Software is spawning more startups

Software is feeding the software world — Part 3

All the major cloud players actively encourage and engage with the startup community. They work with accelerators, incubators and university programs all over the world to offer usage credits, mentors and ongoing support to their cloud infrastructure. Sponsorship of events that brings developers or startups together such as hackathons are very common.

They even offer co-marketing or go to market services via their marketplaces for these startups to be featured by function or industry. Some of the bigger companies collaborate on these go to market programs too. For example, AWS and Hubspot have signed up a 3 year program while Hubspot stays with AWS to give special pricing to all startups with the Amazon programs. Microsoft and Google actively provide similar services within their programs. Microsoft comes from the world where a large portion of their revenues were through partners and their worldwide partner conference is quite focused on its cloud partners and promoting them.

And of course, most of these larger companies run Venture arms invest in startups. Of course, if you are on their cloud, you can also highlight how much you are contributing to their bottomline too.

In the recent Cloud 100 list published by Forbes and BVP, Salesforce Ventures and Hubspot both highlighted many of their portfolio and partners, which of course overlap.

Growth in Startups (Just in Martech)

Scott Brinker or Chiefmartec has been documenting the marketing startup landscape since 2011. This picture shows the number of startups and their growth.

Going from 150 in 2011 to 9K+ in 2022, that is a CAGR just above 45%

Now, imagine how many startups there are in other areas. A company called G2 has pegged the number at 103,000+ or so. Which I believe is low for worldwide startups.

There is an app for that is now normal in both consumer and business.

I have not even listed all the startups in the web3 space, which is expanding on a daily basis. Apart from the fact that a lot of money made by founders who exit or software exec goes back into the venture market as investments creating an endless supply of cash infusion needed by worthy startups.

So overall, SOFTWARE IS FEEDING THE SOFTWARE WORLD.