>Small companies are often great because they can be like a partner that grows together with you. Silicon Valley startups are, more often than not, essentially

>Small companies are often great because they can be like a partner that grows together with you. Silicon Valley startups are, more often than not, essentially looking to exploit you in order to maintain a hypergrowth graph that ends up in a place where you don’t matter by definition. That has always been my feeling too. The key word is commitment. The company can be big but it depends on how committed they are to their services. For example, I can commit myself to the .NET Framework of Microsoft because I know that they won't be dropping it anytime soon, it is pivotal for them and tighly coupled to their strategy. Also some companies have a reputation for shutting down their services or having unstable APIs. I don't know for you but personally I can't picture myself building my company around technologies developed by Facebook. They have their assets but I really don't trust them in terms of maintenance and long-term commitment, but this is what matters in business. And I had this sense long before the Parse thing. My preference is to work with big companies having "obvious" commitments like Microsoft and .NET. When I'm not sure of this commitment, if I have the opportunity to work with a small company that has a great product and I know is not seeking explosive growth, this is a no brainer for me. This is one of the reasons why I stopped to define myself as a startup. I asked myself, if I was one my leads would I actually buy my products ? And I figured that the term startup tends to be associated with a quest for big acquisitions or explosive growth, while talking about a company conveys a sense of stability. I'd commit myself in Learning a Framework or integrating an API only if I know the company is serious about supporting the product for the next 10 to 20 years.