Faking it is when you see another company out there, and you say, “We just want to be like them. What’s their tagline? Just use the messaging from their website.’” That will never work, because it’s not authentic to you.

The guidance to “fake it until you make it” is “the worst business advice ever,” says Sabrina Horn, founder of Silicon Valley PR firm Horn Group (now part of Finn Partners), C-suite advisor, and author of the new book, Make It, Don’t Fake It: Leading with Authenticity for Real Business Success. …

By Sam Fort, Kevin Tu, and Delaney Ugelstad, DFJ Growth

DFJ Growth is excited to announce our investment in the $70 million Series C of Salt Security as it advances the modern security paradigm for APIs.

For decades, cybersecurity has been a constant game of cat-and-mouse, with new software architectures demanding new security layers as hackers find novel ways to infiltrate their targets. We recently partnered with market leaders across several emerging threat vectors. For example, the proliferation of IoT endpoints led to our investment in Armis, and the inflection of containers and Kubernetes led to our investment in Sysdig…

Startups are fun. You push a button and something happens because there’s not a lot of bureaucracy and it’s a very tight feedback loop. The ability to be able to say, ‘Okay, let’s do this or let’s write this function or add this feature’ and you just go do it — that is very gratifying.

When entrepreneurs recount their inspiration for a startup, their stories usually don’t begin on death’s door.

But that was where Ali Diab was in 2013 when he was rushed to the emergency room with a life-threatening condition. Diab’s intestines had twisted up, cutting off the…

By Carol Wentworth, Marketing Partner

We all know what “sticky” means when it comes to online experiences. But what is “sticky” when it comes to telling stories about your business, products and customers? It’s about putting stories together that are memorable, that have longevity, and that land in top media in front of many eyeballs. Sticky storytelling is an art — but it’s an art with a ton of work behind it. We asked Trevor Hammond, VP of communications for Planet, and Mike Baker, global communications lead for Formlabs, to share the sticky-storytelling strategies they devised over the years.

Quality over quantity

Ideally…

By Randy Glein and Sam Shapiro, DFJ Growth

We’ve been preparing for this moment at DFJ Growth for the past seven years. That’s when we started our journey with cryptocurrency and its underlying technology called blockchain, including our first investment in the category. Since then, we’ve continued to build conviction that blockchains, which at their core are decentralized digital ledgers for tracking all sorts of transactions, will transform the way industries record and manage the ownership of tangible and intangible assets.

Nearly every industry is likely to be impacted by blockchain, including initial early adopters in sectors like financial services…

By Sam Fort, Kevin Tu, and Delaney Ugelstad, DFJ Growth

DFJ Growth is thrilled to announce our investment in Sysdig, the emerging leader in container and cloud-first security, as part of its $188 million Series F funding round.

At DFJ Growth we’ve been actively investing over the past decade in the rise of the cloud. We have partnered with companies including Box, Yammer, and Anaplan in the early days of cloud apps, to more recent leaders such as Unity, Stripe, and Hopin, all based on the thesis that the cloud is driving a profound shift in how businesses operate.

Though…

The role of internal communications in a growth company is much more than sending out employee newsletters. As internal communications consultant Daria Kissner explains, one of the practice’s responsibilities is to reinforce company values that help inspire, inform, and connect colleagues — especially at a time when real-life connections among coworkers are hard to come by.

By Carol Wentworth

Not even a global pandemic can stop IPOs, assuming market trends and financials align. But the pandemic adds new wrinkles to the complex process of managing communications around an IPO, as the talented communications leaders at two companies well know. In September 2020, Unity Technologies and Sumo Logic went public; but years before, Amanda Taggart (former global director of PR and communications, Unity) and Melissa Liton (senior director of global communications, Sumo Logic) began the long process of planning out how the event would be communicated, including bringing employees into the eventual IPO celebrations.

We asked Taggart…