a16z 分析师谈软件行业竞争：最佳企业用‘人质’而非‘客户’

a16z's Alex Rampell says the best software incumbents have hostages, not customers: "Normally, sell...

a16z's Alex Rampell says the best software incumbents have hostages, not customers: "Normally, selling into the brownfield is hard just because it's brown. What does brownfield mean? It means that it's been trampled by an incumbent." "Try selling ERP and you have a product that's much, much better than SAP. There's a saying Joe's heard me use a million times: 'The best companies have hostages, not customers.' SAP has hostages. That's a brownfield." "Sometimes you can break in. Cloud versus on-prem: What did cloud do? It was brownfield, but it kind of just redefined the problem." "If you go back to the CRM days, you're using Siebel Systems that's running on your IBM AS/400 mainframe in your office. You're tired, the guy that maintained it quit. He was 92 years old. Maybe now you should use a cloud-based vendor. That's partially how that brownfield was done from on-prem to cloud." "The other strategy is going greenfield, saying, 'I'm not going to bother with the hostages. I'm just going to build the best product in the world, and then brand new companies that are untethered from any existing software solution, they'll just use me.'" @arampell @joeschmidtiv Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter a16z @a16z Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris on killing a product with two million monthly users and rebuilding the CRM from scratch: Lightfield's predecessor was an AI presentation tool growing faster than the team could buy inference to support it. Keith shut it down anyway. Nobody on the team liked the product. Keith decided he wanted to attack the CRM space, a vertical that's notoriously hard to break into. A company's record of its customers is scattered across a whole stack of systems that often contradict each other. His bet is reconciling them into one coherent source of truth, what Lightfield calls a business world model. Every agent a team might run sits downstream of it. In this conversation with a16z's Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt: the office space they traded for their first 10 customers, why a CRM ended up modeled on the Facebook timeline, three attempts at pricing before one worked, and why nobody at a 40-person company has a fixed role. 00:00 Intro 01:24 Why 2 million users wasn't enough 03:36 Why better models wouldn't have fixed it 06:41 Reconciling the data was the real product 08:16 How free rent bought their first 10 customers 10:12 A CRM does 3 jobs and only 1 matters 11:42 Autopilot CRM nobody has to update 14:56 No more rigid data models 17:11 How one customer modeled a whole marketplace 18:48 Taking customers from an incumbent 23:49 How to survive a new head of sales 26:03 Why the CEO still uses a spreadsheet view 30:55 Pricing models that failed before one worked 36:23 Fixed roles make product pivots impossible 40:02 Why slow shipping loses CRM customers 43:17 What Silicon Valley customers are actually worth 46:20 Why buyers need a reference who looks like them 50:40 What to ignore during a pivot YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=K5yGLO… @keithpeiris @lightfld @arampell @joeschmidtiv Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter 🔗 View Quoted Tweet 💬 4 🔄 1 ❤️ 22 👀 7439 📊 5 ⚡