and business models by reducing the cost to start a new company and experiment with different ideas, leverage machine learning, and transform nearly every facet of our lives.
As a result, the rise of Cloud has most notably given rise in the US to three dominant Cloud vendors upon whose services virtually everyone relies. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The Big Three Cloud Castles.
因此,云计算的崛起最明显地导致了美国出现了三家主导云服务的公司,几乎每个人都依靠它们的服务。这三个云计算的巨头包括亚马逊网络服务(Amazon Web Services)、微软Azure和谷歌云(Google Cloud),被称为“云计算的三大城堡”。
Over the past 15 years since the launch of AWS in 2006, the Big Three have each built up modes of defensibility that essentially guarantee their status for the foreseeable future.
Massive economies of scale combined with strong network effects and easy distribution of new services to users. Fortified with these modes, the Big Three have near infinite resources and unparalleled control of distribution.
They have a direct relationship to the developers combined with a low marginal cost to launch and promote new Cloud services. These Cloud Castles have each been able to spin up hundreds of different developer services from security and storage to DevOps and artificial intelligence tools.
And Cloud Growth has been fueled even further by the pandemic-induced acceleration of Cloud adoption. In 2020 alone, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud saw their revenue increase 30%, 50%, and 80% respectively.
We know that the most intense head-to-head competition, AWS, Microsoft, and Google Face, is from one another. And there is almost no point in trying to become the fourth monolith, although Oracle Cloud and others are trying.
我们知道,AWS、Microsoft 和 Google 面临的最激烈的对抗来自彼此。虽然 Oracle Cloud 和其他云计算服务也在竭力争取,但成为第四个巨头几乎毫无意义。
But as I postulated a few years ago in an essay on the new modes, there are many ways to build businesses in the shadow of Cloud Castles.
但正如我在几年前的一篇关于新模式的文章中提出的那样,建立与“云城堡”相伴的企业有很多种方式。
Following that post, I had several conversations with founders, executives, and investors about different ways to take on the big three by creating businesses that compete directly with one or more of their individual offerings.
As I later put forth in my essay on the evolution of Cloud, that movement is well underway. The 2020 and 2021 IPOs of several Cloud companies like Snowflake, Confluent, Hashee Corp, and Databricks have demonstrated that the sector is large and dynamic enough for others to successfully coexist alongside the big three.
Meanwhile, the growing demand for tools from companies like Chronosphere, Roxet, and Kato Networks illustrates our shift past the Cloud Transition era and into the Cloud-only era.
Numerous opportunities still exist to push the boundaries of what the technology can accomplish.
仍然存在许多机会来推动技术实现更多的创新。
This is why we've begun a new undertaking at Greylock, a comprehensive interactive project to map the Cloud ecosystem.
这就是为什么我们在格雷洛克开始了一个新的计划,建立一个全面互动项目来绘制云生态系统的地图。
First, we are compiling and categorizing the various independent Cloud services offered by AWS, Azure, and GCP. Enumerating which services are provided by which Cloud vendors gives us a snapshot into where the big three are investing and potentially how they are different.
This look will try to answer some basic questions like which Cloud has more ML services, which Clouds provide a platform for IoT and other areas for comparison.
The second effort we are launching and asking for help from the community is to enumerate companies and startups who are competing against these individual Cloud services.
我们正在发起第二次努力,并向社区寻求帮助,这是为了列举那些与这些个人云服务竞争的公司和初创企业。
This database started by us and hopefully augmented by other founders, executives, and investors will help us create a living tactical guide to understanding the following, where the Cloud incumbents are investing their resources, where startups are succeeding, competing against Cloud vendors, how startups are able to cross big Clouds proverbial modes, and where should we expect the next wave of innovation, slash investment, and why?
Over the next few months, our primary aim is to identify which strategies are allowing challengers to win in their sector and why they are able to do so at this point in time.
The project reflects the Cloud ecosystem in 2019 and 2020. We will update this database annually at the close of each year. In Q1 2022, we will populate this data table with updates from 2021.
To compare the Cloud services in the context of the startup environment, we ran pitch book queries on private software companies that reached evaluation of more than 500 million in 2019 or 2020. We categorize these companies against the markets and submarkets in which their product offerings compete against Cloud providers services. We then supplemented this data with select early stage startups we've seen competing in these markets.
To learn more about our process, check out our essay on the methodology behind the project on our Castles in the Cloud website at www.castlesinthecloud.com. To learn what we've found so far, check out Corinne Riley's essay on the top trends from the funding data or listen to our podcast on Gray Matter.
As we analyze the data, we will continue to publish essays on the Gray Matter blog examining how and why it is possible to compete with the big three Cloud vendors, along with case studies detailing the various tactics companies are using. We will also host guests on the Gray Matter podcast featuring founders and top executives of several Cloud companies.