The Successful Startup and Enterprise Partnership | Greymatter

The rise of new technologies has created an opportunity for enterprises to innovate, improve efficiency and provide differentiated customer experiences. For faster technology adoption and better service and support, enterprises often partner with startup companies to maintain competitive advantage. However, the path to a successful partnership involves several learning lessons.

At Greyscale, our annual conference that connects CXO leaders with enterprise founders, Greylock’s Sarah Guo discusses how enterprise and startup leaders can effectively work together. Below, we share the four concerns all enterprises have when working with startups: scale, security, spend and supportability.

To listen to the full presentation, tune in to the latest Greymatter where she maps out the journey of a successful partnership between enterprises and startup companies. Follow along with the slide deck on SlideShare here.

For more information, Greylock published a whitepaper that explores the challenges and opportunities from both sides. The full report can be found here.

The Gap Of The Four S’s

Scale

Over and over, we heard from large enterprises that scale is their biggest concern when working with startups. Startups need to be able to scale infrastructure and users, across geography and manageability. Enterprise leaders want to know that a startup has deployed at this scale with other customers, and if not, be confident that the engineering team can build to scale.

Security

On top of every enterprise leader’s list was security and within that, there are three different themes:

• Regulation: Protection of data as a company is priority, but it is also regulation driven. If a startup company wants to work with an enterprise, the startup needs to have similar regulations as well.
• Access Control Management: Startup companies need to consider who has access to what parts of the product in a big company. This usually involves building in sophisticated access control earlier on than expected.
• Basic FAQs: Startups must be able to answer a set of questions about their company and how they treat customer data. For example, who has access to customer data? And what protections does the data have in where it resides now?

Spend

Enterprises have several thousand employees and customers. Pricing models that are appropriate for the first thirty developers or first hundred users might not work financially for larger enterprises. Startups looking to partner with enterprises must offer pricing models that are realistic and feasible, aligning with the value the startup creates for the business.

Supportability

Enterprises want to work with startups that have the organization in place including capabilities such as 24/7 customer service. To serve large enterprises, startups will need to bring on these capabilities. The best thing a startup can do is to figure out what enterprises are going to need, prepare for those needs and build in parallel to that.

Greymatter shares perspectives and stories from some of the world’s top technology entrepreneurs and business leaders. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more about how startups can successfully partner with enterprises, be sure to listen to: Reinventing Customer Service with the Gladly Founders Joseph Ansanelli and Michael Wolfe and Rethinking Transportation Safety with Nauto CEO Stefan Heck.