Comment by kingnothing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kingnothing | Hacker News Reader

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Most companies don't want what you want. They don't want to sign 50 different contracts with 50 different vendors and have to do due diligence on all of them. They don't want to negotiate rates with all of those companies every time a contract renewal comes up. They don't want the instability of working with startups that may close shop with little notice.

What they want is a couple of big, reliable companies who offer services that just work. They want dev teams to be able to explore a new service by simply spinning up a POC with a new offering from a vendor they already have a relationship with; they don't want to figure out which of the 20 different EU companies who offer LLMs or managed Kafka they need to contact, sit through sales calls, and do security evaluations on before the team can start work.

As an American, I definitely don't like having to drive to a mega store and do all my shopping there. The European city model is far superior -- I love traveling there and walking to the bakery, cheese shop, and butcher to buy a meal. But as a dev and manager of many years, I definitely do not want to see that be the norm in software. I love startups who offer unique services, but from a practical perspective, I also love that it takes a day to spin up something in AWS vs months of contract negotiations, trials, sales calls, etc to get signed up with a vendor who offers something outside of AWS.

I hope you'll see the contradiction in this stance.

As a small company, you don't want to deal with small companies because it's too much effort. You just want to deal with one huge company which is your supplier for all your services. But you do want your clients to come to you and negotiate with your small company.

Assume your clients have the same mindset as you: why would they buy from you instead of buying from the same "one-stop-shop" where you're buying everything? They don't want to deal with small businesses such as yours, just like you don't want to.

Your "supplier of all services" might not offer what you're offering right now, but the day they do, you'll quickly be out of business. You and, gradually, all other businesses.

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As a tangential note: 50 IT service providers is a darn lot. I suspect that is 10x of what the average business needs.

There was a miscommunication here. Large companies don't want to deal with small companies since it's high effort to go through the whole procurement process that generally takes months.

The small companies I've worked at were generally quite happy to work with other small companies where procurement consists of a couple employees telling a founder they need a service, then the founder subscribes with a credit card later that week.

I don't generally work at small companies these days :)

50 might have been an over-estimate, but I thought you were advocating for a decentralized EU tech space, where I would need one vendor for each part of my tech stack... instead of using AWS for EKS + SQS + SNS + RDS, I would have one vendor for my managed kubernetes cluster, one for kafka, another for APNS notifications, and someone else to host the databases.

If the entire stack is individual EU funded FOSS projects that are stitched together then maybe small companies could offer the sort of integrated service that you're describing.

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