Customers are 👑: 9 Fortune 500 Pain Points We’re Hearing About and Investing In at Work-Bench
There are generally 2 camps of VCs out there — those who are thesis-driven, and those who are not.
There are pros and cons to both depending on your firm strategy and model, but for us at Work-Bench, we’ve always believed we can be the most thoughtful (and anti-FOMO) investors by coming with a prepared mind to a space.
By leveraging our backgrounds from corporate IT and our home base of NYC with 52 of the Fortune 500 in our backyard, what we’re able to do is actually work backwards and speak first with Fortune 500 line of business executives to start with the enterprise customer pain point. By understanding top technology challenges, priorities, and where budgets are going, we then go out and find the best enterprise startups building transformative solutions and quite simply then play matchmaker between the “suits and the hoodies.”
Working as a collaborative and cohesive team, Work-Bench specializes in investing swim lanes to build domain expertise and corporate networks within these sectors:
- AI / Machine Learning
- Security
- Infrastructure
- Future of Jobs
See below for themes with our 4 sectors where we’d love to meet founders building solutions in this space, connect with corporate executives, and where we are always learning more.
Smart Orchestration
We first wrote about this in August 2019 and it continues to be top of mind due to the fact that connecting the right people at the right time in a large company is more difficult than it sounds. When you overlay collaboration challenges with relevant tooling and workflows, everything from recovering from a website outage to closing your monthly finance books will be more efficient. Here, smart orchestration is important because it helps teams become more efficient working together and is poised for widespread adoption thanks to today’s always-connected Slack enterprise.
Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)
Robotic process automation (RPA) provided an initial productivity bump, but its impact is waning. The true next phase of enterprise efficiency will come from IPA and this requires domain expertise, a vertical focus, and a great product interface.
Explainable AI
For enterprises to truly trust and adopt AI, they must understand it. This is going to become increasingly important as GDPR enforcement expands from focusing on data to the model level too. In the past few years, enterprises have been investigating and investing in the potential of AI, but explainable AI will accelerate this proliferation by creating interpretable and inclusive models and deploying them with confidence. Check out our portfolio company in the space, Arthur.
Data Security
As data is increasingly used by more groups and applications across the enterprise and growing in volume across different infrastructure and SaaS tools, security practitioners need a better way to discover, protect, and understand the risk to their crown jewels. Tools bridging the data security gap between on premise and cloud resources and enabling safer access and use of resources for folks like data scientists, business analysts, and developers will be of utmost importance.
Securing Infrastructure as Code
The need for better reliability, system performance, change management, and scalability is pushing engineers towards infrastructure as code. The benefits of this automated approach brings its own set of challenges. One top of mind concern for security teams we talk to is understanding the security implications and how to implement the right visibility into this pipeline.
External and Internal Asset Management
A reliable inventory allows for more robust policy setting, speedier response, and a deeper understanding of risk and adherence to compliance. Inventory is critical for all aspects of the business, but hard for security teams to accomplish. We’re looking at tools that help piece together the puzzle of assets, including cloud, and that unifies internal and external data to get a comprehensive 360 view of an organization.
Data Pipeline and Data Warehouse Modernization
With access to more data than ever before, enterprises have evolving needs for a revamped, modern data stack that will enable them to perform complex compute. Developers are now realizing ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) (ETL) creates a number of efficiency challenges and ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) allows data to be transformed on an intermediate server before it is loaded into the target. This removal of the intermediate transformation streamlines the data loading process.
Next Gen Best of Breed Functional Tools
While there has been a generation of enterprise companies serving Fortune 500 customers for decades now as market leaders — be it Salesforce, Ariba, Oracle, SAP, Coupa, Anaplan, Concur, and many more — there is a rise in demand for best-of-breed and rethinking of tools across all vertical functions, i.e. customer success, procurement, supply chain, financial planning and analysis, marketing, IT, and more. More and more platforms will seek to re-architect legacy systems that were previously built on outdated tech stacks from decades ago, to be agile, performant, and without requiring thousands of dollars in consultant spend and months of implementation to deploy. This is especially true of expectations from fast-growth Cloud 100 pre-IPO companies who are scaling rapidly.
Training…No Longer Known as Training
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistic Data, unemployment numbers are at a historical low, however “underemployment” numbers are likely at its highest thanks to the rise of the gig economy and increasing retirement age. To address this, we are already seeing a rise of a new field of tools that are not categorized as “training tools,” but are helping people gain the technical and digital adoption skills needed to work in tandem with automated technologies to get the job done at the most efficient rate — across sales, customer success, and more.
