What are three 'hot' enterprise areas right now?

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Former CTO @ Scribd / Partner in Software, 1,001 - 5,000 employees

Certainly AI for enterprise is a really hot area. There are a lot of companies that see a big opportunity in helping enterprises adopt more AI and machine learning technologies, and there are a lot of different variants of this. There are companies that are doing pure play ML stuff, where they will help enterprises deploy models. Then there are secondary effects of that: companies that are applying ML to a specific business problem, and selling a solution that's ML powered. There are lots of ML powered sales tools, recruiting tools, and finance tools.

The next categories that really stand out to me are security and dev tools. Y Combinator has always had a really strong set of dev tools companies applying a lot of really core infrastructure now, for development like, Heroku, Stripe, Mixpanel, PagerDuty, Doker, and CoreOS, those are all YC companies. And I think we've gotten so many great Dev Tools companies because Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s founder, was a famous programmer who wrote books on programming and had a lot of really strong opinions about the future of programming and computers. He attracted a lot of people who were extremely technical and also cared a lot about that. And also, because we run Hacker News, which is the largest community of software engineers. We've long had a lot of Dev Tools and security stuff applying to YC, and we continued to get a lot of that.

One thing that has changed is that a lot of them now are going after enterprise customers much earlier than they did in the past. In the past they'd ordinarily start with indie hacker types, like developers just hacking on stuff and it would take a long time to get to the enterprise. Whereas now, people are figuring how to get to the enterprise a lot sooner.

VP of Global IT and Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, 501 - 1,000 employees

Security, AI, ML,

Group Chief Information Officer in Construction, 5,001 - 10,000 employees

IOT
Blockchain

Chief Security Officer in Software, 10,001+ employees

Identity, AI/ML and ZeroTrust

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Cloud, SAAS, Mobile

CIO in Consumer Goods, 11 - 50 employees

Artificial intelligence, data science and cyber security

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