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Comment by pquerna | Hacker News Reader

Something I've been thinking about:

> A perception of winner-take-all markets

> Enterprise-oriented companies raise much less private capital;

> The average enterprise-oriented company (where the primary customer is a business) is worth $2.5 billion, less than half the average consumer company.

The enterprise space doesn't seem to be following the winner-take-all mentality as compared to consumer startups. At some point you are still hiring regionalized enterprise sales reps, and each of them can only have so much quota.

Is there a enterprise-unicorn where they don't have traditional-enterprise-sales? Where their distribution/acquisition closely follows consumer companies?

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Depends on your definition of "enterprise". For me, two of the characteristics of enterprise software that define it are: it encompasses company wide operations and the purchasing decision is made by a c-level exec. For example, selling Slack to a marketing department or an engineering team is _not_ enterprise. That's simply B2B SaaS. Selling CRM so that the entire salesforce of a company is enterprise software. Following my definition, there are very few companies who don't sell enterprise software without an actual person involved.

Also, if you see the logo of a large company for something like a project management tool (let's use Basecamp as an example), it's most likely one department out of thousands use the tool...not the whole company. I suspect many people misunderstand this.

Interesting tidbit - ever wonder why there are so many Director's, VP's, etc in the sales or product organizations of enterprise software companies? It's because no C-level exec of a large business (think F500) would converse with an individual of an vendor who didn't have a similarly looking title to their own.

I believe Slack is an enterprise unicorn? So is Atlassian (I hear they also don't follow the usual traditional sales process)

https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing

Atlassian probably fits the bill more and has proven revenue on it, while Slack is more... "SaaS" in my mind, and really hasn't proven long term revenue traction yet, though it is certainly looking good for them.

Depending on the product, enterprise customers also publically and strategically source from multiple vendors to ensure they're not beholden to vendor lock in.

Consumers rarely act in so organized and thoughtful a pattern.

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