Enterprise Market Entrepreneurship not sexy? Making money is the absolute truth.

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Company Cloud service Provider Box founder and CEO Allen Levis (left) and startups founder David MACCU (right)

The news of Facebook's $1 billion purchase of Instagram is a boost to the size of Silicon Valley VCs and start-ups. Instagram's mobile internet social start-up has become the latest craze in Silicon Valley, and has long lived in the media spotlight, even though few of these companies are currently making a profit without hampering the investment boom.

But in another market, the same outstanding start-up companies are not getting much attention. They have established a clear business model with stable revenue and user size, but their valuations seem undervalued relative to social start-ups. Box, SlideShare and other cloud services companies are representatives of such companies.

Dave McClure, founder of startups David MACCU, said: The first category of consumer-focused startups is "sexy" (Sexy), turning a cast all attract a lot of ordinary users and investors, and then a small enterprise market positioning of the start-up companies are "not sexy" ( unsexy), stable and competent but not enough attention, and this is his organization unsexy Entrepreneurial Forum's original intention.

Look at the list of companies he invited: cloud storage service box, cloud Applications Twilio, cloud file service provider SlideShare, business social company Yammer, mail marketing provider MailChimp, and so on. Marcum feels that, as Facebook's listing has been sluggish and the U.S. economy is in a slump, these tech start-ups, which don't burn money very well, deserve more attention.

The "Not Sexy Entrepreneurial forum" came into being, in order to highlight the characteristics of these companies in the money, the venue of the conference table strewn with counterfeit dollar banknotes and gold chocolate. Marcum, who has always been a funny-looking man, wears glasses with a dollar "$" logo, and rarely uses foul language to make his opening remarks, "earning a startup is respectable, and we need to get the fuck out of money!"

For technology start-ups, earning money is glorious, and the idea runs through the forum. At the beginning of the event, Marcum asked the entrepreneurs at the meeting, "Please stand up for the people who are sitting in the company." The 10 dozen entrepreneurs got the full applause of the audience. Marcum even Ballmer Steve Ballmer, the recently reviled CEO of Microsoft (Weibo), that Mr Ballmer is clearly not a sexy type, but that Microsoft has been good at his performance report card.

The contrast between the enterprise market and the consumer market is very strong. Allen Levis, the founder and CEO of Box, asked the audience before he spoke, "raise your hand with the Dropbox service," and almost 90% of the people raised their hands, and he then continued, "Please raise your hand with the box service," he said. He was obviously embarrassed by his curly hair, "see, the consumer market is easy to be famous."

The 7-year box already has 120,000 corporate users, valued at $1.2 billion trillion, and is expected to hit $ more than 2 billion trillion by market capitalisation next year. Both they and Dropbox are market pioneers in cloud storage services and are now facing strong competition from Google and Microsoft's cloud services. Lurvy does not seem to be too bothered by Google's two big rivals: "We should focus on our products rather than our competitors, and do our own user experience without fear of competition".

SlideShare CEO Rahimi Sinha (Rashimi Sinha) shares the same view that LinkedIn has just spent $120 million to buy SlideShare, which has nearly 30 million independent visitors. Sinha mood calmly to share his successful experience: "Do not be noise interference, not too concerned about competitors, focus on the user experience; do not put eggs in a basket, diversify and build your own platform." ”

Although these startups are based on the SME market, they think they are also serving people. "Our users are not companies (Enterprise) but people (arranges)," said Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, Jeff Lausen. "The product needs to be simple and easy to use, pricing to be transparent, so users feel that their money is worth a lot." ”

In his view, the IT market will become increasingly consumer (consumerization), the SME market technology companies also need to do a good job of user experience details, because enterprise users are also composed of individual users.

Talking about the difference of profit model between consumer market and enterprise market start-up company, Adil Saidi (Adil Syed), a well-known venture capital of Silicon Valley (Redpoint Venture), has published its own opinion: the enterprise market start-up company is easier to obtain the revenue, achieves the steady growth; But the consumer market is relatively potential, just need time to explore the profit model.

He said to Sina technology: "We invest more is to see the quality of the entrepreneur and the future development prospects, whether to make money whether there is a profit model is very important, but not the decisive factor." Of course, Facebook's listing (the continued fall in share prices) may have some impact on investment, but the risk is also in the hands of [VCs]. ”

In fact, these entrepreneurs are not convinced by the "not sexy" classification.　　Steven Boal, founder of Coupons.com, an American coupon marketing firm, Stephen Bauer: "The US One-tenth coupon marketing is all about us, who says we're not sexy?" Sina technology Zheng from Silicon Valley, USA