[muzani]

I thought it's the opposite. Most of the things we could buy are pretty boring - stuff like Slack, wikis, HR tools, CRMs, customer loyalty, travel claims management. I wouldn't sign up for a fashion marketplace job only to end up making a HR tool for it.

But I wonder if it's a front end vs back end thing, because front end are the peeps who also work on branding, marketing, etc.

[withinboredom]

Some of the things we built in-house because it wasn't worth buying at our scale:

- data lake and supporting tools (we fired over 100 million analytics events in a single day).

- a/b testing software (assignment and analysis)

- support software

- email sending tech (we sent over a billion emails a month)

- hr tooling (the company hired in over 50 countries)

- payments integrations

- probably other stuff I don't remember

Basically, due to scale, these tools were interesting in their own right. Paying for them was either impossible (no off-the-shelf solution would be able to support it) or prohibitively expensive or both.

[muzani]

Interesting. I wonder why most of these are being sold by startups and not the giants that use them regularly.

I do remember a cool thing that some foreign Huawei guys I worked with used to use. It would call a ride sharing service, pick the more cost effective one, and then handle the claims for that. Presumably it checks that the location is work/home and only applies for such conditions.

[withinboredom]

Scale and custom stuff. It’s a lot easier to hardcode things than build stuff for the masses.

[HenryBemis]

It makes perfect sense to build when you are at a certain scale. I remember talking to Citi's C-suite some time ago and their mentality is/was "we are an IT company that is also a bank". But! you have to be Citi (or the likes of your company - perhaps you are in Citi? :) where you can get the talent, pay them handsomely, and keep them motivated.