Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

That is both an excellent question and the root problem at that company. The PE firm was a majority shareholder, drive the board, and there were two board members who were HEAVILY involved in the company. Too heavily, they kept making decisions about them and not the company, and that's why I left. Several months later the PE firm was tired if waiting for results, fired those two board members and sold their share of the company at a big loss.

I was really surprised, because one of the two I'd worked with at three other companies, all of which had successful exits (including an inpatient healthcare provider that we ran and sold during COVID!). Something changed, and at this company he made it all about him making the calls and not just trusting his CEO and company staff. He froze out the C-suite, manipulated facts to cause a change of leadership, and in 6 months he forced the new CEO to do all these dumb ideas we'd already tried repeatedly, taking the company from being break even and close to profit to a $2m/month revenue shortfall. There were structural process issues inside the company but he just kept insisting we needed a bigger marketing spend, "marketing can fix any problem."

I think for most companies EPIC is too much, and EPIC tends to agree, they won't talk to you unless you have at least a thousand providers.

I can't pick one over all, it really depends on what your health care company does. I researched dozens to find one for our company, and it was one focused on behavioral health.

In general I'd say stay away from Nextgen like the plague, and avoid Netsmart too. Those are the worst I've ever seen. I could write a small book about Nextgen's failures.

I worked at SugarCRM for years. It's often easier than one suspects once you figured out what a customer pain points are and show them a less burdensome solve. Most businesses do not need the kitchen sink approach of SFDC or SAP, they just have rarely had that demo'd to them.

Do _you_ know what three easy replacements are? If no, how do you know those people are looking to pad their resumes, did you figure that out from your non-SF conversations?

SF has worked very hard to cultivate that reputation, and at the end of the day they're mostly an overpriced application host. Once you communicate to the stakeholders that what they have in SF is just another application, and not actually "special", the conversations become a lot easier to have. They feel like Salesforce has them over a barrel at renewal time and helping them understand they CAN move makes a lot of conversations happen.

The answer to what have I switched people to is at the end of this post.

One company was using SF as a patient management system because their EMR wasn't set up right. They spent 6 figures a year on SF just to communicate with patients, make and change appointments, send and receive documents, record insurance information, etc. I spend 2 months fixing the EMR and they moved everyone to that, canceled, SF, and saved $200k/yr on SF and another $250k/yr on SF consultants. For a $50m/yr business, that's a lot.

Another was using SF as a ticket system. Those folks we moved to FreshService. $180k down to $15k/yr. From my experience, ticket systems tend to be one of the most common existing applications that get duplicated inside SF. People think they have to build it in SF rather than just linking your apps. There was another company who kept SF for their CRM aspects but we moved them to an external ticket system that linked to SF and cut their SF bill from $550/yr to $270/yr.

Then there have been cases where I'm brought in while in the middle of a development project. One of my favorites was this consulting firm said they could do all these things and integrate their EMR and Salesforce and that they had done it before with their custom middleware. But every month there'd be a new change-order from them where they said certain things weren't possible, and it came with an invoice! They were CHARGING this company to reduce the scope of an approved, signed, paid contract. I jumped in and said, "we're not paying any of these change orders, you don't get to charge us to do less work. You promised all these features, you said your software ALREADY DID them. What's the problem?" Then for two months we went round and round where I was able to offer them methods to do every single feature they said wasn't possible, and then they'd invent another reason they couldn't do it. I said we're done, canceling the contract, not paying any open invoices, not paying the remainder of the invoice, and in exchange I wouldn't recommend we sue them to get back everything we paid so far. Their own lawyer agreed, and we parted ways. They had us sign a Salesforce contract before we even paid them, so we were a year into a 3 years salesforce contract and literally nothing had been built out. By this time it turns out I had a reputation in the salesforce finance department, so it didn't take a lot of arguing to get them to offer a 50% reduction in exchange for paying off the contract immediately and canceling it.

What they get moved to depends on what they actually need. 50% of the time it's not a CRM at all but a more appropriate app like an EMR, ticket system, ERP, scheduling apps, invocing solutions for existing accounting apps, etc.

The rest of the time it'll be to CRMs and marketing tools that already exist, or custom extensions/connectors to their apps or a way to link their apps and a CRM. I've moved folks to Monday, Nutshell, Hubspot (who I don't like either but they're better than SF), a dozen others.

I haven't dealt with a company yet that couldn't move to a cheaper alternative with no loss in functionality. If execs have emotional ties to SF then I can't do anything. I had one client, the sales VP shot down a conversion because he liked being able to say "we run on Salesforce!" Literally. he liked being able to brag they could afford Salesforce. I just left that one alone.

Oh yes, I've had proposals rejected for terrible reasons. "I like bragging we can afford Salesforce." "We're special, other companies can't do what we do and other platforms can't do what Salesforce does." "I go back years with Salesbozo, he's giving us deals no one else gets, I trust him." (meanwhile they're paying 10% under list, not a good deal at all).

One of my absolute favorites was, "well, our Salesforce consultant is the husband of the VP of marketing so we can't do anything that would eliminate his contract." In the end we got rid of Salesforce, him, AND the VP of marketing.

> They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will listen to me.

That's the thing: Broadcom don't. Care, bother, whatever. You are not even a blip.

That's what people have been saying about Oracle for decades, and they're still going strong

So?

Doesn't sound any worse than the average restaurant.

In what way is Obsidian going downhill?

Yep, but now they’re jacking the pricing to the moon and everyone is starting to leave for other apps. I almost did it this year and probably will do it next year.

Sorry I meant profit. On a 5% interest, you get 1bn (pure profit with no risks) per year for a 20bn of capital. Their revenue grew 140% YoY but does that account for new acquisitions? Also, their profit needs to grow x10 in order to match bonds. It may have made sense in a 0% interest rate world but not at 5.

True, I think they were early to the trend though, it's looked like that basically since they launched: https://web.archive.org/web/20210821023119/https://lu.ma/

I think it depends where you are. SF is all tech stuff but https://luma.com/chicago for example is mostly non-tech.

Interesting. Luma is getting traction in London. Not so much outside.

In NY + SF, it's used for anything you might want to attend that would be organized by an individual - parties, meetups, food crawls, classes, concerts, local events, etc.

Speed, UI improvements, esp in the backend. Vimeo has been languishing for years. If this was all done by the original team, I wonder why they didn't roll it out years earlier. I've switched several clients away because of it.

Fair enough, though I do bristle at the use of the term "real value", like somehow it's a general net positive. They should at least qualify with "for shareholders" so we can know that their interests are specifically directed at financial enrichment

Especially Swiss developers, best bang-for-buck on the continent ;)