Comment by shimman
4 hours ago
The only people "relying" on this are other startups whose VC benefactors force them to use other products under their portfolio in order to goose up their numbers.
4 hours ago
The only people "relying" on this are other startups whose VC benefactors force them to use other products under their portfolio in order to goose up their numbers.
that makes so much sense. I always wondered how the fuck did all those ZIRP era "hello world as a service" bullshit startups have any customers at all.
Well, my org decided to pay for Monday.com, and still does, even though no one uses it. We also pay for Asana, and the wonks use that instead.
I suspect a lot of larger orgs just have site-wide subscriptions with volume discounts that they don’t need.
I've raised venture from a lot of the big firms (and a lot of small firms) and have never had any of them attempt to force me to use anything.
You may not even see it. I worked in a startup whose founder had money dipped into about a dozen products in the cyber security vertical. Many of those startups, I later found out, had access or used products from others in his portfolio. Basically taking $50k and cycling it through all of them buying something from the other one. I doubt it was a money laundering scheme, but it sure was convenient to just add logos of "customers" to the Nascar pitch slide.
Go to the website of pretty much any AI startupslop, Google who led their series A, then Google who led the series A of the other AI startups (it’s always other AI startups) whose logos they show as users/testimonials/case studies on their landing page. You’ll start seeing a pattern.
This is usually founder-led not investor led
+1