(Spark Capital General Partner Bijan SabetSpark Capital)
For the last 11 years or so, Spark Capital has found success by investing in some of the hottest consumer technology startups around: Yahoo's Tumblr, Facebook's Oculus, Twitter, and Warby Parker are all Spark investments.
Now, says Spark Capital cofounder and General Partner Bijan Sabet, the firm is starting to turn its attention towards a new target — the rising tide of workplace apps that make work just a little bit more fun.
And Spark had a big victory in this regard just recently: Trello, a beloved work organization app with 19 million users, sold to Aussie software giant Atlassian for $425 million, after raising a relatively modest $10.34 million in venture capital in its lifespan. For Sabet, who sat on Trello's board from its early days, it was a personal victory, too.
Plus, Spark is also an investor in Slack, the $3.8 billion chat app that recently staked its claim to the Fortune 500-grade software market with Slack Enterprise Grid, a new product intended for larger teams.
Here's why Sabet thinks there's a huge "acceleration" in the market for startups that have more to do with your work life than your personal life — and why Spark is putting its money where its mouth is after years of having it the other way around.
'Goosebumps'
Historically, Sabet says, Spark's interest has really been in companies that combine cutting-edge technology with good design, because those are the products that people actually enjoy using. So it wasn't exactly that Spark was avoiding business software companies, Sabet says. It's that, historically, it was hard to find any that fit their criteria.
Trello was an early exception, but he says that even popular enterprise software like Salesforce is "not a very inspiring product." When Sabet looked at Salesforce for the first time, he says, "we didn't get goosebumps like we did when we saw Tumblr."
(Trello helps users organize their projects by moving virtual post-it notes around on a whiteboard.Trello)
Furthermore, Sabet says, the way that business software was historically sold created "natural gatekeepers" — the IT department dictated what hardware and software could be used by employees, meaning that there weren't a lot of ways that even the scrappiest startup could compete.
There wasn't an easy way to try business software before you buy, Sabet says; we may be used to lots of web-based productivity tools having free-to-use services now, but that wasn't always the case.
"You literally had to take a meeting before you could get a trial version," Sabet says.