The current wisdom conferred to startups by IT gurus is: If you want to be successful, don’t try to read customers’ minds; get your product to market and lap up every ounce of feedback to make version 2.0 better, faster, stronger. The “land-and-expand” model is undoubtedly a winning strategy for most Silicon Valley startups. But head east to New York City, and you’ll find startups taking a different approach — and securing big enterprise customers to boot.

Jonathan Lehr, managing director of Work-bench Ventures, an enterprise technology VC fund in New York, said the startups it funds focus on very specific problems out of the gate. “It’s really about starting with the use case, which is a very New York-centric point of view,” he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

It’s who you know

Lehr said that Work-bench’s deep corporate network  informs its decisions about what to pursue. He said his own background at Morgan Stanley gives him perspective on what enterprises want from new technology.

He said that banks “tend to be the earliest adopters of new tech due to competitive pressures and whatnot.” He added that banks and other enterprises have very specific pain points they’re trying to solve, and delivering a tailored solution can increase a startup’s chances of being adopted.

Use case in point

He noted that banks are realizing that the world is moving to cloud, and despite their anxieties about security, they are going to have to find ways to make it work. He said that vArmour Networks, Inc., a company Work-bench invested in, is making great strides addressing those very concerns by providing cloud infrastructure security to banks and other enterprises.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE