Mayfield Fund News: April 2012

Mayfield Fund Advises Mobile Entrepreneurs –
“Don’t Sell Out Early”

The key to the mobile era is that it’s all about delighting and empowering the end user. It will be hard for incumbents to embrace this new paradigm, just as it was hard for mainframe-era leaders to dominate the world of PCs, or for PC giants to pivot and embrace the Web. Similar to how Cisco and Polycom pioneered telepresence, it took Skype to bring videoconferencing to the masses. We believe that a new mobile world order will emerge, with leaders being created by entrepreneurs and disruptors.

Three trends that are shaping the disruption include BYOD (bring your own device), appification, and cloudification. Opportunities for entrepreneurs include building companies that tackle the following business challenges:

• Identify the security issues that businesses already have.
• Sandbox personal and professional user data, instead of separating workspaces.
• Develop applications first in a familiar language, then deploy on multiple platforms.
• Provide tablet users with access to their favorite enterprise apps.

We are entering a fascinating period where innovation comes from the mash-up and cross-fertilization of know-how from many different disciplines. Opportunities in mobile require entrepreneurs with a mix of DNA who can create solutions to these problems and who, as industry leaders, will define the new mobile world order.

“Don’t sell out early, as you could be building the next Symantec, RSA, BEA, Citrix or SAP. Taking the long-term view could mean the difference between rewriting the rules of the game and writing a corporate footnote on Wikipedia.” – Navin Chaddha, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund.

This viewpoint was published in Forbes, for the full article visit Forbes.com.