Fire them for buying Salesforce.

Salesforce or IBM. The point is the same.

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Whenever someone says "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", I wish you could hear how hard my eyes roll. I mean, there are so many variations- "Nobody ever got fired for buying Salesforce." "Nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle." "Nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey." Each version captures the same fundamental idea: in large organizations, choosing the established market leader is the safest path for individual career preservation, regardless of whether it's the optimal choice for the company.

But what happens when this mindset is applied to a startup team member? I argue that not only should they get fired for making "IBM choices" in startups – they must be fired, because their decision-making framework fundamentally undermines the structural advantages that make startups competitive in the first place.

The Anti-Startup Mindset

Let's take a look at why the "IBM mentality" is so destructive in a startup.

First, startups succeed by prioritizing speed and adaptability over predictability and rigid processes. When Airbnb was disrupting the hospitality industry, they weren't relying on traditional enterprise software like SAP for accounting or Salesforce for customer management. Instead, they pieced together agile tools that could accommodate rapid growth and quick changes. In its early days, Airbnb used Zendesk for customer support, a relatively new tool at the time, because it was quick to set up and flexible enough to scale with their needs.

Second, startups operate with constrained resources where every dollar matters. When Notion was starting out, they didn't license Microsoft SharePoint or IBM Notes for internal collaboration. They built their own tool, one that would eventually become their product. This wasn't just about saving money – it was about maintaining the flexibility to experiment and pivot as they learned what users actually needed.

The "nobody gets fired" mentality optimizes for the wrong variable: individual career risk instead of company success probability. This misalignment of incentives becomes particularly dangerous in startups, where the default outcome is failure. Your job isn't to avoid getting fired – it's to avoid having the company die.

The Hidden Costs of "Safe" Choices

Consider a real example I encountered recently: an early-stage fintech startup was deciding on their initial tech stack. The VP of Engineering, coming from a large bank, pushed hard for using Oracle for their database needs. Their argument? "It's what the big banks use, and we'll eventually need that level of reliability."

This decision would have:

1. Consumed 30% of their remaining runway in licensing costs

2. Required hiring specialized DBAs in addition to their full-stack developers

3. Locked them into a rigid schema when they were still figuring out their data model

4. Added weeks to their development cycle due to the complexity of Oracle deployments

The founder, fortunately, rejected this approach and opted for PostgreSQL. They deployed on AWS RDS, spent their money on additional developers instead of licenses, and got to market months faster than they would have otherwise. The VP "resigned to pursue other opportunities" shortly after.

This wasn't just about choosing Oracle versus PostgreSQL. It was about a fundamental misunderstanding of startup dynamics. The VP was optimizing for a future state that the company would never reach, if they didn't first achieve product-market fit and growth with their limited resources. Scaling problems are only problems if you actually scale.

The Real Risk is Not Taking Risks

The mythology of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" comes from a time when computing was a cost center, not a core competitive advantage. In that world, minimizing downside risk made sense. But in today's tech ecosystem, especially for startups, tech choices are fundamental to competitive advantage.

Look at Snapchat's early infrastructure decisions. Rather than following the "safe" path of building on AWS like most of their competitors, they made the then-controversial decision to build on Google Cloud Platform. This was before GCP was considered a viable alternative to AWS. The decision was risky – GCP was less mature, had fewer features, and had a smaller ecosystem. But it allowed Snapchat to leverage Google's superior networking infrastructure and global presence, which was crucial for their media-heavy application.

The decision maker who pushed for GCP wasn't fired; they were promoted. Because in a properly functioning startup, you get rewarded for intelligent risk-taking that aligns with company objectives, not for making choices that would look good in a post-mortem.

The Modern Manifestation

Today, the "IBM mentality" most commonly appears in SaaS tool selection. I regularly see startups making baffling choices like:

• Implementing Salesforce before they have a sales team

• Buying Workday when they have 15 employees

• Licensing Adobe Experience Manager for a blog that gets 1000 visitors a month

• Using SAP for financial reporting when their revenue is still measured in thousands

These choices aren't just wasteful – they're actively harmful. They create organizational debt that's harder to unwind than technical debt. They establish processes optimized for scale before product-market fit. They consume resources that should be going toward growth and experimentation.

More insidiously, they attract the wrong kind of employees. When you choose enterprise tools, you need to hire people who know how to use enterprise tools. These people often bring with them enterprise mindsets, enterprise processes, and enterprise pace. This creates a culture of cautious decision-making precisely when you need rapid experimentation.

The Proper Framework

Instead of asking "What choice won't get me fired?", startup employees should be asking:

1. What choice maximizes our speed to the next milestone?

2. What choice preserves our optionality?

3. What choice aligns with our current scale?

4. What choice fits our resource constraints?

Looking at successful startups, you often find they made unconventional tooling choices early on:

• Stripe used IRC for team communication well into their growth phase

• Figma built on WebGL when desktop apps were considered the "safe" choice

• Discord built on Elixir when most companies would have… not

• Netflix chose to stream video over the internet when mailing DVDs was working fine

These weren't just different choices – they were choices that looked wrong to industry veterans. They were choices that someone coming from a large company would have advised against. They were choices that required conviction and understanding of first principles rather than pattern matching to existing solutions.

The Startup Advantage

This brings us to the core insight: startups don't win by making safer choices than incumbents. They win by making different choices that leverage their structural advantages:

1. No legacy systems to maintain

2. No existing customers to satisfy

3. No organizational processes to follow

4. No quarterly earnings to hit

5. No existing revenue streams to protect

When a startup employee pushes for "enterprise" solutions, they're effectively advocating for voluntarily taking on enterprise constraints without enterprise resources. This is the worst of both worlds.

The Correct Response

So what should you do when someone in your startup advocates for an "IBM choice"?

First, understand their reasoning. Sometimes people default to enterprise solutions because they don't know alternatives exist. This is fixable through education.

But if someone consistently pushes for choices that:

• Prioritize their resume over company outcomes

• Optimize for hypothetical future scale over current needs

• Focus on minimizing downside rather than maximizing upside

• Pattern match to large company solutions rather than first principles thinking

Then yes, you should fire them. Not because they made a bad choice, but because they've demonstrated they fundamentally don't understand startup dynamics. They're optimizing for the wrong things, and that won't change with a single decision.

The Way Forward

The real lesson of "nobody got fired for buying IBM" isn't about IBM – it's about incentive structures. In large companies, individual career risk and company risk are often disconnected. You can make choices that are bad for the company but good for your career.

In a well-run startup, this shouldn't be possible. The incentives should be aligned so that what's good for the company is good for employees. If someone is making choices that optimize for their individual career safety over company success, that's a sign your incentives aren't properly aligned.

This means equity that matters. This means celebrating intelligent risk-taking. This means creating a culture where "nobody got fired for making the right choice for the company, even if it looked risky on paper."

Because ultimately, the real risk isn't choosing the wrong tool. The real risk is hiring people who don't understand that startups win by being different, not by being safe.

In other words, fire them for buying IBM. Your startup's life depends on it.