These are all fantastic answers. Some points to add on this list from what I hear on Sand Hill: Enabling the enterprise: Enterprise software and infrastructure is a great place to start a company right now. On the software front, there’s still a lot of serious, structural economic inefficiencies that are waiting to be solved with how co-workers communicate and work together. For infrastructure, the rise of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and advances in technology like flash storage continue to disrupt the very large enterprise IT industry.Enterprise software and hardware startups have some advantages over their consumer internet counterparts. The existence of strong sales channels and well-defined monetization models allows enterprise companies run by veterans to get to revenue a lot quicker than many consumer internet startups.Revenue gives us VCs data that we can use to better understand the growth of the company, and that makes us much likelier to invest. The presence of recent enterprise software (Yammer, Jive) and hardware (Isilon, Palo Alto Networks) exit comps (see: Valuation using multiples) also allows VCs to better understand how things can turn out.If you’re willing to go a little out of the box, being an infrastructure startup with a freemium model is very interesting. One of the big problems with selling to enterprise customers is the tendency to get locked into painfully long sales cycles. Guys like New Relic have blazed the trail for infrastructure startups who want to move away from traditional sales teams and towards automated, self-serve acquisition programs. This can reduce average sales cycle time and has dramatic implications on Cost of goods sold and margins, both of which are critically important metrics to us evil suits (and should be to you as well). Information Security: Security, particularly federal and enterprise security, is undergoing a seismic shift due to the highly sophisticated nature of modern hackers. State sponsored hackers in particular are a huge, unsolved problem – as are their standard weapons of choice, the APT attack.Like other types of enterprise solutions, enterprise/SME information security startups benefit from a set of clear comps (PA Networks, Silvertail Systems) and well-understood revenue models. Startupswith strong product teams also have the benefit of guarding their progress with barriers to entry. Fields like cryptography and network security are fairly arcane, and a small team of young, ex-NSA cryptoanalysts can still potentially outbuild large – and sometimes ponderous – incumbents like Symantec.Securitystartups tend to struggle at locking in strong recurring revenue though, given that security is rarely proactively purchased unless a company is facing legal exposure due to compliance regulations or the like. This is a big problem because it can make your quarterly revenue very “lumpy,” and make it hard for us to see sustainable growth emerge out of the tumult.The big shoe to drop in the next year will be around FireEye and its imminent IPO. If things go well, you could see a lot of venture money flooding into security thanks to the presence of another strong comp. 3D Printing: 3D …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
