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Ittycheria: Superior products could not easily overcome 1990s enterprise account control

Dev Ittycheria · 20VC: MongoDB CEO, Dev Ittycheria on Why Sometimes You Have To Be Inefficient To Be Effective, The 2 Different Types of Decisions and How Great Leaders Respond To Each & Why Value To Overhead Ratio Is The Metric To Use When Selecting Investors · Aug 10, 2020 · at 4:42

Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO of MongoDB, reflects on his early career at AT&T observing how enterprise sales incumbent relationships dominated customer decisions.

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“In the early nineties, the large companies had an enormous amount of account control. With customers. And so even though if you have the best mousetrap, it was still not easy to win business because these companies have such good account control. They take the senior execs to the Super Bowl and have all these events and have such deep relationships at the corner office that if you're this unknown company with a better product, it was still not easy.”

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