Who is Nnamdi?

The way we talk about private valuations doesn't make sense.

Four years ago I set out to correct a long-standing misnomer in how founders and investors talk about startup valuations.

Open source LLMs are 90% cheaper than closed source models at the same benchmarked intelligence level.

Seed valuations don't behave like valuations: They are too stable over time for such a speculative asset They are impervious to shifting interest rates They don’t follow public tech valuations In short, seed valuations are a bit of an enigma — it’s not at…

To celebrate Patronus AI’s $17M Series A, I wanted to share some thoughts on the current state of AI benchmarking.

I’ve updated the Venture Activity Index for Q4 2023 data.

It's cold out there in Series A land: A common explanation for the Series A winter is raised expectations – investors are demanding to see better metrics and traction.

Real-time data systems tend not to have amazing developer experiences.

It's no secret – unless you're building in AI, the venture market isn't very kind right now.

Venture valuations have fallen off a cliff, but they are still too high.

Interest rates are the Federal Reserve's go-to treatment for an ailing, lethargic economy.

Where did the explosive growth in venture activity come from?

Public technology valuations have crashed.

Venture funding hasn't grown as much as you think.

Subscription revenue is a double-edged sword: It's predictable, making the business much easier to forecast It's persistent – over or underperformance today reverberates far into the future Contrary to popular belief, SaaS companies do not in fact "pull f…

Layoffs grab headlines.

COVID hurt most software companies.

There's something strange about software valuations.

For your seed stage startup to graduate to the next level, it must pass a new test.

Abundant capital is not a panacea for founders.

Rules are meant to be broken, and the Rule of 40 is no exception.

Preferred equity is synthetic leverage.

ACV, or average/annual contract value, isn't as useful a concept as people think.

Investors often justify high valuation multiples with the claim that the companies "will grow into their valuations."

In Why Developers Love Redpanda, I talked about the exciting developments around WebAssembly and how Vectorized is leveraging the technology to build it’s Intelligent Data API, Redpanda: WebAssembly, or WASM, is one of the most exciting up-and-coming tech…

In 2006, Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, published a memo titled "You Can't Eat IRR."

The super-rich earn more on their investments than the rest of us.

The burden of scientific knowledge and managerial complexity is crushing our best and brightest.

Developer relations (DevRel) is one of the toughest hires to make in early stage, developer-centric startups.

Developer inefficiency drives hundreds of billions of dollars of lost software output annually.

In software development, more (developers) isn’t always more.

TL;DR: I invest in productivity-enhancing tools for software developers and other technical knowledge workers.

Developer productivity is undergoing a tectonic shift.

The recent Robinhood and Gamestop / Gamestock / Gamestonk fiasco shed a light on some of the complex financial infrastructure that undergirds equity trading.

Red pandas are cute.

I've never liked the SaaS "magic number."

The longer you search for product-market fit, the less likely you will find it.

We will never have enough software developers.

In enterprise software, the "average" customer is a meaningless concept.

Title: An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale Authors: Anonymous (Paper currently in blind review for ICLR 2021) One sentence summary: Large Transformer trained on large datasets outperform CNN-based architectures and a…

(I'm trying something new: summarizing and explaining technical research papers I come across.

Developer productivity is undergoing a tectonic shift.

Developer productivity is undergoing a tectonic shift.

Math and data say early-stage VCs should index invest, and late-stage investors should stock pick.

The value of a college degree is crashing toward zero and may even be negative for today's COVID-graduates.

This post is an excerpt from my 2020 software developer pay analysis.

The sky fell.

Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Jason Lemkin of SaaStr hosted a live Zoom discussion last week on the current state of venture capital and cloud software in the wake of the coronavirus turmoil.

This post is an excerpt from my 2020 software developer pay analysis.

This is part 1 of my 2020 analysis of software developer earnings.