I'd be curious on what terms they evaluated "no financial benefit". There's plenty of business choices that could be "no financial benefit" in the short term,

I'd be curious on what terms they evaluated "no financial benefit". There's plenty of business choices that could be "no financial benefit" in the short term, but revolve around building market share and customer base for the long term. If your long term goal is to land deals with places like AT&T and Verizon, you're going to need to get past the "nobody ever got fired for buying ~IBM~ Cisco" style arguments. How do you fight "There's no techs familiar with your gear" and "Show me a bunch of successful installs fitting American business-problem challenges"? You can bootstrap a response to that by starting with smaller customers (who are perhaps more receptive to your offerings) and making too-good-to-refuse offers to get your kit into their racks. Then in a few years time you can go to the big boys with polished white papers that say "10,000 active deployments, look how Rural Iowa Telecom and Shrimp Cannery reduced their TCO by 9.2%!"