Ding: Building Integrations In-House Is as Pointless as Self-Hosting Servers
Shensi Ding · She cold messaged 50,000 engineers—then grew to $10M+ ARR. | Shensi Ding, Founder of Merge · PMF Show · Sep 18, 2025 · at 35:55
Shensi Ding, co-founder of Merge, discusses why engineering teams resist third-party integration providers out of pride and why she believes building in-house makes no sense.
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“There have been some situations where we've talked to companies where they're like, no, like our founder believes in like we build this in house and we can be uniquely good at it. And obviously I'm biased, but that is just fundamentally not true. There's no one who is that much better at like their cloud provider. Like everyone just uses AWS. Like why would you buy and maintain your servers in house? Like if you're gonna use AWS or GCP, like it just doesn't really make sense.”
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