Re:Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective
by hpcjoe on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @10:51AM
(#23976396)
We had a customer that POCed on our systems, then bought some crap from HP + one of the SSD card vendors in 2013. They then called us up in 2014 and asked to pay us to help them achieve the performance they saw on our system, on their 5x as expensive "low risk" HP + SSD card system.
My response was simple. No.
I invited them to throw away the crap they bought and buy the right thing from us, but that was politically untenable. Turns out spending multiple millions of dollars for crappy half baked "solutions" versus a lower sum of money for something that actually worked, would likely get some people fired.
The world isn't fair, and sometimes not even sane. The people who made these decisions, despite being disastrous ones, were promoted. Enough of these built up that we couldn't survive.
Incredibly frustrating.
We've been in similar situations several times. We're serving a niche, but this niche is a core piece of our customers business. Without software like ours, their whole operation stops.
Anyway, we'd have demos. Department heads were on fire, wondering if we could install same day we had demo, all smiles, everything looked great. And then we lost because someone higher up decided we were "too small". We're small, but we're pretty much the best in our niche and we have had very solid financials for decades.
Those we lost went with bigger, supposedly "safer" competitors and had some very sub-par years with them before they had to pay their way out of those contracts and come back to us.