[throwthisawayt]

This is not how most large companies I've worked with operate. Large IT decisions are driven top down, not organically through the engineering front line. The CTO, CIO, etc. work with vendors that market to them. It's the way organizations like Salesforce, Workday, Cisco, and Concur operate. The consumer/developer first organizations like Dropbox, Twilio, and Stripe can only get to a certain stage before they need to target the big fish. It's this huge cultural shift (focusing on making something users want vs figuring out how to sell to behometh organizations) that will make or break these companies.

If they figure it out, they will own their markets because frankly their products are better since they were user first.

I think it's important part of building a company - recognizing that the heart and soul that led you to say $100M sales can completely differnent from what leads you to $1B. It's almost like a mini innovators dilemma for startups.

[Devolver]

Extremely well said. Yours is a more in depth and eloquent version of what I wrote in the first section of this essay:

"This is an essay about go-to-market strategy and market development. It’s also an essay about company culture.

Specifically, it’s about how the market focus and culture that helped a company reach significant heights can rapidly transform from critical assets into potential liabilities…and what to do about it.

While Twilio is the focus of this essay, this essay is not just about Twilio. It could be about about ANY potentially disruptive company with brilliant founders, venture-scale ambitions, great products, a top-notch team, and traction to die for."

[gz5]

Yes, absolutely. However, does this change over time? With:

+ increased decentralized decision making + less monolithic systems architectures and complex integrations + quicker/cheaper ability to take software from pilot to production

Do developers become the new gatekeepers of the large enterprises?

[maxxxxx]

"Do developers become the new gatekeepers of the large enterprises?"

I doubt it. From what I see is that developers can do a few things but as soon as the IT department hears about it they will try to standardize on a solution. And you are back in big Enterprise sales. In the end the CIO wants to keep his/her budgets and power.

I just went through this. We prototyped a system and thought it would work. IT jumped at it and made that supplier the company wide standard. In the meantime we got some doubts and will probably jump ship. But IT is sticking to their decision.

[im3w1l]

Most examples (Stripe being the exception) are for internal use, and I think there is a difference between software used internally and API's / libraries used in the product.

Stripe is about payment and payment will be at the core of most businesses so it makes sense for the higher ups to take an interest.