Paul Graham Gets Vague when Boston needs analysis
buzzboston.wordpress.com
buzzboston.wordpress.com
You can't be innovative by thinking that just because something hasn't been done a certain way before that it shouldn't be done that way.
Real innovation REQUIRES violating some generally-accepeted principle of how things should be done.
Real innovation is one thing that that the current crop of enterprise software is largely missing.
Based on what? You don't think virtualization is real innovation? Spend some time learning about Netezza, Endeca, ITA, BladeLogic, Scalent, VMWare... before making blanket statements that are blatantly inaccurate.
You could have mentioned salesforce.com. That would be a valid counter to my original argument.
Seriously though, one counterpoint could be that, Apple and Google - companies that had two of the biggest IPOs in history are not really enterprise software companies.
I mean it in the sense of the system which stores all of the business information for a company or other organization (the "enterprise".) It keeps track of things like "who are the employees" and "who are the customers" and "what inventory do we have" and "where is it" and "where's the money" and things like that. This includes systems which can be described as accounting, customer-relationship management, human-resources management, etc.
You could also call it "Business Information Management" systems although the phrase "Enterprise Software" is more common (at least among my peer group.)
Companies like Seibel, Peoplesoft, SAP, Great Plains, Oracle, sell this stuff for a lot of money to big companies who then spend absurd amounts of money hiring poor idiots like me to work with it. In fact, that's exactly what I've done for a large part of the last ten years, for two different Fortune-100 companies, and I've had plenty of opportunities to observe these systems and think about ways of improving things
The biggest innovation in this type of software has been the move from using a client program on each user's desktop to web-based but their web interfaces aren't very good.
While virtualization may be very important to how an enterprise runs its software it's not directly applicable to the software itself. The employee who goes to a web page to sign up for a new health insurance plan doesn't know or care whether the web page is coming from a VM or a Sun box or a Dell box - but the fact that he CAN sign up for a new health insurance plan online or request a different schedule or generate a verification of employment letter to use in getting a mortgage.(1) THAT is important to him.
And that's the kind of enterprise software I'm talking about.
(1) All three are innovative features that the enterprise systems most people use don't have.
(Aside: Ask Bill Gates what can be built by a college dropout.)
As for Bill Gates, that is an old example. If you look at even the last 15 years, the most successful enterprise companies (VMWare, Siebel, SalesForce, ...) were founded by seasoned, college-educated founders.
If it's the other 7 million small businesses ($1 to $100 million annual revenue, many outside of SOX enforcement), then I disagree. These people have literally been dying for good software forever. They are already leapfrogging the enterprise software bandits and installing their own mission critical systems, many based on open source technology. They simply can't wait for or afford "enterprise" solutions. Their viral chain? Word of mouth, industry journals, chambers of commerce, tech groups, country clubs, lawyers, accountants,...
Just because there is a whole new "Web 2.0 space" doesn't mean that those who have been driving the economy for ages have disappeared. This sleeping giant needs to be fed and its providers probably stand to gain the most.
Enterprise + Web 2.0? You better believe it.
Beyond that, "enterprise" and "startup" - at least to my mind - don't have a large intersection. If I want something enterprisey, I want it from a big, established IBM type company who will be there 10 years from now, and still be interested in my business.
Like a lot of other people in this group you are confusing web startups with startups.
Here is a list of Boston area Enterprise startups that went public this year: Airvana, Starent Networks, Bladelogic, Netezza, AcmePacket . They could not have done so without real customers and real revenue (not traffic, not unique visitors).
Do you think the people who run IBM or GE are stupid? Probably not... What they are not, however, is "hackers". That's a vague term too, so I guess debating it is meaningless, but please don't put words in my mouth with regards to "stupid people". There are plenty of smart people whose footsteps I wouldn't wish to tread.
As to why PG is focused on web companies, I think it's pretty natural, given his background and what YC does in terms of investment (15K doesn't get you a lot if you're building something capital intensive). Lots of us are also interested in this idea of startups becoming more widely possible, which also means we're interested, once again, in low capital requirements.
So, yeah, there's other stuff out there, but for most of us, the web is where the action is at.
In Silicon Valley, you'll get more offers from investors for funding since the investors are more aggressive, and as a result, you're more likely to get a fair market price for equity in your company. More importantly, the quality of the investors in Silicon Valley is likely higher since they have more experience with them and have more connections that could help your company in the future.
I don't think there's any way to compare investors in Silicon Valley with those in other areas without the Silicon Valley investors coming out on top.
It seems quite reasonable that riskier investments should have greater potential reward. (Otherwise, why take on the additional risk?)