12 VCs share their thoughts on enterprise startup trends and opportunities

Compared to other tech firms, enterprise companies have held up well during the pandemic.

If anything, the problems enterprises were facing prior to the economic downturn have become even more pronounced; if you were thinking about moving to the cloud or just dabbling in it, you’re probably accelerating that motion. If you were trying to move off of legacy systems, that has become even more imperative. And if you were attempting to modernize processes and workflows, whether engineer- and developer-related, or across other parts of the organization, chances are good that you are giving that a much closer look.

We won’t be locked down forever and employees will eventually return to offices, but it’s likely that many companies will take the lessons they learned during this era and put them to work inside their organizations. Startups are uniquely positioned to help companies solve these new modern kinds of problems, much more so than a legacy vendor (which could be itself trying to update its approach).

Venture capitalists certainly understand all of these dynamics and are always dutifully searching for startups that could help companies shift to a digital future more quickly.

We spoke to 12 of them to take their pulse and learn more about the trends that are exciting them, what they look for in an investment opportunity and which parts of the enterprise are ripe for startups to impact:

• Max Gazor, CRV
• Navin Chadda, Mayfield
• Matt Murphy, Menlo Venture Capital
• Soma Somasagar, Madrona Ventures
• Jon Lehr, Work-Bench
• Steve Herrod, General Catalyst
• Jai Das, Sapphire Ventures
• Max Gazor,  CRV
• Ed Sim, Boldstart Ventures
• Martin Cassado, Andreessen Horowitz
• Vassant Natarajan, Accel
• Dharmesh Thakker, Battery Ventures

Max Gazor, CRV

What trends are you most excited about in the enterprise from an investing perspective?

It’s abundantly clear that cloud software markets are bigger than most people anticipated. We continue to invest heavily there as we have been doing for the last decade.

Specifically, the most exciting trend right now in enterprise is low-code software development. I’m on the board of Airtable, where I led the Series A and co-led the Series B investments, so I see first hand how this will play out. We are heading toward a future where hundreds of millions of people will be empowered to compose software that fits their own needs. Imagine the productivity and transformation that will unlock in the world! It may be one of the largest market opportunities we have seen since cloud computing.