The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their jobs with incredibly inefficient and error-prone excel workflows. Our software would have eliminated a lot of what they do in a day, and therefore, would eliminate their jobs as well.

It is terrifying that trillions of dollars of assets are run on excel, but the inertia is too strong.

Even if you're right, pretty much any company whose customers aren't 100%, unimpeachably good is going to fail.

Another way of thinking of it is, as soon as they became even slightly an antagonist (think Disney rivals, less Autobots), it was doomed.

As an aside, an alternative interpretation would be that Excel workflows are more intellectually stimulating, so as a side effect they come up with better models. So even if your software had a superior UX for the task at hand, the objective of making money is better served by people using their brains harder generally.

After all, a lot of people practice violin and play chess because it feels good, and then those people make a bajillion dollars on the stock market. Consider that if Excel even remotely reenacts the patterns of those activities, which is almost certainly does, it makes money in ways besides calculating numbers in a user-accessible way.

Our software didn’t have that feeling, it didn’t make you feel powerful in the same way that excel does (I lobbied hard for us to make a desktop app, no one likes how web apps feel. But nobody listened)

Giving up that control is hard.

One cyber-breach and all that really nice clean code is readily understandable to your competitors.

But what they really wanted to say is "we will have to repurpose 200 staff who process these checks and mail out statements, and they're all 30 year veterans, and I don't have the heart to tell them they're fired even though they are the sole reason we lose money"