All of a sudden, SaaS and enterprise seem hot.  Billion dollar valuations and billion dollar exits do seem to do that.

A new meme among VCs from Reid Hoffman to Sequoia on is that the enterprise is somehow overlooked, because it isn’t as ‘cool’ as consumer internet.

Some of these very smart, very rich guys really don’t know what they are talking about.

Business and enterprise software is a big category, and has been for a very long time.  Yes, most kids just want to copy what they know, another photo or travel app.  But there are 1000s of great folks with domain expertise in business-y software who would love to do a start-up and disrupt their industry.

The problem?  Enterprise SaaS isn’t a great fit for current VC models.

Why?

  • Basically, if you have a proven track record, it’s very easy to get funded for enterprise/ SaaS, and always has been.  Marc Benioff at Salesforce, after success at Oracle.  The team at Workday after Peoplesoft.  Josh James, etc.  It’s perceived to be low risk.
  • It’s also very easy to get funded in SaaS once you hit about $5-$10m in ARR — and today, at a very high valuation.  The pieces come together.  The lead flow is predictable, the metrics make sense.  The revenue is truly recurring.  The capital is about scaling.  It’s perceived to be low risk.

But there a yawning investing gap otherwise:

  • Who really wants to fund another talent management SaaS company, for example, that is pre-revenue, but needs $10m to get off the ground?  Some, but very few.
  • The related corollary, is you can’t do cr*p in SaaS with a $750k seed round.  You need $2-$4m pre-revenue to get anywhere and $10m to really go big.
  • The related related issue, is that in enterprise/SaaS, traction = $$$.  In consumer internet, early traction = users.

The appeal of consumer internet for seed and Series A investors is exactly the fact you can get to some modest amount of traction on a trivial amount of money.  Y Combinator is the ultimate example.  At EchoSign, we were nowhere until we’d spent $1m and nowhere interesting until we’d spent $2m — and we were pretty scrappy.

Actually, what a lot of these VC guys really want is for folks to get traction in business-y, freemium-ish lightweight apps, get traction, and then invest.  Or somehow get to $2-$4m in ARR, and then invest.  Nothing wrong with that — worked for ZenDesk, worked for Box, etc.

But when VCs say enterprise is somehow overlooked, they’re wrong and not helping.  Because they don’t really mean funding too many pre-revenue enterprise, or true SaaS plays, me thinks not.

So VCs, I say, put your money where you mouth is.  Invest in more Series A SaaS companies.

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