there's this interesting misalignment of incentives in a certain type of heavily financed software startup wherein engineers are not only encouraged to be cost-agnostic in the solutions they design, but are actively discouraged from spending time to save money

this makes sense in the short term as the company seeks to find product/market fit, and to iterate quickly on features to capture as much of the market as possible

but longer term it has the effect of locking out access to an entire market segment of price-sensitive consumers

due to architectural decisions not prioritizing cost, this sets a very high opex floor, which has downstream consequences on pricing structure, which constrains the target demo to price-insensitive buyers such as large institutions

this, in turn, influences the product backlog

iterated over several years this can effectively lock in corporate strategy and make it downright impossible to target smaller consumers, as the entire organization is used to a certain way of working, with a certain amount of overhead and flex budget built into the process

this overhead opens the door for smaller leaner competitors to swoop in & scoop up large swaths of the market that ur product was inaccessible to; since there are typically many more of these consumers, this gives your competitors a treasure trove of a market research opportunity

this huge pool of many low-value clients, while harder to scale a business with, does enable one to iterate much faster and with a higher risk tolerance, which has accumulated benefits for R&D, allowing these competitors to challenge you for the higher-value clients down the line