From 50,000 feet, the economy looks like a 19th century United States. Large enterprises have already made the leap onto web-based software, pushing every facet of their businesses into the cloud. Like industrial cities of early America, they have embraced a new paradigm where technology is the driving force behind growing and scaling cost effectively.
Small and medium-sized businesses are living in the wild West, a gunslinging world of Excel spreadsheets, spam-riddled email accounts and paper invoices. Salesforce.com has become the dominant provider of traditional enterprise software for large companies with an offering that is complex and cost effective enough to work at scale. Small businesses and teams have no clear solution—aside from the status quo—but all the players in the space are squaring off for an all out gunfight.
The vast majority of small businesses do not use enterprise software because there is no compelling value proposition. It is learning intensive, cost prohibitive and often narrowly focused on only one type of business activity. The leader in providing software to small teams will address all three issues head on with a product offering that has the learning curve of a consumer app and a feature set that hones in what’s truly important to smaller companies.
So what does the future of the small business of the future look like? We believe that we are riding a technology wave where everything small businesses use to operate will be sucked into the browser. Fax machines, paper, filing cabinets, phones—they are all going to start disappearing off the desks of entrepreneurs everywhere. In our particular vision of the future, a small business will be nothing more than a small team of dedicated entrepreneurs armed with computers, smartphones and not much else. Every small business will communicate with co-workers, customers and suppliers via their own “stream”, allowing them to compete at the speed of Internet and take advantage of the one thing small companies have that large companies don’t: speed.
Our product, Stream, brings all the pieces—people, files, emails—together into a filterable, real-time stream; a universal inbox for everything going on within the company. A radically simple, radically consumer-facing enterprise solution that gets teams on the same page (literally).
