Canteen is a network built by and for world class startups primarily selling to the enterprise.
We want to empower amazing teams to transform outdated enterprise processes, tools and approaches. We want to do this by enabling faster discovery of great enterprise startups and have them accelerate roadmaps at places like Stripe, Square, Coinbase, Deel and other large tech companies.
Concretely, this consists of two key pieces: (1) a continually updated, curated directory of the best founders, teams and products selling to the enterprise, and (2) a buyer-lead RFP (Request for Product) process to solicit pilots based on real needs and difficulties — not perceived ones. Because of (1), enterprises will be able to discover teams they never would have encountered. Because of (2), enterprises will lead these conversations with their problems. The roadmap and OKRs of each company will define the teams they proactively talk to.
When we were building our last startups at YC, we saw the same pattern over and over again from batchmates: awesome founders with compelling technology would run out of time and money trying to find the right buyer profiles in enterprise. Even those that would get to substantial traction (with defined customers and pilots) would suffer from poor PMF and would not be able to effectively derisk their GTM strategy over time. They were continually selling to black holes in enterprise, would receive limited feedback, and would burn valuable capital and years of time building the wrong thing.
As a PM, I would see the same story unfold on the other side: directors / VPs would make ad-hoc buying decisions based on word of mouth and leadership directives. There would be less focus on bottom-up thinking and planning on what to purchase and why. Decisions would be made reactively (”What interesting products has my board or VC X told me about?”) instead of proactively (”What are the most expensive problems we are solving internally?”).
This “brownian motion” approach to enterprise buying is fundamentally broken. Random connections, word of mouth introductions and cold emailing creates a low signal to noise ratio for buyers or sellers. It also is not as effective in finding the best teams solving core problems in enterprise.
Canteen hopes to empower more teams to make bottom-up, objective decisions about which software best serves their needs and helps them transform their roadmaps and OKRs.
VPs and directors at large companies spend about $150B yearly on enterprise SaaS products. They have experienced the power of being able to revolutionize many business verticals (spend, consumer support, ad sales, marketing assets and more) through SaaS products for their teams.
This has been a continuous trend since the beginning of this decade:
Based on these growth measures, analysts soon expect to hit $200B in enterprise SaaS spend.
We expect these numbers to be orders of magnitude larger, if you incorporate non-tech companies that have not yet been exposed to SaaS-first ways to run their businesses. In sum, there are about 3 million large businesses in America. Tech companies of this size tend to have about 110 SaaS apps, each with an ACV of about $40K.
What if trucking, logistics, hospitals and other non-tech companies adopted a SaaS-first approach to running their companies over the next decade? The numbers are orders of magnitude beyond expectations: 3M companies * 110 apps * $40K ACV per app = $13.2T in SaaS spend.
Canteen will be the connective tissue between these 3M companies and the ~20K best in class startups selling to enterprise today.
<aside> 👉 Note that some today predict a shrinking SaaS market in the near future. They claim that generative AI will make most of these products irrelevant.
At Canteen, we believe this view is based on correct priors but incorrect posteriors.
It is true that generative AI technologies will make it far easier to create codebases and products with far fewer headcount. In fact, we want to be part of this very transformation.
Will this lead to much more powerful offerings in the future? Absolutely. Will this lead to an end to technology companies that can build valuable enterprise offerings? No. If anything, we expect a Cambrian explosion of such tools and services in the near future, all built to satisfy niches all across enterprise today. In fact, the flexibility and strength of such technologies will make it more possible to find underserved areas and hidden wells of revenue with a tiny bootstrapped team.
In the long run, we believe LLMs will make startups selling to enterprise smaller, flexible and more profitable over time.
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