From Developer Experience to Enablement

Developer tools are important, but it’s not the whole story

It was not the startup turnaround story we expected. Airbnb had become a behemoth in the span of a decade, disrupting the hotel industry along the way to a $31 billion valuation. Then COVID hit, forced layoffs of nearly 2,000 employees, whacked the valuation in half, and begged the question if the company would even survive. Then a week ago, Airbnb announced their intentions to go public.

Airbnb was not the only tech startup to throw their hat into the IPO ring. Earlier this week, a flurry of lesser known tech startups filed their S-1’s for a public offering:

• Asana — Team based work management (valued $1.5B)
• Sumo Logic — Cloud monitoring and log management (valued $1.0B)
• Snowflake — Cloud based data warehousing (valued $12.5B)
• Unity — Cross-platform game development engine (valued $6.0B)
• JFrog –Binary repository manager for DevOps automation (valued $1.2B)

If we take Asana out of the mix, the other four are strikingly similar in one important way. These are companies whose products help the types of teams that a decade ago were thoroughly ignored; developers and IT operations. Now there are four startups worth $20 billion about to IPO in the next few months.

In the 2000’s, it was hard to get any respect if you were building a product for…