I’d lean more towards their story being path dependent. My hunch is they had to go through lean times to be able to focus harder on customers and eventually cr

I’d lean more towards their story being path dependent. My hunch is they had to go through lean times to be able to focus harder on customers and eventually create a product that could take the company to an IPO. If you’re not lean, management is most likely distracted with the internal company and organizational overhead than you are with external customers. No way to prove this (because we can’t recreate the exact scenario) however.