[mb22]

There is also a similar story for Siebel (Northwestern Mutual I think?). In enterprise software, buying from small companies is not the norm, so if some large organizations invest in your product, it can trigger the larger market to believe in you. I believe the trick is to make sure the "big" accounts you take on aren't ones that are going to take you too far off your normally planned roadmap. If you find yourself building one-off features, one for each customer, you are in for a world of hurt. If your big customers drive you to build your roadmap faster or more aggressively, that isn't always a bad thing.

[hodgesrm]

For enterprise products the obvious 'large customers' to avoid are companies like Google and Facebook. They operate at such enormous scale that the problems you see there are unlikely to pop up in normal corporate use. If the article had mentioned these I would agree completely.

In my last company we had one particularly large customer that really put us on the map. It was grindingly hard to get things to work but fortunately they had a problem they really needed solved and just enough patience to let us solve the teething problems of new software. Once we had them as a reference it made a huge difference both in terms of product quality as well as validation of the company.