If you can leverage contacts to shorten the first few sales then a very small team (2-4 people) can endure the true sales cycle until you pick up momentum.

If your contacts own the budget and purchasing, maybe. Otherwise, you're probably deluding yourself to think that personal relationships are going to cut the sales cycle on an enterprise product. The sales cycle on a securty product at a BigCo includes:

* Weeks of presentations and demos (this part you can cut with relationships)

* Weeks of pilot deployment, which in this guy's case will involve coordination between security, architecture, and server IT.

* Weeks of user education and training (something everybody forgets about).

* Weeks of back-and-forth about missing features and requirements.

* Weeks of negotiation for first PO, assuming all the previous stages went well.

* 3-5 months of delay waiting for receivables.

What friendships will do for you in this process is eliminate the hidden "in-between" steps where people get distracted by their real jobs for 1-3 weeks and don't return your phone calls. But most people don't have friends in BigCo's that can simply cut them checks.

Also, when you try to shop this to VC, most of them aren't going to be impressed by the demo and pilot deployments you've secured with your friends.

Most of the entrepreneurs we work with are over 35, and in many cases know and/or have worked with department managers and senior managers who own a budget and can influence purchasing. For the most part they are not selling applications that are mediated directly by IT in the way that a security app would be so some of the friction is taken out of the process. I do agree that for younger entrepreneurs in the security space you are offering a realistic scenario. My comment was more in response to team size vs. sales cycle than the overall thread, I should have been more specific.