I'm not sure what industry you work in, but at least in the world of US tech startups there's long been a huge culture of buying services from VCs and their fri

I'm not sure what industry you work in, but at least in the world of US tech startups there's long been a huge culture of buying services from VCs and their friends other startups. It's almost a point of pride to be using some other early, but promising startup's SaaS product before everyone else. Just take a look at Snowflake for probably the most successful example (though they still don't make a profit). It seemed like over night ever "big data" tech company I knew started using them aggressively with little other reason than they were the next cool startup whose product you wanted to be using.