Editor’a Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners. You can follow him on Twitter @semil
“In the Studio” taped a special segment this weekend during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, welcoming backstage an engineer, PhD dropout, entrepreneur, founder, and long-time investor in enterprise IT to talk about current trends in the space.
Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, has amassed an impressive career in the enterprise field, helping found VitalSigns and investing in companies such as Jive, Nimble Storage, and Palo Alto Networks, among many others. While many folks believe the enterprise space is hot all of a sudden, the reality is that entrepreneurs, such as Nir Zuk, who co-founded Palo Alto Networks, and investors like Goetz, among others, who back them, have been toiling away in the space for the last decade, if not longer, and show no signs of slowing down.
In this brief chat with Goetz, we discuss how enterprise SaaS startups are actually picking up and adapting techniques around customer acquisition, customer retention, cohort analysis, and design from consumer-facing startups in order to gain a stronger foothold against enterprise giants. Additionally, with so much opportunity in enterprise IT, from infrastructure all the way up to services and applications, Goetz believes the opportunities will last for many years before fierce competition among startups — the kind we’re seeing on the consumer side — trickles over into the IT stack. Finally, Goetz say while there is a lack of coverage of enterprise IT on the tech blogs, that may change soon, as well, with the best information emerging from those who currently working in the space today.