#work-bench

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A workbench is a sturdy flat, smooth, molded surface that comes in a variety of sizes designed for specific tasks. Well-constructed workbenches have strong supports that can handle jobs requiring the use of heavy tools and machinery.

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Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming

Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming

Work-Bench, a brand-new York City adventure capital tight that spends a lot of moment around fluck 1000 companies, has put together The Work-Bench Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition, which you could think of as a state of the Enterprise report. It’s somewhat like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, but with a focus on the tools and technologies that will be having a major impact on the enterprise…

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What To Consider When Joining An Enterprise Tech Startup

Top Considerations

By Rachel Shannon-Solomon, Venture AssociateMay 7, 2014

Note from editors: this post was originally delivered in the Tech MBA newsletter. We thought Rachel offered some great career advice and guidance, so we wanted to share it here as well. 

Understand The Enterprise Opportunity

With $300B spent annually on enterprise software, and with disruption occurring across the legacy enterprise IT stack, startups providing secure and scalable software solving the needs of complex organizations face unprecedented opportunity.

Historically, the enterprise opportunity has flourished on the West Coast, and to this day Silicon Valley presents unparalleled opportunity for startups seeking partnership and collaboration with large tech companies. For scaling startups looking to sell into the Fortune 500 or financial services, however, there is a rising tide of opportunity in New York City. Home to 52 of the Fortune 500, New York is increasingly becoming a magnet for enterprise tech and finserv startups looking to be close to their customers.

Know Your Skillset—And Risk Tolerance

Enterprise tech companies (especially SaaS businesses whose recurring revenues bring greater revenue visibility) are inherently less speculative compared to those in the consumer space. Joining an enterprise tech startup, therefore, can present a more secure career move, coupled with strong upside potential if you join forces with a team focused on execution.

Nevertheless, it is critical to consider your level of risk aversion when evaluating which stage in a startup’s lifecycle is most aligned with your experience and outlook. Unless you have a strong technical background, join once the company has a product that is built, live, and ready to sell. For an enterprise tech startup, this will be aligned with an early stage (but typically post-seed) startup. At the Series A or Series B stage, technical founders are looking to scale sales, customer success, and operations teams.

Solve An Existing Problem, Then Apply Business Knowledge To Scale

Most importantly, understand whether the company you are considering joining solves a true pain point. Is there an existing, allocated budget for the company’s product or service? If not, how does the company adeptly pitch their product in the absence of an existing budget?

With enterprise sales cycles lasting six to nine months on average—and as long as one year—time is of the essence, especially for an early stage startup. It is critical to start the sales process off right to avoid getting the runaround from procurement and business units. Leveraging your business knowledge to support technical founders through this process can add real value for an earlier stage com

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Enterprise Weekly #5

Bloomberg Enterprise Tech Summit Recap, APX Labs Joins the Work-Bench Ventures Portfolio

Sent On April 25, 2014

Note from editors: this post was originally sent as the Enterprise Weekly - our weekly Work-Bench newsletter featuring commentary & the latest news in enterprise, upcoming community events, and recent fundings & exits. Sign up here to subscribe.

This Week's Enterprise News

Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit: Yesterday, Work-Bench was proud to be an event partner for Bloomberg's annual Enterprise Technology Summit. Nothing beats a panel of senior security executives debating best practices for today's state of security, or having Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz say that "Hadoop is like cryogenic storage; throw all your stuff in it and hope that you'll use it one day" - only to be countered by Doug Cutting of Cloudera (and the creator of Hadoop) speaking to Hadoop's current and potential use cases. For some of our takeaways in IT Security from the summit, check out our event recap.

APX Labs: We're excited to announce that APX Labs is now part of the Work-Bench Ventures investment portfolio. We've written before about the immense opportunities for a hardware agnostic software layer on enterprise smart glasses, and we believe that the APX Labs team is uniquely positioned to create immense value for a variety of industries and use cases. If you have a potential use case for your corporation that you'd like to explore with APX Labs, please email our Venture Director, Jon Lehr, who can put you in touch with the company.

APX Labs Raises $10 Million To Bring Wearable Tech To Work The Wall Street Journal  "New Enterprise Associates is leading a $10 million Series A investment in APX Labs, which is helping businesses use wearable tech to boost worker productivity and safety."

An Open Open-Source, Netflix-Style Recommendation Engine Wired  Mortar Data, a Work-Bench member company, made headlines this week with their recent move to open-source notoriously difficult suggestion algorithms.

The End Of Dumb Software Wired  "For all the technological advances of our time, business software is still profoundly dumb. Most enterprise software simply serves as a tool to get a particular job done faster or more efficiently, but few applications are really 'smart.'" 

Corporate Acquisitions Of Startups - Why Do They Fail? Forbes  An excellent resource for corporates, startups, and early stage companies on different acquisition and assimilation tactics from the legendary Steve Blank.

Security Trends Uncovered Work-Bench  Jon Lehr, our Venture Director, spent some time putting together his notes from Bloomberg's Enterprise Technology Summit yesterday.

5 Business Tools Designed From The Ground Up Work-Bench  From email communication tools to comprehensive analytics, here are five beautifully designed tools used, loved, and endorsed by Work-Bench.

Upcoming Events

New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup Tuesday, April 29th, 6:15pm

Work-Bench Workshop: Mailjet Wednesday, April 30th, 2pm - 3pm

Fundings and Exits

Stitch raises $3.25 million led by Google Ventures Mobile Customer Relationship Management • Seed • TechCrunch

Synack raises $7.5 million led by Kleiner Perkins Enterprise Security • Series A • VentureBeat

Piqora raises $7.7 million led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson Enterprise Marketing & Analytics • Series A • The Wall Street Journal

APX Labs raises $10 million led by New Enterprise Associates Wearable Technology Software • Series A • The Wall Street Journal

SpringCM raises $18 million led by Goff Capital  Enterprise Content Management • Venture Round • Forbes

FinancialForce raises $50 million led by Advent International Enterprise Resource Planning • Private Equity • TechCrunch

Pure Storage raises $225 million led by Wellington Management  Enterprise Flash Storage • Series F • Business Insider

DocTrackr acquired by IntraLinks for $10 million Document Management • Acquisition • GigaOM

Glider acquired by FPX for undisclosed amount Document Management • Acquisition • TechCrunch

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Security Trends Uncovered

From the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit

By Jonathan Lehr April 25, 2014

1. Google’s security posture

In the first panel session of the day, Ben Fried (CIO of Google) discussed the company’s infrastructure and explained that “if you follow the trend of end users choosing software instead of IT, connecting to the internet becomes more important than to your own datacenters.” As he continued down this train of thought, he explained that “we live in a world of zero trust now” and that the notion of a private enterprise network within a datacenter no longer applies to today’s infrastructure in a public cloud and SaaS tools world.

2. Hearing the former CTO of the CIA compare Security to an Oreo

Gus Hunt, the former CTO of the CIA, gave a “tasty” analogy of where security stands today and how we’re missing the most important piece of the puzzle. He explained that enterprises have firewalls, have implemented usernames and passwords, and keep layering things on to create a hard outer shell of protection, like the top and bottom layers of an Oreo cookie. But meanwhile, no one is focusing on the “creamy center,” which is the enterprise’s data. Most existing solutions today don’t protect enterprise data, so if a company gets breached (which is commonplace today), then the crown jewels will go missing. Future solutions need to protect company data, wherever it ends up.

3. Shift from “keeping bad things out” to understanding and accepting risk

Towards the end of the day, a panel featuring 10 security executives featured heated debate of the best practices for CISOs. This is a sign of the times we’re in today where there is no clear “correct” answer on how enterprises should proceed when it comes to data security. While this dynamic is a bit ominous, it also presents many opportunities for new approaches to be taken in the industry. Historically, the industry’s point of view and budget allocations were oriented towards total prevention of malware and breaches. Now, however, attitudes have shifted, and CISOs understand that you can’t have 100% protection. The panelists all agreed that today’s approach is to understand threats and be able to quickly respond to them.  

4. On today’s pace of innovation

The current pace of innovation is too fast for CISOs to react. For instance, they can’t say no to mobile phones. If you try to protect these devices, you’ll spend time and money to get that issue solved, only to find that once you’ve run that process there will be a new device to protect. As a result, the new key becomes knowing who would attack an organization and why, rather than constantly trying to keep up with new end points. Additionally, the half-life of new security methods keeps decreasing. One panelist cited sandboxing as an example—it was formerly a great threat prevention tool that quickly was rendered essentially useless because hackers have figured out how to bypass it.  

5. Cloud and mobile are here to stay

Cisco’s CSO John Stewart remarked that “most of my users don't care about risk—they care about getting their jobs done." Other CSOs and CISOs echoed this sentiment and agreed that business value and ease of use of software often trumps security concerns these days. The design and usability paradigm is becoming so important in the enterprise that Duncan Angove, President of Infor, explained that they decided to in-source design (vs. the industry norm of outsourcing it) to boost usage of their ERP software.  

Did you attend and have other points to add? Please do so in the comments.

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5 Business Tools Designed from the Ground Up

Used, Loved, and Endorsed by Work-Bench

By Day JimenezApril 22, 2014

In the 1990s and 2000s, an explosion in information led to complex and difficult to use software. These legacy business tools are quickly being replaced by a new set of products built by companies that value design, experience, and emotions in order to give purpose, help understand, and share delight. We're building a company founded on design because we understand the power of design principles and their importance for the next generation of businesses.

1. RelateIQ

Our constantly connected state makes it easier than ever to communicate with teams, partners, and customers. Today, most service businesses have multiple team members having multiple conversations with multiple employees at each of their customer companies. Yep, that's right, conversations are happening to the third power. RelateIQ set out to invent relationship intelligence. They designed a tool that manages, analyzes, and advises employees on their business relationships.

At Work-Bench, we use RelateIQ to stay in sync across all our conversations, with our member and portfolio companies, as well as our colleagues in the enterprise and venture communities. We love to get reminded that a relationship is growing stale and make sure to follow up by getting in touch and never being out of sight, out of mind. Use RelateIQ and say goodbye to tedious relationship management and unsynchronized efforts, and welcome effective business engagements with the people who matter most, your partners and customers.

2. Dropbox

Dropbox needs no introduction and is hands down the most important tool on my tool belt. All my files on all my devices are stored in Dropbox, and that gives me instant access, anywhere, anytime. And best of all, it just works. Work-Bench just started using Dropbox for Business, and we love it. We beta tested their new feature that allows a personal and business dropbox on the same computer or device, and those of us who use Dropbox for our personal lives were thrilled with the new integration. Design at Dropbox has always been about simplicity and precisely hiding away complexity. Since day one, their tool was designed to live in the background without interrupting your workflow and requiring very little management. It's great to see Dropbox strengthen their business offering, and I'm bullish on their future, especially considering the army of talented designers they've recently enlisted to join Soleio Cuervo—Tim Van Damme, Daniel Eden, and Kristen Spilman to name a few.

3. LayerVault

LayerVault's founders brought together innovative technologies—cloud storage and version control—to modernize the designer's workflow. Some of the best product companies build products that they themselves want to use, and this is certainly the case with LayerVault, led by Designer CEO Allan Grishtein. Gone are the days when designers saved and re-saved a propagation of files with names such as 'homepage 03 final 01.psd'; LayerVault allows designers to work fearlessly and do what they do best: design. LayerVault provides version control for designers, and does so in flying colors. The product works quietly, behind the scenes while you work—much like Dropbox—and archives every saved version of your design file to the cloud. LayerVault helps any designer keep their files tidy and organized, but they don't stop there. Their web interface allows users to manage, collaborate, and share design work with teammates, clients, and friends. Typically, LayerVault stores directly to their secure cloud, but they recently began offering a self-hosted local product, which is a first step in expanding large-scale design teams and the enterprise. Full disclosure: LayerVault is a Work-Bench Ventures portfolio company and a Work-Bench Member company, but we still love their product.

4. Campaign Monitor

Email communication can be one of the best ways to consistently stay in touch and engage a wide audience. Email campaigns can be used to make a simple announcement for a new feature or to share newly published content with your subscribers. Email communications are a challenge on many levels, from subscriber lists to email campaigns. Campaign Monitor has built the best and most robust tool we've seen. Most importantly it was built with everyone in the email campaign workflow in mind; designers, developers, copywriters, marketers, and more—even client teams if you’re in the business of creating emails for clients.

Everyone who collaborates on emails at Work-Bench can do so easily and effectively with Campaign Monitor. We especially love their thoughtfulness for designers and developers, which has made building and testing our email templates a piece of cake. They provide an unparalleled set of tools, documentation, and resource guides, and their strong API adds even greater flexibility. Campaign Monitor has readily available tools that can help any business enlist and retain subscribers, and a simple, so-easy-anyone-can-do-it interface for writing, previewing, sending, and understanding how campaigns perform.  It’s no wonder they just raised $250m in financing. At Work-Bench, we're using Campaign Monitor to build a community around enterprise technology through our new Enterprise Weekly newsletter. There's a good chance you're reading this because of an email we sent with Campaign Monitor, but if not, make sure to sign up before you go!

5. SumAll

As a business, it's important to analyze as much information as you can collect. With technology and computers came data, and lots of it. Today, anything and everything can be tracked; from the number of conversions your website makes to the minutes and seconds viewers are spending on your marketing or educational communications. At Work-Bench, we collect data using a range of tools—Google Analytics and MixPanel for our websites, Campaign Monitor for our emails, bit.ly for our links, and RelateIQ for our relationships. However, collecting data is only the first step towards making data-driven decisions. For step two, SumAll brings together all our data from many of the services we use.

The SumAll interface is wonderfully easy to use, built around a chart and a list of data. Compare one service against another and analyze using simple, interactive visualizations. For example, answer questions like, how much traffic did that recent email campaign, press piece, or tweet drive to our website and our blog; what are we doing well, and what could we be doing better. The SumAll team is innovative and forward looking, always exploring new and improved ways to help users understand data in a human-friendly format, how we think versus how computers compute. They're also continuously adding more and more services that connect into SumAll. We're excited to one day integrate all of the data tools we use at Work-Bench and visualize our performance across everything we do; all our data available, legible, and interconnected with one click's reach.

I'm happy to share a list of all the tools we use to do business. While these five tools are our favorites, by design, we just started using MixPanel and are eager to try Percolate and Peak. If you're considering any of these tools for your business and want to know more about how we use them at Work-Bench, drop us a line in the comments.

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Enterprise Weekly #4

The Race To Capture Marketing IT Spend Continues, The Empire Strikes Back

Sent On April 17, 2014

Note from editors: this post was originally sent as the Enterprise Weekly - our weekly Work-Bench newsletter featuring commentary & the latest news in enterprise, upcoming community events, and recent fundings & exits. Sign up here to subscribe.

This Week's Enterprise News

Marketing IT Spend: Big news this morning from Campaign Monitor, the Austrian SaaS email marketing company, as they announced a $250 million financing round from Insight Venture Partners. Along with Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget for $2.5 billion and Marketo’s IPO last year, this enormous round is indicative of the race to capture marketing IT spend at large corporations. While Gartner and Accenture continue to debate over whether CMOs will outspend CIOs by 2017, it’s clear that CMOs have large budgets and are ready to use them in the digital landscape.

The Empire Strikes Back: Don't expect the legacy tech incumbents to cede IT spend to startups without a fight though. This week Microsoft announced offerings targeting the Internet of Things, and SAP continues its cloud analytics push with its HANA platform offering. For strategic areas where incumbents can’t build their own offerings, they’ll continue to use their cash rich balance sheets to acquire companies, just like IBM did this week with Silverpop.

Microsoft Goes All In On The Cloud TechCrunch As Aaron Levie eloquently articulated: "Someone at Microsoft officially pressed the 'we're not screwing around anymore' button. Quite impressive to watch."

Q&A With Fred Wilson, The Legendary New York City Investor Business Insider Union Square Venture's Fred Wilson sat down with Business Insider to talk retirement, the future of the firm, and what it takes to be a decent investor.

The 39 Most Important People In Cloud Computing Business Insider From veterans of the legacy incumbents to the CEOs of recent enterprise technology upstarts, here are 39 of the most influential people in cloud computing.

Where Are We In The Enterprise 2.0 Tech Cycle?  Bowery Capital Predicated on the thesis that roughly $357 billion of enterprise software spend is up for grabs, Mike Brown writes that the market has only seen 11% penetration.

 7 Things To Consider When Marketing To The Enterprise Work-Bench From pricing your product to targeting your audience, Taylor Gould, Director of Marketing at BetterCloud, shares his most salient points on enterprise marketing.

Upcoming Events

How To Scale Ops For Enterprise Startup Growth Wednesday, April 23rd, 12pm - 1pm

Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit Thursday, April 24th, 8am - 5:30pm

Fundings and Exits

ItsOn raises $12.5 million led by Tenaya Capital Telecommunications Services • Series C • Re/code

Kinetic Social raises $18 million led by Blue Chip Venture Company Social Media Marketing • Series B • FinSMEs

FireHost raises $25 million led by the Stephens Group Secure Cloud Hosting • Series E • VentureBeat

Campaign Monitor raises $250 million from Insight Venture Partners Email Marketing SaaS • Venture Round • The Wall Street Journal

Goldman Networks files for $100 million IPO Telecommunication Network Services • IPO • Reuters

Paycom Software goes public with $100 million IPO Cloud-based HR & Payroll • IPO • The Wall Street Journal

IBM acquires Silverpop for undisclosed amount Email & Marketing Automation • Acquisition • GigaOM

Zebra Technologies acquires Motorola Solutions for $3.5 billion Mobile Computing, Bar-code Scanning, Wireless LANs • Acquisition • TechCrunch