Returns aren’t as good if acquisition is high, like slack will be.
They are a pretty notable company in startup history since they were the first to be hugely successful at using the self-service model for enterprise sales.
A lot of small(ish) firms are making reasonable money doing this sort of thing; I'd count them as enterprise sales ;)
One central high quality HR Team can scale easily in a big org while the same amount in small companies need spend more on HR.
And its not just HR of course.
I wouldn't even trust small companies to build a modern and secure cloud product. While big companies have their own Security Teams and are able to afford a normal security audit, for a small company that means 1. much higher cost in relation and also binding of personal they might not have.
I have worked in a very small company which basically couldn't spell security. And i'm now working in a very big company. There are plenty of people who also can't do that but there are teams only for security.
I don't have to justify now that i'm doing things securely. Thats how it is. My manager will not sign the risk away; He actually can't and people are not keen of asking upper upper management for that.
That's the sales pitch, sure.
Size scales in reverse order with security. The larger you are, the more difficult it is to make sure all the gaps are sealed - that's why the greatest of empires fall eventually - they get spread across so large a portfolio there are bound to be gaps, which are endlessly exploited, even on users of the large ERP companies.
If products were actually integrated well and deployed well all of what you say would be true. But that's just not the reality - trust me, I've been there. It's bad.
I don't know where the sweat spot is, but i don't think it is at a 10 person company. I believe its more in the range of 500 or 1000 person company.
They need to absorb things so their sales team can say "oh we have X feature" regardless of its actual implementability and just leave it to the consultants to struggle and somehow implement a half baked solution that doesn't work in the end.
Oh but that's how they make money also. More products, more features, more crappy integrations = more service contracts, more consulting work, etc.
All a huge scam that enterprises are forced into because they don't want to be "left behind in the digital economy."