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Comment by hrimfaxi | Hacker News Reader

> But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers. People don't seem to be focused on the hard parts.

Big companies seem to be bad at innovating but really, really good at enterprise sales.

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I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I do think that a big part of enterprise sales involves building a comprehensive solution that works well within the customer’s ecosystem. Start-ups usually tend to build point products, which have value, but are still missing functionality (even if that functionality is not scintillating) that customers really desire to easily deploy and maintain solutions. Also, customers do care about things like stability of their vendors and the level of available support.

I'm not saying it is always the case but does it not match your experience that big orgs like Microsoft are much better at navigating the enterprise sales process than a typical startup? Not to mention how many of those startups are just answering security questionnaires and other procurement gates with AI.

I definitely agree w/ you that big organizations are generally better able to navigate the enterprise sales process, but mainy trying to say that customers might choose to work with a bigger company's products for reasons that typically go way beyond that (e.g., better integrations, support resources, etc.).

I've seen big companies manage to duplicate startup-like culture with small teams internally. Weird things like directors handling builds and source control duties. 12 hour days, working weekends.

These teams said that per man-hour they brought more value to the company than any other team. (But you know, they all say that)

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