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Highlights From Our Customer Development Event

By Mickey GrahamJune 26, 2014

Here at Work-Bench, we are constantly thinking about how we can better connect startups building disruptive technologies for the enterprise directly with Fortune 500 companies. Core to our mission of accelerating the adoption and development of game-changing enterprise technology, we believe it is critical to get startups and their customers - large corporations - talking earlier and more often.

While both sides have immense value to provide to each other, it can be difficult to get the conversation between the two started. Corporate executives are often strapped for time and resources, and the task of evaluating innovative software products can often fall to the wayside. Enterprise technology startups, on the other hand, struggle with complex sales cycles, difficulty navigating corporate organizational structure, and lack of immediate customer feedback.

From our Sell Days to Enterprise Founders Upfronts, we regularly hold events to get both sides of the table talking. We recently held our second Innovation in the Enterprise customer event at Work-Bench, where we lined up an all-star list of attendees representing parts of their IT departments from top-notch organizations such as Sun Chemical, Goodwin Procter, Conde Nast, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom LLP, JPMorgan Chase, BMC Software, RR Donnelley, Pfizer, and Criterion.

Twelve of our Work-Bench member companies - Enhatch, Compendia, CLO3D, Better, Mortar Data, Nodejitsu, LayerVault, True Office, Dwolla, Fuze, Pymetrics, and Monaeo - presented in a marathon sprint. We were thrilled to hear spirited questions & answer sessions after each demo, with both great conversations and questions throughout.

Member Spotlight: Monaeo

By Mickey GrahamJuly 15, 2014

We are excited to announce our Work-Bench Member Spotlight series, where we do a monthly deep dive feature into some of the unique challenges that enterprise technology startups face in building, scaling, and selling a product to the enterprise. Each of our 15 member companies at Work-Bench has been tackling big challenges in product development, marketing, and sales, and have gained immense insights and learnings to share with our community. First up - Monaeo, a location-based tax and audit protection platform.

We recently sat down with Vinay Pai, tech lead at Monaeo, to shed light on a few of the differences between consumer and enterprise software development. Monaeo’s SaaS solution enables companies to understand their mobile footprint, send early warning alerts, and deliver reports to save taxes and provide protection in tax audits. Prior to joining Monaeo, Vinay was CTO at OkCupid.com, where he helped scale their architecture to handle 10x the traffic, with millions of active users when he left. An expert in both consumer tech and enterprise software engineering, Vinay shared his thoughts on the key differences between the two domain.

1. Systems Integration

One of the most significant differences between engineering in consumer tech and enterprise tech is that enterprise software needs to integrate with a customer’s legacy technology and their other third-party vendors. In enterprise software development, there are many more external systems that a development team needs to prepare for. Customers will often require reports and integrations with their other third-party vendors, and a product offering must fit into a customers internal workflows, practices, and systems. “It doesn’t matter how great your system is if they have to go in and change everything - a large organization simply won’t use your product if it’s not compatible with their established processes and practices,” says Vinay.

Similar to consumer tech, it is essential in enterprise software development to come up with a core architecture that makes it very easy to build on top of. In consumer tech, developers are generally dealing with a feature rich system and the challenge is architecting an underlying system that is powerful and efficient. In enterprise tech, however, developers need to build an information architecture that can consume and output data without bleeding into core systems. A unique aspect of being in the enterprise tech space is that customers will dictate how they need the product to work. In the HR space, a customer may need a startup's solution to integrate with PeopleSoft, while another may be using Workday or ADP. If the product doesn’t have a robust enough core system, developers will need to continue writing new code and reinventing the wheel in order to keep up.

2. User Testing

Another key differentiating factor in enterprise software development is user testing. In the consumer space, one can generally build a new feature, push it live, and see what happens. In making a consumer design change, developers can build a simple version, roll it out to 5-10% of users, and measure the impact. This is not a luxury developers have in the enterprise space, and without the benefit of being able to roll out redesigns and new features to users seamlessly, a big challenge is understanding what exactly to build. The key to solving this problem, according to Vinay, is a close integration of product, sales, and development.

One way Monaeo gets around these customer testing challenges is by getting product feedback during the sales cycle. By incorporating mockups and prototypes in their demos, their sales team can receive valuable customer feedback while pitching the product, and understand which features the customer wants to have by the time they are ready to close the deal. Given the length of enterprise sales cycles, this typically means that a sales team should be a month or two ahead of the development team. That being said, it is crucial not to over-promise and under-deliver.

For this to work effectively, Vinay suggests keeping the information flowing in both directions. It is important for developers and founders to sit in on sales calls and to provide mockups and powerpoints for demos, as well as for the business team to know where the development team is on the product roadmap. Sitting in on sales calls every couple weeks allows the team to see what people care about, what resonates, and what questions come up. A close collaboration of the business, product, and development units allows a flow of information that can serve as effective user testing.

3. Scalability

In scaling consumer products, developers rarely add a giant batch of users to their system overnight. Besides the rare case of showing up on the front page of Hacker News or Reddit and needing to handle the sudden influx of traffic, consumer tech companies generally tend to grow linearly or exponentially in a more predictable model.

As an enterprise SaaS company, however, developers may be adding tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands users simultaneously upon closing a large enterprise contract - such as Box’s recent 300,000 person deal with General Electric. With a paying customer, there is more pressure on enterprise technology companies to support the scale of an enterprise wide deployment without crashing. Enterprise companies need to do their absolute best when it comes to testing and load generation, and Vinay suggests taking a more phased approach as far as possible. Batching users and managing the provisioning of users on to a system will help avoid many of these scalability issues.

4. Pace of Development

Working with a large organization as a customer can dramatically slow down the pace of software development, and there are different expectations for the pace at which the process should move. There are many formal systems that need to be checked off as an enterprise software vendor, which can dramatically slow down the development process. Stakeholders often include an IT department, a security department, and other departments, who will probe with questions around how a service is hosted, what a disaster recovery plan looks like, and more. Oftentimes, the customer’s boilerplate forms and processes are outdated, rendering them ineffective and slowing down the procurement process even more.

If a customer wants an integration with one of their vendors, what could be a simple quick fix may actually take months to implement. What may normally take a week to set up -  like configuring a csv - can be a painfully slow process, involving the customer, other third-party vendors, and a 15 page document with requirements and specifications on what format a csv file should be generated. Even once the enterprise product gets into the hands of a customer’s development team to integrate, it can be a 3 month process - if they are moving quickly.

5. Security

In the consumer space, there are very few laws on how data is handled. It is very self-regulating, and the biggest motivation for not being careful with user data is the threat of a breach, negative publicity, and the loss of user trust. With federal regulations for data privacy, however, especially as it relates to personally identifiable information (PII) and material non-public information (MNPI), enterprise technology products have a number of much more formal requirements. 

Interestingly, a lot of the more formal requirements enterprise customers want to see covered are antiquated, increasingly so with the transition from on-premise to cloud-based software. There are a lot of internal regulations that are asking for specific requests, which do not address underlying concerns such as having a network-based intrusion detection system (not relevant if on an AWS system). The key to overcoming these challenges, according to Vinay, is getting to the right people who understand the technology, addressing the underlying concerns, and playing by their rules when possible.

Of Dwight Merriman, Co-founder & Chairman of MongoDB

By Mickey GrahamJune 17, 2014

Last Wednesday at Work-Bench, we kicked off our Enterprise Founders Upfront event series with Dwight Merriman, New York City enterprise tech legend and Co-founder & Chairman of MongoDB. In an interview with Jon Lehr, our Venture Director, Dwight shared his insights on everything from growing a developer community, to MongoDB’s unique go-to-market strategy, to his thoughts on NYC’s growing enterprise technology community. We’ve posted the video in its entirety below, but here were three points that we loved:

1. Build something great

Regardless of what you’re doing, you need a core group of people that are excited by your product or service. While MongoDB has a leading developer community and a full time team built around this function, in the early days all of their developers had to be evangelists. They were essentially telling a group of people, “here is something, download it, you’ve never heard of it, it’s kind of early stage,” but you should use it anyway. The only way to overcome this challenge was ultimately building a great product their core audience was truly excited about. As Dwight said, “if you want something to propagate without a lot of sales and marketing, for some audience it has to be great. If it’s good I’ll use it, but I won’t tell my friends about. If it’s great, I’ll use it and tell my friends about it.”

2. Don’t be incremental

A recurring theme throughout the interview - and what might very well be the secret for building three billion dollar plus companies - was “don’t be incremental.” In response to three questions, Dwight touched upon the same piece of advice of avoiding incremental improvements. If you’re a founder looking for opportunities to start a company, make sure it is truly disruptive, solves an existing pain point, and improves upon the current solution by an order of magnitude. Instead of thinking ‘how do I improve this product 10%?,’ he advised founders to think ‘how do I improve this product 10x?’ As Dwight recommended, you “should push harder,” and “be more audacious.” Along these lines, it was interesting to hear Dwight say “you can force creativity and innovation” - citing the idea that if you’re locked in a room for 12 hours and told to come up with 10 ideas, eventually you will.

3. New York City enterprise tech is at an inflection point

Lastly, we were excited to hear Dwight’s thoughts on New York City’s emerging enterprise technology ecosystem, and we were thrilled to hear him say, “I think a lot of the enterprise tech startups in New York are in this building.” Further responding to where he would want to see the ecosystem in 5 years, he commented: “I think we need office space, and places to work. I think [Work-Bench] is great. It puts an emphasis on it. We’ve seen tremendous progress in general with what we might think of as entrepreneurial ventures or startups whatever the space is. The amount of stuff out there, compared to DoubleClick days, is just so much more... people are moving here, there are a lot of great things happening. It will happen, it will percolate, the seeds are planted.” We couldn’t agree more, and we couldn’t be more excited to be driving the future of enterprise technology here at Work-Bench in NYC.

Watch the full video below, and don’t miss our next Enterprise Founders Upfront event with Gaurav Dhillon of SnapLogic on July 17th.

By Brianna Smith and Mickey Graham August 22, 2013

Work-Bench champions enterprise technology through a cooperative workspace for members, education, and a bridge program that connects exceptional startups to customers, partners, and investors. At the heart of Work-Bench are a select number of world-class Associates who execute and lead projects to realize Work-Bench’s core mission: to attract, scale, and invest in the most promising enterprise technology startups. Integral to this mission, Associates partner with experienced Directors to ensure the success of the Work-Bench community.

Work-Bench Associates complete a two year tour of duty with the opportunity to focus on multiple functions of the cooperative including, but not limited to, Design, Media, Venture, Operations, and Business Development. Each Associate is hired within a specific area and trained by a lead mentor during their first year. In addition to managing their respective function, Associates have the ability to collaborate across other disciplines on a project basis. Proven second year Associates are trusted with the responsibility to create, implement, and manage unique new initiatives.