The Day in SaaS 07.16.21: Twitter Back to Office; Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson Make Millions in SaaS; Watch What You Say on Slack

• Some Twitter employees return to offices in New York, San Francisco. Twitter and Square were some of the first to seemingly go “remote for life” after Covid hit. Fast forward to today, the offices have reopened, and “An internal company survey found that 45% of employees in San Francisco and 63% in New York intend to return to the office, even if just one day per week.”

• Who Is Melanie Perkins, the Canva Billionaire Who Plans to Donate Her Wealth Away?. An interesting profile. The employee pool is only 5%. And who knew “some of her first investors were Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson”.

• Indian entrepreneurs are returning from Silicon Valley to invest in Bengaluru. Alongside Bengaluru’s 14 unicorns, the city also has 64 “soonicorns”: startups worth over $100 million that are candidates to become unicorns.

• Databases will be a $100B market. Neo4j’s CEO just needs a sliver. MongoDB aside, databases are the largest Cloud and SaaS market we don’t talk that much about — as investors. But if you’re building software, it’s as important as it gets. That could be about to change.

• What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson? Remember when it could do anything? Or so IBM said.

• Veeva Systems (NYSE:VEEV): What Investors Can Learn From This Successful Enterprise. “Veeva initially raised $7 million from investors, but only $3 million was put to use as Peter, unlike most startup founders, believed capital scarcity would help the company spend money wisely. In addition, Veeva never had a long term plan during its first year in business. Instead, it had quarterly plans.”

• Cracking Private Companies: Investors Buy Into Tribe Capital’s Vision of Disrupting Silicon Valley Itself. The relatively new VC fund raises $1.5B in just 3 years.

• Netflix Fires Marketing Execs for Criticizing Bosses Over Slack. Watch what you say over Slack. If you wouldn’t say it outload, don’t type it.

• Raise Workplace: Demand for Top SF Office Space Will Soon Be Back to Pre-Pandemic Levels. The actual data. Leasing for top tech office space is almost back to where it was pre-Covid.

• Revolut $800 Million Funding Round Signifies Hot Fintech Market. $1 out of every $5 raised globally last quarter went to the fintech industry for a total of $33.7 billion, per CB Insights. With Stripe and Klarna, fintech boasts two of the five most valuable unicorns in the world.