Before starting Devshop, I worked for 4 other small to mid-sized software companies (The last 3 as head of engineering). Each of these companies was around the 25 person mark (one of them ballooned to over 100 people during the dot-com boom but came quickly back down to earth shortly afterwards).

In each of these companies, the whole management team had gotten it into their minds that they were going to build enterprise class software and sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars to some of the biggest companies in North America. In a couple cases, the teams were out hunting the elusive “million dollar deals”. Back then, I didn’t know any better and since I was merely head of R&D I happily went along with many of the “business” folks and put together the engineering plans to build the enterprise class software for them. They’d look after pulling in the sales.

None of these companies were successful in doing what they were trying to do – land and service the “big deals”. Worse: all of them eventually got crushed under the weight of their own deals and entered a nose dive. Someone trying to convince me today that a small company (