Enterprise Weekly #436: HashiCorp's Open-Source Transition, GTM Compensation, and More
This week, HashiCorp announced that it transitioned from its historical open-source roots to a Business Source License (BSL). This gives the company more control over its OSS projects by insulating the company from competitors seeking to redistribute HasiCorp’s OSS code for commercial use. HashiCorp isn’t the first OSS company to make this move — Confluent, Couchbase, Cockroach Labs, Elastic, MariaDB, MongoDB, and Sentry have all adopted alternative licenses that include restrictions on commercial usage.
How is the community reacting? While there are many opinions on the topic, some are growing distrustful of single vendor OSS projects. We asked Jake Moshenko, Co-founder & CEO of our portfolio company Authzed his thoughts:
“There is a knock-on effect from re-licensing that I think doesn’t get enough attention. If you are importing just a small piece of code from a larger project, you find yourself in a precarious situation: either pin to the liberally licensed commit and miss out on security fixes, or fork and become a maintainer. This is very common in the Go ecosystem (where Hashicorp is a huge player) thanks to easy git imports and tree shaking. This will break a lot of projects.”
In other news, a new State of GTM Compensation Report from CloserIQ found total compensation for startup GTM roles is tapering off. Thanks to 6 consecutive quarters of tech industry layoffs and presumably missed quotas, compensation is beginning to plateau and even decline for some roles. More specifically, in H2 2023, they found:
To no surprise, growth-stage startups generally pay higher base salaries than earlier-stage startups. But interestingly, we’re seeing late-stage startups offer higher compensation than many Big Tech companies like Google, Meta, and others who previously ranked as the highest paying employers.
Reduced quota attainment decreases total earnings, and candidates are prioritizing increased base salaries vs. (on-target earnings) OTE.
Many organizations are collapsing middle management and replacing executive leaders (ie. CROs) with a front-line leaders (ie. Heads of Sales) in an attempt to create lean and efficient teams to reinvigorate revenue goals.
Remote hiring is reverting to hybrid and in-office. Zoom, Meta, and Google are making waves as the most recent companies to demand remote workers back into the office citing remote work was built out of pandemic safety protocols, not sustainable, core cultural beliefs.
These trends are a reaction to a variety of factors including the current cash strapped market, longer and tougher sales cycles, as well as a sector-wide emphasis on profitable growth, which have all shifted enterprise sales compensation trends for the foreseeable future.
📚 Read more news:
Forbes: Nobody Beats Wiz: Meet The Hyper-Aggressive, $10B Startup Shaking Up Cloud Security
Insider: DeepMind's Secret Mafia: Meet the Stealth Startups Emerging From Google's AI Lab
Pitchbook: VCs Expected An M&A Wave. Dealmaking Fell To A Decade Low Instead.
The Information: ‘Not Everyone Is Trying to Build God’: Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela Tries to Dampen the Doomerism
The Verge: Slack’s Biggest Redesign Ever Tries To Tame the Chaos of Your Workday
📚 Read more (th)reads:
Company: Alkymi
Role: Enterprise Account Executive
Technology: Data Extraction & Document Automation
Funding: $26M from Intel Capital, Canaan Partners and Work-Bench
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