One of the key concepts at the core of traditional marketing is the 80-20 rule — that some 80 percent of the effects (or in this case, profits) are the result of 20 percent of the causes (here, customers). Indeed, if you’re able to target just a small group of people in order to successfully yield most of your profits, there are all sorts of benefits — it’s easier to reach a small group, it’s easier to build them the right product, and so on. Most large technology sales and marketing organizations have taken the 80-20 rule to heart and focus on some small fraction of the tens of millions of businesses on the globe, often targeting just the Global 2000.

While the 80-20 rule can be very powerful, the reality is that many of the costs associated with building, supporting, distributing and selling technology products have dropped dramatically in the past decade. Yet many enterprise technology executives are operating as though the cost of distribution hasn’t changed since the early 1990s. In the coming years, I expect startups to increasingly target the massively