Having worked with a few of them, currently with SendGrid I think the market is ripe for disruption. It’s a terrible, terrible, experience to work with these systems when you need e-mail visibility to play into a larger setup. We’re doing simple stuff, like giving our sales personal an information stream to track that links into their HubSpot and a few other systems, and it’s frankly so bad that one of our developers wrote as much of the business logic as was possible outside of SendGrid. I’m sure it works well for the IT services part of our operations, but for development and automation purposes when you need to put some gaffatape on all those 300 systems that your business bought. Then it’s not very good.

As far as being YC funded, well, that’s the purpose of HN isn’t it? I’m not personally convinced that you can’t maintain a good product after you getting acquired. I haven’t used these services enough to say, but maybe they fit into the market of their time, and has then failed to innovate or keep “great” in the decades that followed? If you ask our IT operations they will tell you that SendGrid is great.