Emergence Capital Mobile Enterprise Forum

In October 2015 we hosted our 3rd Annual Mobile Enterprise Forum, hosting nearly 300 CEOs of mobile companies building apps for business users.

The day started with a Welcome by Kevin Spain, General Partner, Emergence Capital. He framed the opportunity by sharing his prediction that mobile enterprise businesses will become a $100 billion opportunity, as mobile represents the next major platform shift for enterprise technology.

Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President Business Development, Microsoft

Peggy Johnson, EVP at Microsoft, then took the stage and gave the audience a glimpse into the future from Microsoft’s perspective.  She talked about device proliferation and share a vision for increased productivity in the future through mobile .

Kevin then returned to the stage to interview Peter Weed, General Manager of the Growth Tech Practice at McKinsey & Co.  Peter shared the results of a survey that McKinsey conducted with nearly 70 CEOs of enterprise mobile companies, almost of which considered themselves “mobile first.” The survey showed that per user and per seat pricing mechanisms were the most common, and that customer acquisition costs for mobile were in line with SaaS startups at a similar stage.   The survey also indicated that vertical companies were getting higher revenue per installed app and selling into higher levels in the organization.  

Next we heard from Anthony Lye, CEO, HotSchedules, who shared insights from building the most popular mobile apps for restaurant workers.   HotSchedules has seen over 60,000 monthly app downloads across Apple, Google and Microsoft platforms, and employees are using the app to swap shifts, manage schedules and coordinate among managers and employees.   He noted, “hotschedules is bordering on cult usage.”

Next up was Jeff Tangney, CEO of Doximity who spoke about Driving engagement that matters. Doximity is the largest and most active place for doctors to talk about patients and ⅔ of the physicians in the United States are active members. Jeff spoke about monitoring engagement, and specifically how he looks for the click to kick ratio (the click-through rate over the opt out rate). He emphasized how measuring engagement really matters, and tracking is critical. He also spoke about a contest concept within the company to encourage engagement, noting that “it works incredibly well.”    

CEO of Invoice2go, Greg Waldorf was the next to speak in a session titled, “Show Me the Money.” He reflected on how  “the app store has become a key part of the cloud”. As a CEO, Greg gets a daily email about what is going on in our top 10 apps. What are the trends, what are the things they are loving? We look at app store reviews as a real time barometer of anything people are feeling about our company.”  He also talked about how critical it is to stay true to your message, ending with the idea that one of the worst things you can do as a leader is to constantly pivot your company from metric to metric.

Next up was a high energy sales discussion with Glen Coates, CEO, Handshake and Jim Herbold, CRO, Infer & former EVP WW Sales, Box. When talking about how to build an enterprise sales engine, both underscored the importance of creating a degree of urgency. They also both discussed how to hold the sales team accountable for revenue. Glen noted that “sales opps keeps the trains running on time,” and Jim added that, “Sales engineering becomes important to distill the requests.” For both, a key takeaway was the idea that selling has become more of a science than an art.

Spenser Skates, CEO, Amplitude shared insights on analytics in his session: f “You Can’t Measure What You Can’t Measure.” He emphasized that analytics are driving product change. For example, a customer discovered a lot of people wanted to log in regularly but they kept hitting the sign-up page. On a larger scale, for a customer with an enterprise chat app, the best predictor of whether somebody would complete the trial to completion was if they had three chats a day. When asked about the tools that they use to monitor analytics, Spenser mentioned that “event-based analytics look from a behavioral perspective, but operational data can be helpful. You really need to be able to access both.”

The speakers closed out with “On the Horizon: Drones in the Enterprise” featuring Romeo Durscher, Director of Education, DJI and Mike Winn, CEO, DroneDeploy. DroneDeploy enables any company to use drones, and both commented that we’re starting to see an explosion of drones used for commercial purposes despite the regulatory restrictions in place. A drone can give almost instantaneous results, within 99% accuracy, and so we’re seeing more and more uses in industries like mining, farming and construction. For example, drones are being used to collect water samples in remote locations that normally wouldn’t be accessible. This session ended with a drawing for a new DJI drone for all the attendees who participated in McKinsey’s survey.

The day wrapped up with a busy Ecosytem Break-out Session where all the attendees could meet with executives from 12 industry leaders that are enabling the best mobile enterprise companies.

The Emergence team is excited about what the future holds for Mobile Enterprise companies!