How do you cope with the lack of integration between various SaaS vendors?

In one of the last corporate roles I had, the company was acquiring four other factories every quarter for four years—that's a huge amount of integration. Each one is different, because even if you buy factory floor space from a single enterprise in multiple locations, there's no guarantee that it's all going to be the same across those locations. And one of the first things that we did was look at the criteria that they're using to pare down—what choices will they make to avoid the technical debt that may have been put in place before?

And those criteria are not just speed and growth. In the factory setting and in manufacturing, they're bringing in the connected worker to better align the top floor and the shop floor, and from the shop floor up. And I think that analogy works well for mid- and late-stage startups that are going through the same thing. It's not necessarily to look at things as disposables, but rather to look at them as stepping stones to what you really need. In the development process of those enterprise applications—or what may become enterprise applications—you can leapfrog over a few of those steps.

Some of the tools that we are buying were chosen because they integrate. We use HubSpot as our main CRM, so we are looking for tools that plug into it. They're different parts of the funnel, and it's much more about development on the other end of the scale. They don't necessarily need to plug into that.