thanks, I am glad to could contribute something here... I have often enjoyed the thoughtful dialog this community provides...
skrish, I agree, especially for a community such as Hacker News the Yammer way is the best way. If I were to start a company right now I would look to build something that an individual within an enterprise could acquire and get value from w/o involving their IT departments. As a bonus I would try to engineer some type of social, sharing or collaboration element where that individual would get exponentially more value if their coworkers also used the technology. I would closely study the technologies enterprises use at their core and figure out a way to expand, enhance or even exploit. As an example companies like Geckoboard or Leftronic could find opportunities in the enterprise by providing tight integrations into Salesforce.com, workflow/rules (Pega) data warehouses (DB2, TeraData, etc) and analytics (Cognos) - that is how large companies like IBM, PG, and GE run and manage large parts of their organization. And they could charge 10x for those features and companies would pay. CIOs like to buy software that will logically fit within their enterprise architecture. Sure, systems like DB2, SAP, Websphere, Cognos, OmegaMon, Dynatrace and Linux on z/OS (Mainframe) don't sound as sexy as working with MongoDB, Redis and Node.js but in my experience that's where the real money is. Some would argue that the future isn't DB2 or Linux running on a mainframe, but take a look at DB2 it supports in memory key/value stores. Linux on Mainframe is probably the most stable, cost effective way to run Linux on a large scale, especially if you must have a mainframe for legacy CICS apps anyway. No CIO of a large company is going to stake their career on something mission critical that relies on Cassandra or MongoDB, they go with something that works with DB2 b/c its their corporate standard and you simply don't get fired for "Buying IBM". They may experiment with new technologies on noncritical tactical projects, but face it that's not where the real money is. Companies like iRise, Roambi, Apptio, ITKO (acquired already), Splunk, Jive and Okta have the enterprise "hook" figured out in my opinion... Sure, some are "mature" now but they all started as startups...
rdl, on hiring sales people... We are a unique bread as we are hungry and heavily coin operated. The key to hiring sales people is finding those that have a track record of success. Track records not only demonstrate their ability to do the job, but they have existing networks, know how to build partnerships and most importantly know when and where not to waste their time and your time. So where do you find us/these people? Search Linkedin profiles, poach within other enterprise software companies and your network of other founders/mentors/executives who have been sold to by or employed good sales people. I was a sales manager for Rational Software for several years, the latter is how I filled almost every opening. Interviewing sales people can be tricky, they are trained to "sell" and "close". I usually look at a couple things... 1) Do they job hop? a new job for a sales person every 2-4 years is ok, but any shorter may indicate they can not sell and just keep getting pushed out. 2) Demand to see their W2 to validate past earnings. This may sound overboard but every software company I've interviewed with recently asks every sales candidate for that. The W2 doesn't lie, you want to hire the person that consistently makes $300k+ a year. They know how to do the job and they also know where not to waste their time trying to sell something they don't understand well enough.