Startups Focusing On Enterprise Applications

Any other HN&#x27;ers focused on enterprise software with their startups? Personally, I love working in this space. Consumer apps bore me; enterprise apps strike me as having more interesting problems to solve, as well as creating more value.<p>That said, there&#x27;s an interesting point at the confluence of consumer apps and &quot;the enterprise&quot; and we&#x27;re kinda working there. For example, two of our products could kinda-sorta-loosely be described as &quot;Facebook for the Enterprise&quot; and &quot;Reddit for the Enterprise&quot;. There&#x27;s definitely inspiration taken from the consumer-app world, but the fun part is taking that, some really cutting-edge semantic integration tech, mixing all of that with existing enterprise systems, and applying it to solving problems in gnarly new ways.

None of these feel like game changers (and a lot feel like vaguely defined cloud management &#x2F; gmail replacements)<p>Silly idea - I realised yesterday that the kickstarter model could apply to corporate budget allocation. A department puts it&#x27;s core features and it&#x27;s desired features up on the internal board, and <i>other budget holders</i> allocate some of their budget to those that they want to support.<p>it&#x27;s basically trying to move corporate budgets out of communist style command and control and into a more open approach.<p>I toyed with some setups yesterday because it&#x27;s different and would actually make change in the organisation (admittedly a hard sell)<p>I just would like to see something trying to change our organisations

Most of these seem like old familiar tried and tested ideas. That is because that is exactly what Enterprises need. To prepare a very specific business plan with solid return on investments, you will need to find someone else who has successfully implemented that same idea before.<p>Truly novel and innovative business cultures require tolerating a certain degree of failures and dead-end projects. The degree of uncertainty of such endeavours makes the Wall Street nervous. They prefer steady and reliable returns on their investments.<p>So it is not surprising that startups are focussing on a cash rich customer base. But it is unfortunate that they are not the fountains of innovation as one would have hoped for.