TC Sessions Pancake Breakfast: Software Startups Drive Enterprise Change with Education and Openness
Enterprise startups are building the tools that help their customers to create an agile modern enterprise that adapts quickly to market changes. But the enterprise isn’t always open to that change, or even aware of the benefits of that change, said Frederic Lardinois, writer and news editor at TechCrunch, in this episode of The New Stack Analysts recorded at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise held on Sept. 5 in San Francisco. This is a primary challenge for enterprise software companies today.
“I don’t think [education] is happening enough, especially in the enterprises,” Lardinois said. “A lot of them are wary of open source and aren’t contributing back to the community.”
It’s not enough to simply adopt modern tooling, enterprises must also embrace the same DevOps workflows and software delivery practices that the software startups they work with are built on.
To help enterprises make this transition startups must help educate the enterprise on these best practices. They must be good at telling the story of their own products in order to see wide adoption into large organizations.
TC Sessions Pancake Breakfast: Software Startups Drive Enterprise Change with Education and Openness
But startups must also be careful not to take on too much of the cost of education to soon in their business development, said Sameer Patel, former CEO, Kahuna. If they are early to the game, however, the payoff can be huge. Investors are looking for companies that know how to evangelize their own products into the enterprise.
“Anytime that you need to educate a customer, it can’t just be the founder that’s good at evangelization, it has to be everyone on the team,” Katherine Boyle, principal at General Catalyst, said. “It’s not just a sales focus. The engineers have to be closer to the customer, they have to be doing that hard work… That’s what we’re looking for and that’s how we justify the investment. Everyone on the team can communicate this paradigm shift in a very succinct way.”
Both sides — enterprise customer and software startup — must remain open and adaptive in order to stay competitive, attract talent and generate a return for investors.
The people and technologies that help enterprise software startups grow was the focus of this recent panel discussion at The New Stack pancake breakfast and podcast at TC Sessions: Enterprise. TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams moderated the discussion, which was sponsored by GitLab. Panelists included:
1. Frederic Lardinois / writer and news editor / TechCrunch
2. Katherine Boyle / Principal / General Catalyst
3. Melissa Pancoast / founder and CEO / The Beans
4. Sameer Patel / former CEO / Kahuna
5. Sid Sijbrandij / co-founder and CEO / GitLab
