By Alex Williams, TechCrunch – September 12, 2012 at 06:18PM
In a discussion on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today, Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz said it is shocking that more startups are not focused on the enterprise.
It’s the notion of reinventing the IT stack that holds such opportunity, Goetz said. And it’s an opportunity for everyone in the Disrupt audience. Companies like Salesforce.com have helped pave the way with SaaS models that build revenues based on subscriptions.
“The business model is now a weapon for all of you,” Goetz said. “It allows you to disrupt legacy vendors. It makes it very difficult for them to compete.”
There is also a major tech shift happening in the market, Goetz said. You have Flash becoming important for the server. Virtualization is now standard in the enterprise. You have new architectures.
Startups in the enterprise space face a different dynamic. They have only one or two competitors, and they are usually legacy providers.
“It is almost blue ocean,” Goetz said.
Palo Alto Networks Founder Nir Zuk came on stage to join Goetz. He said it takes two years to build an enterprise product. It takes two months to build a consumer service.
“How can you be proud of that?” Zuk asked.