There's a lot of opportunity in enterprise, but it's really hard. I spent 20 years in enterprise myself before founding my own startup in that space. The sales cycle just kills you. I can have a product that would save enterprises hundreds of thousands a year, but it takes weeks, months, years to make a sale!
And modern B2C-oriented startup thinking doesn't get it. The sort of Lean/MVP/failfast thinking doesn't work so well when you're building for a half-dozen meetings spaced out over weeks, to match arcane localization requirements for the target customer. The reason startups rarely penetrate is because it's slow, hard, and painful - the sort of thing where big deep-pockets entrenched companies have a huge advantage.
Worse, young startup founders don't have the enterprise experience to grok why everything is so slow and so hard. It's easy to look from the outside and think those silly enterprise people must be stupid and/or malicious to make such an opaque maze of red tape. Hardly! The enterprise is filled with smart, committed, hardworking people who almost inevitably wind up in the same boat, across the many enterprise verticals.
Enterprise is valuable because it's expensive. It's expensive because it's really, really hard. Don't forget that.
On the other hand, if I can make it work as a founder, it's going to work huge.
And modern B2C-oriented startup thinking doesn't get it. The sort of Lean/MVP/failfast thinking doesn't work so well when you're building for a half-dozen meetings spaced out over weeks, to match arcane localization requirements for the target customer. The reason startups rarely penetrate is because it's slow, hard, and painful - the sort of thing where big deep-pockets entrenched companies have a huge advantage.
Worse, young startup founders don't have the enterprise experience to grok why everything is so slow and so hard. It's easy to look from the outside and think those silly enterprise people must be stupid and/or malicious to make such an opaque maze of red tape. Hardly! The enterprise is filled with smart, committed, hardworking people who almost inevitably wind up in the same boat, across the many enterprise verticals.
Enterprise is valuable because it's expensive. It's expensive because it's really, really hard. Don't forget that.
On the other hand, if I can make it work as a founder, it's going to work huge.