Consumer and Enterprise

Consumer and enterprise are increasingly blurring together.

“A decade ago there was a really sharp divide between consumer and enterprise, these spaces were highly compartmentalized. We brought a lot of consumer thinking and consumer tactics to enterprise...Gradually over the last decade or so, the barriers have really come down, to the point where I think most founders see this consumerized approach as pro... See more

Consumer markets are attractive when the customer experience is the thing that matters. As we’ll see, customer experience is a major focus these companies.

Silicon Valley enterprise startups often focus on the needs of other mid-stage tech companies as customers, rather than the large enterprises that make up much of the business world by revenue.

We also tend to be more excited by enterprise focused solutions. Big companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google are concentrated on solving large consumer problems and have all the data in the world to do that really well, so it’s harder for startups to compete.

These companies follow a playbook originally written by Amazon: serve the needs of users within a single high-frequency purchase category, and use that category as a beachhead from which to expand vertically (brands) and horizontally (categories).