I spoke earlier today in an extensive podcast with friend and venture investor Mike Dauber of Amplify Partners about what's going on in the enterprise space.
Mike has been working in the space since the late 90s and has been a venture investor since 2008.
Most of the tech bubble talk and focus on the unicorns has centered on consumer companies. I was able to ask Mike how much of a spillover effect he was seeing into the enterprise space.
Here's a quick summary of Mike's points which are part of the podcast:
- Despite the current bubble dynamics, he tries to keep his investee company management teams focused on key milestones in order to keep their feet on the ground.
- It used to be the case in the enterprise space that you hoped your venture-backed company made it far enough to get acquired by IBM, Cisco, HP, Oracle, Microsoft, and EMC. All those companies (with the exception of perhaps VMWare) are having difficulty adapting to the big secular shifts affecting enterprise software.
- In the short-term, we're likely going to see more fragmentation in the whole enterprise space. Some big companies. Lots of mid-sized companies. And a bunch of small ones. It used to only the big gorillas like IBM and a bunch of small fry.
- The key enterprise areas of data, storage, security, and storage are completely up for grabs. There is enormous opportunity now for the new Ciscos of enterprise to emerge over the next 5 years.
- Mike offers a few names of specific companies in the first wave of enterprise companies coming up he thinks have a big chance of success including one he's backed called Datadog.
- Although his sense is we could be close to a short-term top in terms of funding available, he continues to believe we are part of a secular long-term bull market for enterprise companies who can make their mark for a long time.
