It's actually the opposite: If you are building an infrastructure company, you are far better off chasing startups than large enterprise companies. Microsoft ju

It's actually the opposite: If you are building an infrastructure company, you are far better off chasing startups than large enterprise companies. Microsoft just has an overwhelming advantage for them in the cloud: The fact that they are already using their services outside the cloud. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something, but selling to startups is relatively easy: They are starting from almost zero, so making changes and trying new things is cheap. When selling to enterprise can be a one or two year process, you can get a startup to sign up in an hour.. and that's if they don't just discover your product and sign up without sales! But the real kicker here is that if your product bills more to larger companies for good reasons (like, say, you bill by the server, or by the transactions they process), then their growth is your growth, without needing more sales. Fortune 500 companies that aren't cloud providers themselves aren't going to grow fast at all. And while some startups fail, the ones that don't make up for that loss: You get a lot of baseline growth without having to grow your sales team. And if you do catch a future unicorn or two, you will then get to understand large company needs from an existing company, instead of having to waddle through complicated sales processes. Amazon didn't start selling their cloud offering to Fortune 500 companies either: Those came around many years later, and in practice rely on hiring people that are familiar with the technology. Unless you have some sales gimmick that works really well with large companies (and nowadays, neither Google or IBM have one), getting startups, and a wide array of individuals that get practice on their offerings for free on their spare time, is the best way to go, and it's not even close.