If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to Pitch and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback from Sramana Mitra, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to Attend to watch and learn.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be Interested.

<p>The post November 5 – 748th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

<p>The post 747th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable Recording first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

In this market, enterprise customers are overwhelmingly controlled by Atlassian and no other equivalent strategic acquirer exists at the top tier. For an emerging startup, competing head to head for enterprise deals against an incumbent with deep distribution and native platform integration presents severe customer acquisition and scaling hurdles. Furthermore, with the primary logical acquirer off the table, the likelihood of a high valuation, top tier exit in the enterprise segment is minimal.

Strategy & Recommendation

Rather than burning capital competing directly against Atlassian’s enterprise monopoly or holding out for a rare mega exit, the recommended path focuses on capital efficiency, targeted positioning, and a pragmatic outcome:

Pivot Down-Market to the Mid-Market

Rationale: Enterprise buyers prefer consolidated platforms and all in one suite contracts (e.g., Atlassian/DX ecosystem). However, mid-market companies often find enterprise suites overly complex, expensive, or slow to deploy.

Action: Tailor the product, pricing, and go-to-market (GTM) motion to serve mid-market teams seeking faster time-to-value, agility, and lighter footprint solutions.

Validate Unit Economics & Build Traction

Rationale: A strategic buyer acquires revenue quality, customer density, and retention metrics rather than pure market promises.

Action: Focus on repeatable customer acquisition, strong retention, and organic expansion within the mid-market segment to demonstrate clear product-market fit and commercial viability.

Target a Pragmatic, Secondary Exit

Rationale: Since Atlassian has completed its category consolidation, the remaining acquirers will be smaller competitors, adjacent toolmakers, or Developer Experience (DX) platforms needing parity features to prevent churn to Atlassian.

Action: Build intentional relationships with Tier 2 platforms, dev-tool competitors, and adjacent ecosystem players who need a mid-market foothold or specialized feature set to remain competitive against the market leader. Position the company for a modest, capital-efficient buyout.

1. Re-evaluate M&A Pathways When the Primary Buyer Exits the Table

When a dominant player buys your direct category competitor, that specific door usually closes. A single market defining acquisition rarely happens twice by the same buyer in close succession. Founders must immediately map out Tier 2 and Tier 3 acquirers, understanding that these buyers will likely value the business on customer base density and strategic feature parity rather than speculative platform dominance.

2. Exploiting the Incumbent’s Blind Spots (Mid-Market vs. Enterprise)

Large enterprise acquirers inevitably push their product suites upstream to maximize Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and contract sizes. In doing so, they often create product bloat, higher price floors, and longer sales cycles. This leaves the mid-market underserved, opening a clear window for smaller, nimbler startups to win deals based on simplicity, cost effectiveness, and speed.

3. Capital Efficiency & Right Sizing Equity Expectation

If the potential exit size is constrained due to the buyer landscape, capital efficiency becomes paramount. Raising large venture rounds in a space with a capped M&A ceiling destroys founder equity and creates misaligned investor expectations. Bootstrapping or raising modest capital allows the team to achieve a highly profitable, successful outcome on a smaller transaction size.

4. Positioning as a Defensive Hedge for Competitors

In consolidated markets, second and third tier competitors face pressure as customers migrate toward the end to end platform offered by the market leader. A nimble startup that wins mid-market accounts becomes an attractive plug and play acquisition for these secondary players seeking to defend their market share against the dominant ecosystem.

Garth

Listen to Patil MK from Bengaluru, India, pitch Garth, a case study of the above scenario.

Sigma Max AI Solutions

Then Ahsan from Muscat, India, pitched Sigma Max AI Solutions, a company with multiple products that need to be rationalized into a coherent Go To Market path.

You can listen to the recording here:

As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on most Thursdays at 8am PST:

November 5 – Register Here.

November 12 – Register Here.

November 19 – Register Here.

December 3 – Register Here.

December 10 – Register Here.

One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) is the first global virtual accelerator in the world, founded in 2010 by Silicon Valley serial Entrepreneur Sramana Mitra. It offers a fully online entrepreneurship incubation, acceleration and education resource for solo entrepreneurs and bootstrapped founders working on tech and tech-enabled services ventures. 1Mby1M does not charge equity, offers an AI Mentor available 24/7 in 57 languages, and offers a compelling alternative to Y Combinator and other equity accelerators.

<p>The post Roundtable Recap: October 29 – How to Compete and Exit in a Market that has Already had a Major Acquisition first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

Everpure’s Financials

Everpure’s second quarter revenues grew 38% to $1.19 billion, ahead of the market’s estimates of $1.09 billion. Adjusted EPS of $0.70 also beat analyst estimates of $0.59.

During the quarter, Subscription revenues grew 20% over the year to $499.1 million, ahead of analyst estimates of $492.1 million. Product revenues grew 54% to $686.8 million, ahead of the market estimates of $607.6 million.

For the third quarter, Everpure expects revenue of $1.325-$1.335 billion. It expects to end the year with revenues of $5.03-$5.07 billion. The market was looking for revenues of $1.09 billion for the quarter and revenues of $4.52 billion for the year.

Everpure’s Growth

Everpure is registering strong growth through product offerings that are helping organizations accelerate their AI deployment. Traditionally, enterprise IT solutions have been application-centric where data has been siloed within applications. To leverage the benefits of AI, organizations need to transform to a data-centric model that migrates siloed data from individual applications to become a shared and governed system of record. AI tools need to be able to understand context, semantics, and governance of data to derive the right inference. Everpure’s new Data Intelligence tool provides organizations the visibility into both structured and unstructured data for universal discovery, automatically scans the system to identify sensitive information, and maps raw data directly to its real-world business definition, creating a semantics knowledge graph. The solution will help AI agents to instantly understand, query, and safely act on information across the entire enterprise.

Everpure is also enhancing its Unified Data Plane to bring cloud-like scaling directly into physical data architecture. This quarter, Evergreen//One Overdrive will be able to provide a cloud-like performance boost for on-premises storage to absorb traffic spikes up to 25% above baseline without requiring permanent subscription upgrades. By utilizing natural language orchestration and predictive behavioral analysis, Everpure’s tools will be able to automatically move active workloads across capacity, allow storage administrators to use natural language to plan, validate, and trigger secure, end-to-end operations across the entire global infrastructure estate, monitor telemetry across the entire environment to spot coordinated, suspicious login patterns and automatically detect hardware or software configuration drift to enforce global corporate governance.

The advancements Everpure has made in its product offerings are helping it make inroads into the hyperscaler market. In August this year, it announced its second design and supply win with the top 5 hyperscalers. The hyperscalers are leveraging Everpure’s DirectFlash offering that claims to reduce operating costs by making power and rack space consumption more efficient for storage systems. Everpure did not disclose the names of the two hyperscalers that are now its customers.

The market is pleased with Everpure. Its stock is trading at $123.33 with a market capitalization of $42 billion. It was trading at a 52-week high of $157.57 earlier this month. It had dropped to a 52-week low of $56.78 in April this year. The stock has climbed 88% since the start of the year.

Disclosure: All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations, and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research of product-market fit, channel execution, and other factors. My primary interest is in product strategy. While this may have bearing on stock movements, my writings tend to focus on long-term implications. The information presented is illustrative and educational, but should not be regarded as a complete analysis nor recommendation to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. I am not a registered investment adviser and I am not receiving compensation for this article. I am an investor in this company.

<p>The post Everpure’s AI-Focused Product Strategy Pays Off first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to Pitch and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback from Sramana Mitra, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to Attend to watch and learn.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be Interested.

<p>The post October 29 – 747th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

<p>The post 746th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable Recording first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

He came to the roundtable wanting to raise venture capital. He showed me a portfolio of 250 products, though, predictably, a handful generated almost all the revenue.

His achievement is commendable. Building a cash-flowing, multi-product business on lean capital is real entrepreneurship. However, my advice to him was a stark reality check. In his current structure, no institutional VC will touch this company.

The Disconnect Between Small Business Success and VC Math

Many founders believe that reaching $1M+ in revenue and hitting break even makes them automatically fundable for venture capital. They don’t understand the brutal underwriting math of institutional VC funds:

• VCs Don’t Fund 250 Micro Products: Venture capital is not built for catalog businesses or boutique product lines. VCs do not invest in incremental growth across a wide array of low velocity products. They need one or two core products that can scale rapidly into a $100M+ revenue monster.
• The Velocity & Repeatability Requirement: A VC needs to see a concentrated, high velocity sales engine. They want a single product with clear, predictable go-to-market repeatability, where throwing $1 into sales and marketing reliably yields $3 to $5 in predictable ARR at high speed.
• The 3 to 5 Year Horizon: Building to $1.5M over five years shows perseverance, but VCs operate on a high velocity clock. They need to see a trajectory that goes from 0 to $100M within a tight 3 to 5 year window. Slow, organic growth across dozens of SKUs fails their power law mandate.

The Strategic Choice: Adjust or Embrace Independence

If this founder insists on chasing venture capital, he faces a radical strategic pivot. He would have to kill or hive off 245 of those products, pick the single product driving the core revenue traction, prove that it has a massive TAM, and engineer a high velocity, repeatable sales machine around it.

The bigger question is why break a working business to satisfy VC criteria?

He has built a profitable, multi product engine that he controls. Instead of tearing apart a working business to chase a high risk venture play, the smarter move is often to double down on what’s working. Milk the cash cow, optimize margins on the top performing products, fund growth out of profits, and retain total equity ownership.

Venture capital is a specific tool for a very specific type of hyper scale engine. If your business isn’t built to be a $100M single product rocket ship, taking VC money isn’t just difficult, it’s the wrong strategy entirely.

However, this particular entrepreneur, I believe, may be able to also grow at venture scale. He just needs a very significant strategy adjustment and that might render him VC fundable as well.

SpeechGears

Listen to Bharat Chandra from Noida, India, pitch SpeechGears.

As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on most Thursdays at 8am PDT:

October 29 – Register Here.

November 5 – Register Here.

November 19 – Register Here.

One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) is the first global virtual accelerator in the world, founded in 2010 by Silicon Valley serial Entrepreneur Sramana Mitra. It offers a fully online entrepreneurship incubation, acceleration and education resource for solo entrepreneurs and bootstrapped founders working on tech and tech-enabled services ventures. 1Mby1M does not charge equity, offers an AI Mentor available 24/7 in 57 languages, and offers a compelling alternative to Y Combinator and other equity accelerators.

<p>The post Roundtable Recap: October 22 – Why $1.5M in Revenue and Profitability Still Won’t Get You VC Money first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

Adobe’s Financials

Adobe’s third quarter revenues grew 13% to $6.76 billion, ahead of the market’s estimates by one percent. Adjusted EPS of $6.13 also beat analyst estimates of $6.08.

During the quarter, Subscription revenues grew 14% over the year to $6.6 billion and product revenues were down 2% to $67 million. Services and other revenues were down 14% to $111 million.

Customer Group subscription revenues grew 14% to $6.6 billion with Business Professionals and Consumers’ subscription revenues growing 16% to $1.9 billion and Creative and Marketing Professionals subscription revenues growing 13% to $4.7 billion.

For the fourth quarter, Adobe expects revenue of $6.80-$6.85 billion and an EPS of $6.30-$6.35. The market was looking for revenues of $6.84 billion and an EPS of $6.30. For the full year, it expects revenues of $26.58-$26.63 billion and an EPS of $24.45-$24.50. The market was looking for revenues of $26.56 billion and an EPS of $24.39 for the full year.

Adobe’s Topaz Labs Acquisition

Recently, Adobe announced the acquisition of Topaz Labs, an AI-focused company that specializes in video and image enhancement models, for an estimated $340 million. Adobe realizes that AI is reshaping the way video and image content is created. Designers are working across hybrid workflows that not only leverage traditionally captured footage but enhance and integrate them with AI-generated content. There is a growing demand for higher quality content across a growing range of formats, devices, and production methods.

Dallas-based Topaz Labs was founded in 2006 by father and son Albert and Eric Yang. Together they wanted to build a solution that bridged the gap between advanced research in imaging technology and practical tools for everyday photographers. Today Topaz Labs’s tools provide a wide range of advanced AI models for video and image enhancement that analyze and improve existing visual content through upscaling, sharpening, stabilizing, restoring and other techniques to make the content essential for workflows that combine real-world capture with AI-generated imagery. Since its tools are compact, they run directly on a local device and do not require expensive infrastructure from developers.

Topaz’s products will help Adobe offer its customers the ability to not only accelerate the creation of content but also improve the quality of that content. Prior to the acquisition, Topaz Labs was privately held and did not disclose its financials. It has also not relied on venture funding and was largely bootstrapped. Some reports suggest that they were generating an annual revenue of $48 million in 2024.

Adobe and Competition from AI Tools

Adobe has been focused on integrating AI capabilities into all its tools. It is facing increasing competition from AI tools that are offering better and more enhanced content creation capabilities. It is trying to address the concern by positioning Firefly as an AI-centric media editing studio.

The acquisition of companies like Topaz Labs will help Adobe retain users by integrating high-end content enhancement capabilities directly onto the Adobe platform, thus ensuring that they retain content creators within its platform.

Adobe has also expanded its partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic to bring native Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat apps directly into ChatGPT and Claude. Users can now initiate a discussion with their preferred LLM while continuing to leverage Adobe’s backend processing to refine the creative content.

Adobe is positioning itself as the agentic infrastructure layer across models, platforms, agents, and ecosystem. By collaborating with agencies and technology companies, it is building a solution that can connect paid and owned channels, embed intelligence across platforms, and help brands improve their overall customer experience.

Adobe’s new CEO

Adobe also announced plans to appoint Mr. Anil Chakravarthy as its next President and CEO, effective December 2026. He will replace Mr. Shantanu Narayen who was the CEO for 18 years. Unlike prior CEOs for Adobe who have come from the creative side, Mr. Chakravarthy comes from an enterprise data and cloud architecture background. Prior to joining Adobe in 2020, he was the CEO at Informatica. His appointment is expected to help Adobe maintain focus on pivoting toward agentic software and integrating fragmented customer data, marketing workflows, and generative AI deployments.

By selecting the head of Customer Experience Orchestration over a traditional Creative Cloud leader, Adobe is betting on transforming itself to a company known more for its enterprise infrastructure, data, and automated workflow offerings compared with being known for its individual design software products like Photoshop or Illustrator. I don’t buy into Adobe’s logic. The market has had mixed reactions to the appointment.

Its stock is trading at $245.20 with a market capitalization of $96 billion. It was trading at year high levels of $363.70 a year ago. It had dropped to 52-week low levels of $190.12 in June this year.

Disclosure: All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research of product-market fit, channel execution, and other factors. My primary interest is in product strategy. While this may have bearing on stock movements, my writings tend to focus on long-term implications. The information presented is illustrative and educational, but should not be regarded as a complete analysis nor recommendation to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. I am not a registered investment adviser and I am not receiving compensation for this article.

<p>The post Analysis of Adobe’s Topaz Labs Acquisition first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to Pitch and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback from Sramana Mitra, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to Attend to watch and learn.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be Interested.

<p>The post October 22 – 746th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

<p>The post 745th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable Recording first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

Olly

As for our entrepreneur pitches, first we had Shreyansh Sharma from Bengaluru, India, pitch Olly, a D2C Freemium venture in which we discuss the above issue through a case study.

Trip Buddy

Next, Abhishedk Paul from Noida, India, pitched Trip Buddy, a revenue and profit-generating business.

You can listen to the recording here:

As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on most Thursdays at 8am PDT:

October 22 – Register Here.

October 29 – Register Here.

One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) is the first global virtual accelerator in the world, founded in 2010 by Silicon Valley serial Entrepreneur Sramana Mitra. It offers a fully online entrepreneurship incubation, acceleration and education resource for solo entrepreneurs and bootstrapped founders working on tech and tech-enabled services ventures. 1Mby1M does not charge equity, offers an AI Mentor available 24/7 in 57 languages, and offers a compelling alternative to Y Combinator and other equity accelerators.

<p>The post Roundtable Recap: October 15 – D2C Freemium at Pre-seed is a Recipe for Instant Rejection first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>

ServiceNow’s Financials

ServiceNow’s second quarter revenues grew 24% to $3.99 billion, ahead of the market’s forecast of $3.92 billion. EPS of $0.90 was also ahead of the market’s estimates of $0.86 per share.

By segment, subscription revenues rose 25% to $3.88 billion, ahead of the consensus estimate of $3.82 billion. Professional and Other Services revenues grew 8% to $110 million, compared to an estimate of $107.3 million. Among key metrics, its current remaining performance obligations came in at $13.2 billion, ahead of estimates of $13.03 billion. 

ServiceNow expects subscription revenues for the year to be between $15.76-$15.78 billion, and $3.975-$3.98 billion for the third quarter. Ahead of its Q3 earnings release later this month, analysts published their revised estimates. They are looking for revenues of $4.09 billion for the quarter and revenues of $16.17 billion for the year.

ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower

During the quarter, ServiceNow expanded the capabilities of its AI Control Tower. ServiceNow had launched the AI Control Tower in 2025 essentially as a visibility and management tool. Today, it has expanded the offering into a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that lets customers find AI assets across the organization, observe live metrics and alerts, govern AI-driven risk assessment across all types of AI, extend identity access governance to hyperscaler AI environments and provide cost tracking and ROI dashboards. For the second quarter, ServiceNow’s AI Annual Contract Value grew 40% q-o-q to over $1 billion.

Besides its existing integrations with Anthropic and OpenAI, ServiceNow has also expanded integrations with AWS, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and other LLM providers so that organizations can leverage governance and observability across the infrastructure layer. These partnerships and improved offerings are helping ServiceNow expand within the enterprise cybersecurity sector.

It plans on continuing to expand its presence and recently announced that it would offer six unified solutions to deliver AI-native cyber defence by December this year. The proposed solutions will cover cyber-physical security, agentic incident response, cyber risk and compliance, unified exposure management, identity and access security, and continuous vulnerability detection. The growth of AI tools within enterprises has led to increased challenges faced by security teams. Every new agent, identity, and line of code deployed leads to an exposure that needs to be addressed by a human team. Ensuring security in the setup requires governance at the same machine speed. According to its internal reports, average enterprises run more than 70 security tools, thus fragmenting insights across the extended attack surface. Through its offering, ServiceNow plans on delivering a consolidated security service that is focused on addressing AI complexities into one unified system.

Its stock is trading at $140.86 with a market capitalization of $146.2 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $192.97 a year ago. It had fallen to a 52-week low of $81.24 in April this year. The stock is still a far cry from the high it was trading at a year ago with the reduction being driven by the macro economic conditions, and the overall worry of AI’s impact on SaaS stocks. Some of the downward movement is also related to market correction as the stock has been trading at a forward P/E ratio of more than 27 compared with the industry average of 13.7.

Disclosure: All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations, and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research of product-market fit, channel execution, and other factors. My primary interest is in product strategy. While this may have bearing on stock movements, my writings tend to focus on long-term implications. The information presented is illustrative and educational, but should not be regarded as a complete analysis nor recommendation to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. I am not a registered investment adviser and I am not receiving compensation for this article. I am an investor in this company.

<p>The post ServiceNow’s AI Focused Cybersecurity Growth first appeared on Sramana Mitra.</p>