Interesting interview with Aaron Levie (founder of Box) on why most startups are focused on consumers and why it's more exciting selling to businesses:
"When you're 22 years old or 25 years old—the Y Combinator demographic—you have no context for the enterprise. If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that 'real workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to? What are my friends looking at on the Internet that I want to read? How do I share photos and videos?' That's their frame of reference for life.
"Selling to businesses is much more exciting—and a better business. "In the consumer market, we were making it easier to get to a file from a device, or another computer, or to be able to look up your photos. That was very interesting, but it wasn't 10x innovation. Within the enterprise, if you compare Box to something like IBM Filenet, or Microsoft SharePoint, you get almost a 10x improvement on productivity, speed, time to market for new products. So we saw an opportunity to create real innovation in that space and that's what got us excited....We think the market for enterprise collaboration will be much larger than the market for checking into locations on your phone."
