I've seen that a couple of times, startups that insisted on rolling their own code for everything instead of using standard tools. I worked one place that wrot

I've seen that a couple of times, startups that insisted on rolling their own code for everything instead of using standard tools. I worked one place that wrote their own build tool (instead of using Make or Visual Studio). They wrote their own templating engine, instead of using PHP or ASP. They had their own version of MFC and String library, with everything implemented slightly weird, so I had look at the source whenever I needed to know how it actually worked. It was nuts. They spent a year writing their own tools for everything, which was a year they didn't spend working on the product.