I feel like we "beat" our SV competitors (we have several) by simply providing better customer service. Everything else is secondary to us. My definition of a "

I feel like we "beat" our SV competitors (we have several) by simply providing better customer service. Everything else is secondary to us. My definition of a "win" in this context is a customer advocating for our solution over a competitor's solution at a trade show or lunch meeting. A lot of SV culture appears to me to be biased towards the shiny tech and less towards the customer relationship. My recent interactions with some SaaS enterprise sales teams really drove that home for me. The only tech vendor that "gets us" and the kind of business we do (B2B software/consulting w/ US banks) appears to be Microsoft. We constantly ask ourselves "what is the simplest thing that will still make the customer happy". After asking that for several years, we have arrived at a robust technology stack. Very few moving pieces. Server-side forms. SQL does most of the scary stuff. It's a profoundly boring flavor of SQL too. We spend far more hours per week thinking about the customer's problems than we do any particular piece of technology. Put more concisely, I think a key advantage non-SV companies have is that they aren't trapped in some shiny tech rabbit chasing olympics mindset. Boring tech + customer focus will likely beat most competition, regardless of where their offices reside.