New Enterprise Investments

 

Our New Enterprise Investing Approach

Over their lifetimes, our partners have made investments in MuleSoft, Jaspersoft, RelateIQ, NuoDB, Evernote, Figure Eight, Kinetica, Platform9, Folloze, Totango, Viewics and more. Their investments speak to a radically changing view of what enterprise tech means today. Not only is technology fundamentally changing how business applications are built and delivered, but also how businesses market, sell, manufacture and service their customers.

Canvas Partner Gary Little has been investing in enterprise software and services for many years. Notably, Gary led the Series A investment in MuleSoft in 2006 while a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures and served on its board till shortly after MuleSoft went public in 2017. It is his view that the new enterprise of today no longer has a data center, relying instead on SaaS applications built on scale-out cloud-computing resources such as AWS. With an increasingly rich and deep set of applications and capabilities instantly available to users by opening a browser or clicking in an app store, vendors can side step IT and sell directly to end-user customers utilizing disruptive lead-gen methods (e.g. freemium) with self-service solutions. This shift from costly relationship selling to low friction high velocity business models is predicated upon developing great products, typically offered as a cloud service, that are intuitive, easy to deploy and use, and don’t require costly proof of concepts, systems engineers and professional services.

Doubling revenues by doubling the number of sales reps is a long and costly slog, and relying solely on internal engineering resources to advance a product roadmap is an invitation for competitors to leap frog your efforts. Rather, new enterprises invest heavily in APIs to extend their reach via content, distribution, manufacturing, fulfillment and service partnerships. They nimbly accelerate and advance their product roadmaps by leveraging APIs to integrate best-of-breed functionality via cloud-product and crowd-solution partners. Said differently, competitive advantage will increasingly be won by those organized as “software-defined corporations” that are best able to programmatically leverage the burgeoning API economy.

We see every day non-trivial opportunities to fundamentally improve the ways in which modern business is transacted. For the first time ever, the Fortune 500 can be as innovative as anyone, and vice versa. The new enterprise is in that way a continuum, and we believe the biggest enterprise tech investment opportunity ever.

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